Categories
design technology usability ux

Facebook New stories : Mobile to Web

As I have said earlier, I notice UI/UX changes. Some earlier picks herehere and here. I just noticed something new today in Facebook. I have seen this in their mobile app, but one of the first times, I am seeing a company move a good UI feature from an app to the web.

fb-new-stories

 

I have not seen the “New Stories” button in the webpage before. New posts would either auto-load, or I would need to go click on the f button to load new pages. This brings in a new cognitive feature to show that there are new stories.

Good stuff, Facebook. I love the way you are moving features seamlessly between web pages to app and vice versa.

Categories
design Opinion technology usability ux

Twitter Trends – UI Change?

A little while ago, I wrote a post on the awesome new feature in twitter web UI, the quote-and-RT. I am loving it But before the euphoria died down, I just noticed that, twitter has made yet another UI (or maybe trying out on a subset population). When I log in to twitter today morning, I see a dense trends column on the left side of my screen.

2015-04-23 10_17_24-(8) Twitter

To be honest, I do not remember where the trends column used to be before – I rarely look at what is trending. But today seemed to be different. I noticed it because it is crowded and ugly. It is crowded because of the extra text below the actual hashtag. It distracts me from my timeline.

The fact that I never used to look at the trends (and hence did not let it affect/influence) my conversations on the timeline, makes it even harder for me now.

There is definitely a cognitive distraction that is happening here and I am not liking it. Are any of my readers seeing this as well? Are you OK with this?

And deep inside me, there is one more fear in me. Was this a means to drive people towards trending phrases – which could potentially be sponsored. If so, this is nothing short of discrete native advertising. Not that I am saying it is wrong to do advertising (twitter is a publicly listed company after all, and it has to make money), but hopefully not at the cost of distracted users. The last time something like that happened to me was when there used to be these blinking bling pop-up ads on webpages.

Now, has someone written an extension to hide the trends column?

Update: Ok, I found a way to get it back to normal. Click on the ‘Change’  next to the trends. It will ask you for which city you want trends for. Type in your location. There is a button called “Tailored Trends”. Do not click on that button, and just click Done. It will go back to a shorter trends column with just hashtags. Phew.

Categories
design ux

Twitter: Quote and RT

Am I late to the party, or is this really new? One major headache that I used to have is to quote and RT on twitter-on-the-web. It has been there on the android native twitter client, but not on the web. I know quite a few folks who use other twitter desktop clients, just for this functionality.

2015-04-20 10_32_35-Twitter

It was a pleasant surprise to see this over the weekend. Thank you Twitter.

And what more, there is a bonus too. Your quote gets 140 characters. Yes, over and above what the original tweet was. Is this awesome or what? In earlier times, there were twitter guidelines to use lesser number of characters in a tweet (<140), so that people can RT you and write something. Now that is gone. It is a win-win for the original tweeter and the one who RTs.

Now that is what I call a UX win.

Categories
design innovation software startup technology

On adapting successful UX methods

I notice User Experience (UX) differences and how they affect my productivity. I love products who focus on great UX. I love products who continually evolve their UX to become better and better. You know what I love even more – products who recognize good UX behaviors and adapt it to their own. And I recently came across a fine example of the latter – Twitter.

Screenshot_2015-04-16-11-37-48

This is the android twitter app. Do you see the “New Tweets” button at the top. This is very new. Facebook has had this for ages (it is called “New Stories” and it the button has a more oval structure to it). Clicking on the “New Tweets” button lets you know that there are new tweets and that you can click on that to scroll up to the latest tweets. This also saves you a pull down gesture, which is kind-of hard to do if you are holding and operating your phone with one hand (which is a pretty common use case).

My principal point here is that, if you recognize a good UX mechanism, it is my personal believe that, there is nothing wrong in adapting the mechanism to your product (unless it is patented ofcourse). It helps standardize UX across classes of apps. There is also a sense of sharing between the companies. I am sure FB spent quite a bit of UX effort coming up with their equivalent.

Request: As always, I have one request, which I am sure Twitter will not see, but that is fine, I will indulge myself. I would love to see the “New Tweets” button enhanced with the number of new tweets  – example – “132 New Tweets”. Twitter has the underlying algorithms for this, since it is present in their webapp.

Categories
bangalore misc

Geeky Dhaba – ITPL

The Geeky Dhaba in the ITPL food court seems geniunely geeky. Follow us on twitter !!! Wow.
The Geeky Dhaba in the ITPL food court seems geniunely geeky. Follow us on twitter !!! Wow.
Categories
misc tutorial

Twitter fundamentals

twitterpostit-thumb(pic credit)

Just read an awesome introduction to twitter by Jennifer Laycock, or should I now say, @JenniferLaycock. She explains the practical uses of twitter using a great analogy – post it notes on a giant wall.

You should read through, and if you have not understood twitter until now, I assure you, you will have an ‘aha’ moment.

Read the article here.

Another nice article on the practical uses of twitter from NYtimes [link]