Sunday, March 04, 2007

Missing affordance in Flickr...

This is about usability! Have you ever tried to modify the category of one of your contact in Flickr, for example, making them friends or family?

Once you learned is a quite easy taks! But how to figure out how to do it? That's the problem!!

If you look carefully, there is no way of telling where this option is. You might discover it by chance.

Wanna test it? Display your contacts. You'll get some icons as displayed below:
If you move your mouse on one contact's icon e pull-down menu is activated. Then you can choose the option you need.
The possibility of opening the pull-down menu appears only after you moved the mouse over the icon. This is not good because the interface is not telling you what are the operations available until you don't explicitly select them.

While Flickr is a great idea, it seems that usability of its website is rather bad. The contact icon has no affordance that tells you how to operate it.

The concept of affordance is a basic one in Interaction Design and making explicit and intuitive the way of operating the interface to user is the most fundamental design principle one has to consider in order to build friendly interfaces.

I hope Flickr design will soon realize their interface's flaw.

Monday, February 19, 2007

Scanner Darkly

Searching the web for people with Pallotta family name, I found Tommy Pallotta's blog. He is a Californian movie producer who recently produced an astonishing SciFi movie "Scanner Darkly" featuring, among others, Keanu Reeves and Wynona Ryder.



The movie is obtained through a technique called rotoscoping inspired by the novel of Philip K. Dick and it's a sort of high-tech version of Dr.Jeckil and Mr.Hyde.

Here also a picture of Tommy with Keanu Reeves:



Tommy is present also on YouTube with a nice videoclip:



Great job Tommy!!!

Friday, February 16, 2007

Exicting workshop...


DSCF0893.JPG, originally uploaded by liftconferencephotos.

This is me attending the Stowe Boyd pre-LIFT'07 workshop. The workshop was really exciting. It was about building social applications. One important insight emerged: Europe is bad in designing social applications. More information in Boyd's blog about this.

That's me at LIFT'07


DSCF1684.JPG, originally uploaded by liftconferencephotos.

I found my self in this picture I was unaware of from the Liftconferencephoto Flickr user...
The LIFT conference was really great!