October will be forever remembered, by me, as the Month of User Interface Fail. I don’t have dates/times for events, but they happened in a cascade, and makes me wonder WTF is up. Is the new goal to make helpful and convenient services utterly unusable? Because that plan, it is working.
Details below, but let me first say that, as an information science professional, I’m utterly perplexed as to how these disasters happened in the first place. What happened to end-user needs assessments? What happened to beta launches for the sake of critical feedback? Just…what happened?
First, although I think it was back in September, Tumblr redesigned the dashboard. They’ve done this before, and in general I am pretty comfortable with UI changes, believing that designers in general have users’ best interests at heart. Not in this case. They moved important data off the dashboard page, so now to both follow tags and check my queue status, I have to go to two different pages. It’s not a huge problem but an unconceivable one to anyone who actually uses the service, which I wonder if the tumblr designers do at all. I’m thinking, probably not.
Second was the utter catastrophe that was the Delicious.com re-launch. Read about it here on ZDnet. It was the re-launch that sunk thousands of ships, as die-hard Delicious users (like me) freaked the fuck out as our go-to bookmarking/tagging service got eviscerated before our eyes. AVOS (the new owners of Delicious) clearly did NOT do end user research at all. My loathing for them is profound, and the only reason I haven’t closed my accounts (I have several) is that: 1) I don’t want anyone else to get my usernames; 2) I’m happy to take up server space I will never use, just to be petty; 3) they lost one of my accounts, so I’m not burning that bridge until they FIND IT.
Next came the bizarre “fix” FaceBook made to their newsfeed, splitting into a feed and ticker-tape side bar. Now, I’ve been a fan of Facebook for a long time now. I like the service, and before the redesign I used it pretty much all day. If I was awake, I was checking in on FB. Now? I go there about once a day. I can’t stand the stupid ticker-tape, which is both annoying and uninformative, and I’m pissed that FB decided unilaterally who I want to follow regularly. I’ve gone to Google+ but the most significant change is that I now use Twitter as my main social networking tool. Facebook is too big to care, probably too big to fail, but I don’t think that’s a good excuse for fixing something that wasn’t broken.
Then Google got rid of GoogleDesktop, which means they took away my sidebar and all my lovely gadgets. Apparently their user research indicates that people don’t really use it, so fair is fair, but I’m going to pout anyway because I was the one person who used it! Windows 7 doesn’t support MS Sidebar, or even gadgets too much. I liked my sidebar, damnit.
On the flip side, Google re-did Docs and Calendar, and both were great improvements. See? It can be done! Just not by tumblr, delicious, or facebook, apparently.
