If you search for ‘using flags to represent languages’, you’ll get a swathe of wisdom as to why this is a really bad idea. This really bothers me whenever I see it; which unfortunately is really quite often. I blogged about a language selection screen in the Steam client last year which again fell into the trap of presenting users with a selection of flag icons in order to choose their language.
I went to the Tate site today and a little UN-style gathering of flags caught my attention.
What really bothers me about what the Tate have done here is that they’ve obviously put some thought into this design decision, but the logic behind the decision is broken. (more…)
I used to be a Flickr addict. I would shoot as much as I could and upload at least a few days a week. But the past few months, I’ve found myself spending less and less time on the site. Why?
Part of it is definitely the improvement in Facebook’s handling of photos. Facebook now provides higher quality images and the ability to share my photos with a much larger selection of friends.
And that’s where I think Flickr is starting to fall behind: there is a distinct lack of updates and new ‘features’ on the site. Twitter and Facebook are always tweaking their interface (with varying degrees of success and often with a fair bit of controversy). But the last major interface update I can remember was to sharing photos in March 2011. And that was hardly a massive new feature.
Comparison sites such as Kayak and Skyscanner are not only great for finding great deals on flights and hotels, but also cutting out much of the below-par user experience that seems endemic with many airline sites — in particular the obsession the airline industry seems to have with interstitial pages.
It’s depressing how many major airlines present you with screens like this on their landing pages:
Referrals on your site from Facebook? Good luck getting any sort of idea who sent you there. Unless it’s from a public page, all you’re bound to see is one simple referring URL: http://www.facebook.com/l.php. Facebook ‘wraps’ all links on Facebook within this simple file — once you click on a link in Facebook, l.php will ‘redirect’ you to the actual URL. Why Facebook does this is unclear. Possibly to protect user’s anonymity when accessing links — or is it something more strategic?
Given Facebook’s perennial privacy issues, seemingly providing its users such anonymity when accessing links seems out of character. Twitter links can be tricky to track, but since most accounts are public it’s fairly easy to track what users have linked to you by using services such as the bit.ly info page or topsy.com (but not Twitter’s search, because it’s utterly rubbish).
Are Facebook genuinely protecting users from being seen in referrals, or are they just harvesting all this data for themselves? Are they planning to keep it secret and build up better ‘user profiles’ (probably, which is quite scary) or will they launch some sort of premium API service where websites can see what Facebook users are accessing their site? (even scarier, although the privacy implications of this are massive).
But perhaps Facebook do have a strange sense of privacy for their users. There’s no way to know how many people have viewed your profile on Facebook (although countless malware applications claim to do so, and such a feature is no doubt a reason they propagate so successfully). This is probably for the best, as if they enabled something like that there’s a good chance many relationships would get quite awkward. Suddently realising some person you met at a party three years ago constantly looks at your profile would no doubt be very unnerving — nevermind if it was someone such as a close friend’s partner.
Scarily, only a few weeks back I discovered LinkedIn does exactly this: you can opt-in to see who can see your profile, and people you view can also see that you’ve looked. I find this quite creepy — would Facebook ever do this? I doubt, and really hope that they don’t.
A few Windows 8 Demos did the rounds this week. Generally the reaction was twofold: very positive because it looks great, and surprise because… well, it looks great. The adoption of the style used in Windows Mobile looks very exciting: clean lines, decluttered space and a strong emphasis on typography.
However, in this video, you can see that perhaps the experience is vulnerable to legacy Microsoft applications — such as using Office 10.
When that familiar Windows 7 chrome appears with Microsoft Office, Kara Swisher’s reaction is golden: ‘There it is again! It’s back. I liked the other pretty one’. Mumbled laughter fills the auditorium… while Steven Sinofsky and Julie Larson-Green try to get the demo back on track. But Kara Swisher’s reaction will sum up the feelings of many users: ‘oh, I’m back in old Windows now?’.
Steven Sinofsky then pushes the question: why isn’t Office in the new style? And poor Julie Larson-Green is left trying to answer something obviously out of her control (but does well considering being put on the spot). Trying to move on in the demo, Julie Larson-Green then has problems manipulating the old style Office using the touch screen… showing that Office really does need some work to work for touch.
Word and many other Office applications are so bloated these days, I’m very curious to see what their next incarnation will be like given the new and exciting design approach being taken by Microsoft.
Unfortunately, and Julie Larson-Green does touch on this in the demo video, removing or redesigning features from Office will upset a lot of users, even if it does make a better product. It might be a tricky job.
While watching the video (on the TED website) I noticed the subtitle options. TED has a fantastic translation scheme where users can transcribe translations for videos — a staggering 18,265 translations so far. But user experience-wise, this scheme has some critical issues.
Originally I intended this post to be a series of examples demonstrating some of the hassles involved when dealing with multi-lingual content in Flash. But it occurred to me that the issue isn’t so much that Flash is difficult for this purpose, it’s more that it’s lousy. It’s way behind the curve considering where the rest of the web is today in this regard, and incredibly the situation was far worse not much more than twelve months ago (before Adobe released Flash CS5 and the Text Layout Framework).
The rationale for this post came after attending a talk at SXSW 2011 — ‘Flash is Dead, Long Live Flash!‘. The presenters, Elliot Chong and Toby Miller, gave a great overview of strengths and weaknesses of both Flash and HTML 5. However, one point of debate they missed was localisation. Not that I expected to hear it, but I feel strongly about such things considering this is a big part of my day job. During the Q&A session, I brought up the point of localisation — but explaining technical trivialities on the spur of the moment in front of a large crowd of peers can be tricky: hence this post.
After enduring a countdown that was meant to ‘reveal all’ at 6am PST/2pm BST, the May the 4th Star Wars site promptly fell over for a good hour and a half, either showing broken pages, MySQL errors or just redirecting to Foxmovies.com.
3:30pm BST and it’s finally here: a mammoth Flash site with an interesting viral twist: you have to share it on various social media platforms to reveal all. It even has a leaderboard by country showing whose shared it the most.
Now I can’t work out if this is genius or a scam. I love the mystery aspect of this, but am I reluctant to share just because it’s Star Wars? Probably. Because if I did click ‘share’ and revealed a high res image of Jar Jar Binks, I would not be happy.
Yet what if it was for the latest trailer for the latest Call of Duty game or the new kit of my favourite football team? Then of course I would.
Not this time Lucas, not this time — this is a brand trust problem. I’m not ‘liking’ you because I just don’t trust your brand anymore.
(Unless your announcement is the unadulterated release of the original Star Wars trilogy with all the new crap taken out, then I’ll gladly like your little website!)
I recently subscribed to Spotify Premium after creating some playlists for my trip to the US for SXSWi 2011. All worked fine except when I tried to play tracks on my phone while in Texas: no dice. You have to be online to play tracks, even if they’ve been downloaded for offline play.
I can’t even understand why this is. I can play offline songs on my laptop without an Internet connection, but why not my phone? Logic aside, the inconvenience annoys me more than anything else.
Between astromical data roaming costs, flying, being underground or simply being out of reception, I’m a tad pessemistic about the ‘future’ of cloud-based media. And that includes Amazon’s new Cloud Player. It’s fine if you have a broadband connection, but even on a great 3G or 4G connection, there are times when you simply won’t have a signal.
For mobiles I think local storage is still the way to go, however it’s achieved: just as long as you don’t have to be online to access it.
And that’s why I downgraded to Spotify Unlimited: half the cost, and pretty much the same service: bar the mobile experience which is woeful anyway (not to mention how bad the Android app is — but that’s for another post).
One is a flurry of ‘infographics’ around the web. Just like rounded corners and shiny buttons went viral earlier last decade, this time it seems to be print-style high-res graphics choc-full of eye candy and numbers.
Two is a recent reaction against observation number one. Tom Morris for one launched a somewhat one-sided but justified rant; on the flipside, Connie Malamed talks semantics about what an infographic is, and even coins ‘infoposter’ as a better description of infographic’s less refined relation.
Can we really give a name to all these formats? Should we judge them? I’m personally at the point now when I see the term ‘infographic’ I usually prepare for disappointment. I find it really interesting that on Edward Tufte‘s website, there’s hardly any reference to the word ‘infographic‘; and where it is mentioned, it’s not by Edward Tufte, but from other people emailing questions etc.
Edward Tufte talks about information design, graphic design and even art. Data visualisation, infographics etc. are all examples of these — and in the bigger picture, just one part of telling a story. Conveying understanding. Sometimes a video is the best medium for this; sometimes a picture. Sometimes an audio clip. Sometimes an graphic. Would you call one of Hans Rosling’s videos on health in developing nations an infovideo? No, that would sound silly.
A graphic is a graphic, and with any other medium, it’s only as good as the artist behind it and the understanding they have of the subject matter — regardless of what you call it.
