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.

Cool Integration between GMail and Google Calendar

Well, I am not sure whether this has always existed but I just noticed it a couple of days back.

I was exchanging a couple of e-mails with one of my friends (via GMail / Google Mail) about meeting someplace for lunch and I noticed these links on the top-right hand corner to “add a meeting” to Google Calendar (see image below).

google email and calendar links

I clicked on one of those links, and it opened up Google Calendar with an appointment (to be created) that was exactly what I wanted – it was just unbelievable that Google had automatically parsed all this information from the e-mail exchanges (see image below).

Google Calendar appointment

I am a big fan of good integration and usability – and the way this integration worked so flawlessly was very refreshing ! So, what is next ? Google automatically figures out the location (I had just mentioned Karlsplatz with no mention of the city) from the IPs (of the sender and the receiver) and recommends a few restaurants !!

Is that too cool or too much invasion of privacy ? Or is it a bit of both 🙂

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of LinkedIn Usability

The Good.

I have been using LinkedIn for quite some time now (I think since 2004) and I have been a big fan of its service. I think it is one of those few social networking websites that was doing social networking even before it was cool (a better term would be professional networking) – and on top of that, it provides a lot of real value to professionals.

I have always liked their user interface – kind of minimalistic and intuitive – because you can easily find what you are looking for. I also liked the “home page” where you can see your network updates – it was good to be in the loop when one of your connections found a new job or got promoted.

The Bad.

But of late, LinkedIn has been trying to do a lot (I guess getting caught in the social networking phenomenon) with new features like Applications, Groups, Sub Groups, etc, and the “home page” has been getting more and more crowded. When I logged into my Linkedin page a couple of weeks ago and I saw all these network updates from people that were not even my connections, I was literally horrified!! This reminded me of another social networking site called Facebook 🙂 (there, I said it – I hate the usability of Facebook) that I stopped using a few months ago when I started getting updates from friends that were not even in my friends list (apparently they were friends of friends).

After a more than casual inspection, I realized that these updates were from people who were in my network because I had subscribed to a few groups, and these people were members of groups that I had subscribed to. But I really really use LinkedIn only for managing or keeping in touch with my professional contacts, and I really didn’t want an update about somebody unknown reading about online activism or dancing the zeimbekiko. And what’s up with all those small icons next to each update (see image below) ? Kartick’s first rule of usability : if you are going to decorate your UI with such small icons, either provide tooltips or provide a legend and both of them are missing from the LinkedIn home page.

Linked clutter

So I decided to control the clutter by going to my “Account & Settings” page and customizing the “Network Updates” that I am interested in. Now this is where LinkedIn could have made a real difference with respect to its usability. Remember those small icons that I was talking about in the previous paragraph (and displayed in the above image) – I am pretty sure that they have something to do with the different categories of updates – and this (the “Account & Settings” page) would have been a great place to display those icons. Because then I would be able to immediately correlate the different categories of updates to a specific update that is listed on my home page and decide whether I want to enable or disable such updates.

Here comes the ugly part.

Even without those icons, I was able to figure out (pretty smart of me eh ? :-)) that I should disable “Updates from my Groups” if I want to receive updates only from people who are not in my connection list, and so I went ahead and did that (see above image). And guess what ? It has been about a week since I did that, and I still get those updates. It is one thing to have bad usability (e.g. the user can’t easily figure out how to accomplish something), but it is another thing to “not do” what the user has requested you to do with your advertised functionality !! That is not bad usability, that is just faulty software that has been written.

Well, this doesn’t mean that I will stop using LinkedIn anytime soon. It is still lightyears ahead of other professional networking sites like Xing or Plaxo. And I am guessing they are going through growing pains – but still that is no excuse. So hopefully they fix their usability issues soon and continue to provide the great service that they have been providing all this while.