Aditya Kothadiya’s Blog

Apple is going to announce some iPhone updates soon – most likely it’s going to be an iPhone 5 launch with some great voice recognition technology powered apps. To announce these updates, they are hosting an event and sent following invitation to press reporters and bloggers.

I’m not interested in talking about what they will be announcing at the event. What I’m interested in is how brilliantly they have designed their invitation. Read the rest of this entry »

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 And the purpose of making them more visible is no longer applicable unless you remember those big buttons and decide to scroll up again to signup.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!