Tag Archives: user interface

Happy Birthday from LiveJournal

I woke up this morning to five identical emails from LiveJournal. Here’s my LiveJournal inbox:

livejournal-broken.png

What’s wrong with this picture?

  1. I don’t ever need to be notified of my own birthday. It’s on my driver’s license if I forget it.
  2. I don’t need to be notified of anyone’s birthday more than once. And five times in two hours? Really excessive.
  3. I never asked LiveJournal to share my birthday with anyone, yet upon further investigation, I found that my birthday was set to be “shared with everyone.” Birthdates are often used to verify identity; they are a common target of identity thieves. No site should ever default to sharing user’s birthdates (or any other private information) with the universe. One nice way to mitigate this threat is to not include the birth year, which is not important when reminding people of each other’s birthdays.
  4. The messages show my birthday as the nonexistent “December 00,” even though I entered my birthday as January 1st. (I never enter my real birthdate on any site; January 1st works because it’s easy to remember, and anybody who actually knows me will know January 1st is not right.)
  5. If I actually wanted this feature, it would be nice to have more than two days to find a gift for someone.

I don’t actually use LiveJournal; I’ve only occasionally used my account to post a comment. I assume this is not indicative of the quality of the rest of their site.

Vacuous Survey

This was the second-to-last page in the Speakeasy customer satisfaction survey:

goofy-survey.png

It was, hands-down, the easiest to answer question on the survey. Gotta love Speakeasy; even giving them feedback is a breeze.

(URL) Hacking Facebook

I got a Facebook invite from someone I haven’t seen in years. Awesome! Unfortunately, my long-lost friend used a very old email of mine. This is to be expected; I haven’t seen or corresponded with him in years. Facebook wanted me to sign up using this jurassic email in order to accept the invitation.

I tried logging in to Facebook and looking at the invitation again. No luck. Viewing the invitation while logged in silently failed, sending me to the Facebook home screen, with no error message.

Next, I tried searching for my friend on Facebook. Armed with his first and last name, and his email, I found that there was no way whatsoever to find him. I don’t use any of the popular web-mail programs or email clients that Facebook can import from, because I’m a hella old-school motherfucker.

My options now seem to be limited: spend the time to write a program to create a fake exported address book in one of the formats that Facebook accepts, or download and install a converter, like abook, in order to invite just one person, or just send my friend an email, explaining that Facebook sucks, and by the way, how the hell have you been?

I’m about to send that email, when I notice the invitation URL:

http://www.facebook.com/p.php?i=XXXXXXXX&k=ZZZZZZZZZZ&r&v=2

That XXXXXXXXX looks suspiciously like a user id. So, I copy the id onto the facebook user profile URL:

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=XXXXXXXXX

Voila! My friend’s profile, complete with a button to add him as a friend on Facebook.

Why is this so hard? What would be wrong with sending me a link to his profile in email, or detecting that I’m already logged in and showing me his profile rather that silently failing when I click on the invitation? Why can’t I just type in his name or his email and add him that way?

Facebook started out focused on the somewhat closed, school-oriented social scene, so the lack of ability to add people outside of preordained networks made some amount of sense, at some point. But they are clearly going for the whole market now, so it’s time to drop the draconian network boundaries entirely. The vast majority of my friends aren’t friends from past universities or previous jobs — they are friends from Real Life. No wonder I only have a paltry three friends on Facebook. Hell, I even have more friends on LinkedIn, and I hate LinkedIn.

What’s that? Facebook hasn’t noticed this problem because their users don’t have real lives? Come on, I’m sure that can’t be true. At least not anymore.

Tufte & Tiramisu

I went to the Edward Tufte talk on Tuesday with a bunch of people, including Michael Chu. Michael showed his Cooking for Engineers Tiramisu recipe card design to Tufte during office hours, and then he showed it to us at lunch. We talked a bit about how to redesign it. The design must be done with just standard HTML and CSS — no images.

Here’s my version, and my motivations:

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Self-referential modal dialog box

This gem of a dialog appeared on my dad’s computer when I opened Canon’s photo management tool ZoomBrowser. It was the only dialog open. Even if there had been another dialog box open, making that dialog modal would have prevented the need for a second (modal) dialog.
zb1.PNG

Needless to say, closing the dialog helped the situation quite a bit. Canon should stick to making cameras and leave the software to the professionals.

Optimus keyboard released

Somebody promised to buy me one of these if they were ever actually produced. At $1,500, I don’t think my gift is coming anytime soon. This keyboard seems now like one of those ideas that is clever but doesn’t go far enough. If you’re going to put led screens on the keys, why have individual keys at all? Why not have just one big touch screen, or one big LED array which detects finger motion? Then you could have any key layout, or scale the entire thing for the size of your hands and the width of your shoulders, or rearrange the keys into a grid or offset individual columns for the different spans of your different fingers, or switch to a one-handed layout, or switch to a chording style keyboard, or anything else. Why stick to the traditional physical key layout when you are going to all the trouble of making the keys themselves totally configurable?

Update 2008-01-09: Ars Technica reviews the Optimus.

It’s not you, babe. It’s not me either. It’s the website.

This is the story of a girl, a boy, and the website that came between them.

Many years ago now, I signed up for every online dating website I could find. I’ll spare you the list of excuses and protestations that I am actually capable of meeting girls in real life; all that matters is that I like to check out every website I can — because it’s my job, and because it’s interesting.

I once paid a little bit for what was, at the time, the best of the sites. To protect the icompeten– I mean, the innocent, I’ll just call this site www.meetsomeonenicetosettledownwith.com.

There’s a kind of paradox of profit in the online dating industry. To be a successfull company, you have to actually successfully connect people, which means they are no longer customers. Your customers are paying you — even if your site’s entirely ad-driven — to make them non-customers as quickly as possible. If there’s a clever way around this, I don’t know what it is.

Over the years, www.meetsomeonenicetosettledownwith.com got worse and worse. Although I initially paid for “credits” which could be used to send messages at any time, they converted to an exorbitant monthly fee system, and instituted a rigid caste system much like India had for centuries, with “Gold” (Desperate and loaded), “Silver” (Desperate or loaded, but not both), and “Standard” (Broke, sexually confused, deceased, or untouchable).

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