Back to blogging – Tumblr photo-uploader’s performance / usability (lots of room to improve) …

Blogging after a really, really, really long time – and its about usability (once again).

I was uploading some photos to my tumblr blog and realized that it was taking quite a bit of time.

For example, Facebook’s album uploader managed to upload 14 of my photos in less than a minute and tumblr definitely took more than 5 minutes (for 10 photos).

And not only that tumblr violated one of the most important tenets of usability – “provide visibility into what is happening”.

While Facebook provides this nice progress bar with status message(s) about which photo is being uploaded, tumblr just provides a generic “Uploading …” message. And a few more generic messages in the browser’s status bar – e.g “Sending request to http://www.tumblr.com …” – which are not really helpful.

tumblr's photo upload UI

Facebook's album upload UI

And finally Facebook’s selection process – where you can select multiple photos in one step – is just way better than tumblr’s “Add another photo” option (which I had to click about 9 times!).

Maybe they need a refresher – “Designing Web Interface : Principles and Patterns for Rich Interaction“!

Cheers.