Marielle's little place on the web

Tag clouds can be sorted in different ways: alphabetically, by frequency, semantically and randomly. Will McGugan prefers them sorted by frequency, because that makes them look better. In the comments people pointed out that it is easier to find items in a sorted list. Will responded he chooses form over function.

Navigation aid?

But what exactly is this function then? UI-patterns summarizes the problem a tag cloud is supposed to solve as:

The user wants to browse content by popularity or most elaborate topic

In short: a tag cloud is a navigation aid. The user wants to browse and is in need of information on popularity to decide where he wants to go next.

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The GIMP has a whole team of usability people working on its usability issues. But what’s more: there’s an online brainstorm, where everyone can contribute visual impressions of ideas. Little text, many pictures. (And it works: in cases such as this one a picture really says more than a thousand words).

A quick glance through the entries shows that the boundaries between feature requests and interface design are not always clear. Many entries focus on new features, which is quite natural if you ask users what they want to change. There are many interesting ideas, though.

What perhaps struck me most is that between the many manipulated screenshots, there were also a few hand-drawn pictures. In general I’d say that these really stand out from the rest, both in the visual aspects and in their clarity. As usual, less is more.

I just ran across a really nice project: We feel fine. It collects ‘feelings’ from the internet (defined as phrases containing ‘I feel’ or ‘I am feeling’). These data are coupled with other statistics, such as gender, age, location and even the local weather at the time the item was posted. Nice to know: although people feel more often bad than good (93 thousand versus 76 thousand) most people feel better (128 thousand). The interface is nice and playful – I particularly like the mobs and murmurs.

Additional thoughts

(July 12, 2008)

A more serious note on this topic: when you ask people what they think, or how much they like your product, it can be very difficult to interpret the results. If possible (and if it makes sense in the context) I prefer comparisons (which color is nicer, blue or red) above open-scaled questions (how much do you like blue?). Of course, there are many other tricks to get meaningful results.

Robin Good wrote a mini-guide to social bookmarking, addressing underlying issues and comparing the advantages and disadvantages of some main social bookmarking services: del.icio.us, Stumble Upon, Blue Dot, Ma.gnolia, Digg, Simpy, BlogMarks, Reddit, Furl, BlinkList, Spurl, de.lirio.us, Linkroll, Shadows en Yahoo-MyWeb.

As we are moving towards a semantic web, with more dynamic, user-generated content, social bookmarking is a valuable tool to structure that apparent chaos. The main weakness is that the wisdom of the crowds is not always the truth (but often close enough).

Skype 3.0 has just been released in beta. Featuring skypecasts, clickable links in mood messages, a button for calling non-skype phones, and of course the changelog lists “change: UI redesigned”. According to Skype, it is an “Easier to use, more powerful and personal interface.”

I’m usually not a fast upgrader, and I’m still using Skype 2.0.0.something. Easy to learn, easy to use, I like it. However, a little while ago I was surprised by a confusing warning message:

“Are you sure you want to cancel the file transfer?” Choose between “OK” and “Cancel”.
Somehow, the “Do not ask me again” option was very appealing!

This kind of mistake in warning messages is not uncommon. I found almost the same dialog, with the same problem, in an early Dutch version of Gmail. “Wilt u de wijzigingen annuleren?”

It’s not that difficult to solve though. The main problem lies in using the OK/Cancel dialog, which can often be easily avoided. Use descriptive options instead. “Are you sure you want to stop the transfer?” “Stop transfer” / “Cancel”