Aditya Kothadiya's Blog

I generally like Google’s products by default. They are less intrusive, very subtle in colors, and they take care of the usability aspect quite appropriately. I agree, they don’t have great design taste, but they do have great usability taste. In general, I’m not much fan of flashy graphic designs. It hurts my eyes more than it helps me in any way. That’s why I don’t appreciate Microsoft or Yahoo’s many web-based products much. They give too much stress on glossy images to make their UIs very eye-candy. Whereas, Google’s products are easy on colors in general, but lot of emphasis is given on usability. Their UIs don’t bother me much. They work in the browser very quietly. If you notice my blog’s theme, you’ll find that I kept this theme as plain as possible to enhance your reading experience. I didn’t want to add too many images and distract you from your reading.

But Google Buzz is different. I just didn’t like it that much. I understand it’s usefulness and future potential, I agree they have taken care of usability in many ways, but I still feel that they just didn’t deliver the subtle product. Buzz hurts my eyes. It distracts me. It’s not helping me, rather it’s hurting me. So finally I disabled it.

But here are few things that I didn’t like about Buzz -

1. Unread Buzz count

Why another count to show me that I’m slacking? Why another count to tell me that I need to complete another task – clear the unread Buzz count?

If you’ve noticed in above image, I try to keep my inbox count as low as possible. That doesn’t mean I necessarily read all emails, but I delete many not relevant emails when know I’m not going to have time to read them. I just don’t keep them there in my inbox with the false hope that I’ll read it some time in the future. You know, you never go back to your inbox to read the unread emails. Then why keep it there? The unread emails in my inbox are shown in the bold format, and it distracts my eyes. It tells me – give me your attention. Those unread email count, that is even more disturbing. I feel the bigger the count, the more burden I have. So I like to keep it simple – just keep that count as small as possible.

And now they added another count? Sorry, I don’t need that. But, an option to just hide that count will solve my problem.

2. Confused “Already following”

I totally believe in not re-inventing the social graph. We already have our social graphs on Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, etc. It doesn’t make sense for newer applications to ask users to create another social graph starting from scratch. Let’s just leverage existing social graphs.

The good part is, Buzz has exactly done that, and that’s exactly what we’ve also done at Shopalize. But the bad part is, Buzz has made it even more confusing. As soon as you signup, you’re already following certain people. But you’re not following all. I didn’t see any obvious relation in people whom I’m already following, and people I need to follow explicitly. It’s very confusing how they decide whom I’m following and whom I’m not.

3. Popular activity view

I think this is the worst experience. Buzz count shows me that I’ve new unread activities, but when I click on it to see latest activities, I just don’t understand what’s new. I don’t get if the activity itself is a new one, or the comments or likes on an activity are new, or something else? It shows me the same Buzz activity with 100 comments again at the top. It’s very confusing to find the recent new activities. They should have highlighted these new activities.

Sorting activities based on it’s popularity is not a bad idea. But that should be an alternate option. The default option should be recent activities first. Sorting based on chronological order is a norm now. Aren’t we a Twitter generation now?

In general, I wasn’t really excited with Buzz when I first used it. I’m sure, they will get better in coming days. But I still didn’t find that it’s solving my information overload problem in anyway, but in fact it’s making it even worse. So sorry Buzz, I’ve to disable you until I’ve enough bandwidth to consume another stream of noise err…activities.

I really liked how Rypple.com has implemented movable and actionable signup flow. For most of the web-services, we see these links to make our signup action as an easy process – “Learn More”, “Signup for Free”, or “Take a Tour”. Now a days these links are shown in big boxes or buttons to make them more visible and prominent, such that you can see them very clearly and take the signup action quickly.

But most of the times, these links appear at the top section of the screen when you land up on that page. Generally to learn more about that web-service, you tend to scroll down to see what features they provide, what their existing customers said, etc. When we scroll down, the links to take signup action are lost from our visibility. And the purpose of making them more visible is no longer applicable unless you remember those big buttons and decide to scroll up again to signup.

I liked how Rypple has fixed that problem. They made those signup buttons movable. If you scroll down, those buttons also scroll down. If you scroll up again, they will also scroll up again. Basically they will just stay with you all the time as shown below -

When you land up on front page -

When you scroll down -

It’s a very clever way to make sure those actionable buttons are never lost from your visibility. You see that button all the time so chances might be higher that you’ll not forget to signup. Also, if you’ve scrolled down, Rypple has made your job even easier by removing the need of scrolling up again to just signup. I’m sure they must be seeing some increase in number of signups using this clever signup flow.

Suggest if you have seen such clever signup flows.

I love Facebook’s usability. But I found their email notification implementation highly unusable or rather annoying at some times.

1. Commented on which status?

The common use case is – you post some status update and your friends comment on it. Now, as an average user, I generally post 2-3 updates on my Facebook profile. But when Facebook sends me email notification, it sends me a message something like this -

Facebook Status Comment Notification Email

As shown above, all it says – “<Your friend> commented on your status: <Friend’s comment>”. But I’ve no idea on which status my friend commented on. They deliberately made sure that I’ve no clue about which status it was, and I better login to their site and give them some pageviews. I hate it. All they have to send me -

“<Your friend> commented on <Your status>: <Friends’ comment>” – just fill in the value of your actual status! So simple! I just get it on which status my friend commented on, and that comment starts making sense to me. Otherwise without the context, I’ve no way to understand what that comment means.

2. Follow the link to reply?

Another use case is – if I receive comment, then I can’t reply that comment by sending “Reply” button of my email program. Why I’ve to login to their site just to reply to that comment thread? My comment thread is actually right now in my email inbox. It tells me what comment my friend posted, then if I’ve to reply to it, I’ll just hit the reply button and will send my comment via email. It should get posted directly to the status thread on Facebook.

Though, this not an annoying issue, but sometimes if I receive 3-4 comments during day time, then I read those comments in my email, but generally postpone replying to it on Facebook till evening – and most likely, I’ll forget what was my instant reaction to friend’s comment was and will lose its continuation.

But having this ability will increase the instant communication. And I don’t think it’s that hard to implement this feature – especially when it makes users’ life more convenient.

If you have different observations, then please let me know your views in the comment section!

I was trying to visit Twitter’s website, but it was down for a planned maintenance. Here is the screenshot of it’s landing page. Very creative and funny too! It definitely made me smile. It definitely helped me not to get frustrated with their down time. Very clever.

But once I found Twitter is down, I decided to use Hootsuite for updating my Twitter status. As a co-incidence, it was also down at the same time. Here is the screenshot of their landing page. I found this is cleverer than Twitter’s. This is not only creative, but informative too. It definitely made me a little smarter than a moment ago. So who would bother about down-time, if you provide this kind of user-experience? Very very creative.

I think these are very clever design decisions to note down when I need to implement scheduled maintenance pages for my websites!

This blog’s commenting is now Disqus powered. Disqus is a very powerful comment system, which enhances the discussion on your website. Ever since I moved my blog to Wordpress platform, which is the best decision I’ve made about selecting blogging platforms since I started blogging, I always wanted to enable the Disqus commenting system for this blog. But I kept procrastinating that task thinking that it might be a cumbersome process to configure it.

But I was simply wrong. Enabling and configuring the Disqus commenting system on my self-hosted blog was a dead simple experience. The process was extremely smooth, and it blown away me with the complete user experience. Disqus implementation rocks!

My strong recommendations to all bloggers (newbies and professional):

1. Use Wordpress for blogging platform – either self-hosted or from Wordpress.com. Wordpress 2.7 is damn awesome! Blogger and TypePad should die. They are the worst blogging platforms. Those who are still using Blogger and TypePad, still don’t know what they are missing from Wordpress. Go move on to Wordpress – it’ll be your best decision of blogging life.
2. Use Disqus for commenting platform – there are tons of awesome features that Disqus provides to enhance the commenting experience on the blog. Now commenting on the blogs is more interactive, trackable, and controllable. If your blog don’t have Disqus commenting system, then I’ll wonder why you don’t have it, and will think twice before commenting on it.

Thank you Wordpress and Disqus for making my blogging experience so awesome and so easy!

I was doing search on Tripadvisor about things to do in Lake Tahoe. Here is the screenshot of that query’s result.

This is how advertising based startups after a while turn into a website with too many advertisements and very less or no content in the attempt of making some money. It took me quite some time to just figure out which part was the content and which part were ads. Not to mention, I closed the window in 2 minutes of fruitless attempt of finding the content.

I’m a subscriber of a web service, which provides online manuals or articles for the tools that I use on a daily basis at my workplace. So I need to visit this service once in a while. Today when I tried logging into it after many days, it redirected me to create a new password because my password was not meeting their “Strong Password Policy” requirement.

My first reaction was – why the heck they need “Strong Password Policy”? They are just an online help documentation service, not a Credit Card or Bank website. And I absolutely don’t have any personal information stored there.

But anyways, whatever the reason they thought, I convinced myself to change the password. But guess what, their freaking complex “Secure Password Policy” didn’t allow me to create any password which I thought were quite secure enough.

Then I had to read their strong password policy. Here is what it mentioned -

Your password must meet the following criteria:

• Must be at least 8 characters long
• Must include at least 1 number
• Must include at least 1 symbol character (non-letter or number, such as *, %, or #)
• Must include at least 1 lowercase letter
• Must include at least 1 uppercase letter
• Must not include your username, first name, and last name
• These requirements must be met within the first 8 characters

After reading this, I almost had to control myself from hitting my keyboard on the monitor. Do read the each bullet carefully, especially the last one. Why on the earth that service needs this kind of password policy? Believe it or not, even my Credit Card or Bank websites don’t enforce me to create this kind of “strong” password.

In my opinion, these are the types of services, who absolutely don’t get the web usability. Just because someone cracked the code to create strongest password, doesn’t mean that’s the way to go. On top of this stupid requirement, this service neither has a sophistacated interface to navigate through hundereds of documents nor they have smart search engine.

Come on guys, now it’s almost the end of Web 2.0 era. At least now please throw away those Web 1.0 practices and follow the cuttting-edge technologies and practices. Please grow up.