Kicks and Kisses

Now kicksandkisses runs on wordpress 2.5. It’s got a host of new features and the admin panel has been designed by Happy Cog and I totally love it.

Do check out soon for new mods here :).

Do you see the difference between the two images?

In the first mail i got to the mail by clicking on the “spam” link on the left menu. This is in fact same as using “in:spam” in the search. Since the mail is a spam, the button on top is “Not spam”. Which is the correct and expected behavior, as you are inside spam, you would want to unspam certain mails which have been wrongly labeled.

In the second image i got to the mail by first clicking the “spam” link and then refining the search with keywords. This gives me a search result page. And though the search also has “in:spam” the button on top still shows “Report spam”. So if I get to a wrongly labeled message through a keyword search I can’t unspam it.

Am i missing something over here? or is this a bug?

I guess they have different templates for the spam page and the search result page. And they haven’t put the condition that if the search has “in:spam” it should show the relevant option or the relevant template.

Email could be business decisions, system failure alert or an opportunity in peer group.
It has more meaning than just information. Emails have become more of management tool. You become forerunner if you access & respond fast.
I have multiple email accounts. Even multiple accounts in single email client for different purposes. Every time I have to log on to many accounts. Once I signed out,I no longer know whether it has got a new email. There are lots of sync mechanisms. Import mechanism, which can import email from one inbox to other.But still I think it lacks a good design. There are many add on software available which can manage multiple email accounts. But I check my emails on different machines.

Gmail itself is well designed with awesome search capabilities. Can I use this design and search to access my outlook and Yahoo mail ? Consider a design I am proposing.

From the drop down user selects one account and it loads all the emails in this skeleton J . One doesn’t have to go different email clients. Different sign in. If I am checking my Gmail account. A pop-up can inform me whether I have received an email in my outlook and vice versa. All my Gmail tags can be replaced by the folders name if I select my Yahoo ID. I am not sure technically how much can be achieved but strategically this utility can simply multiply Google’s email business revenue.

Intentionally, I never click advertisements. But some time I do by mistake. There will be many people doing such clicks by mistake every minute. I always try to close the popup/New window/ Tab as soon as I come to know that I have done it by mistake. For every click advertiser has to pay. I assume that there would be millions of waste clicks every day.

I don’t get anything out of this click nor the advertiser. For my mistake advertiser has to pay the money. This will be shared by ad publishing company and the publisher. Sometime I think that advertiser should pay only if the viewer stays for some time on the website. Even the payment can be mapped in proportion with time of stay on the website. There should be some tools to measure user’s activity on the advertiser’s websites. The payment could go to maximum, if the viewer makes any transactions. Amazon has somewhat similar Model. They only pay once the viewer purchase the books after landing to Amazon. They don’t pay by impression or click. This is more meaningful contextual advertising.

Ad publishing companies are eating part of this waste click money. This click=$ phenomena also motivates the website owners to get more and more clicks. There are number of misleading websites design with one goal of clicks only on ads.

ICC Twenty 20 Tava is red hot and Google also want bake his breads on it. Recently Google announced easy score utility in search engine. If you search [Cricket] in Google then you will get updated cricket score of the currently running cricket match.

Google pulls this information from most popular websites like Cricbuzz , Cricinfo, Willow . The search result will be shown from the website which has latest scores.

Its good utility from the user experience point of view. It’s like online score card anytime anywhere. It’s very easy to access. One can find all important information on right top. One doesn’t need to go the data provider website until he is not interested in details. If given a task of “finding score” will be less time consuming on Google than Cricinfo.
User experience can become even better if Google provides refresh / auto update with scorecard. Because contextually updates are very important with cricket score.

These websites are working hard to collect second by second information for a match. Google is just pulling this information by its algorithm. I used to watch cricket scores on cricinfo earlier but now I prefer Google. So I think Google will eat a big piece of ad revenues in cricket world. Not sure if they have profit sharing on the ad revenues incurred to Google from these key words. These data are coming from these specific sites only. If there is no profit sharing then it can affect the cricket websites revenues.
Also there is internet traffic and marketing angle to this. I was not aware of willow website earlier but I have subscribed to willow now. Willow provides score on your mobile.

I am getting lot^2 invitations to Join Shelfari which is a social networking websites related to books. Earlier I was thinking of joining it but now I will never join it.

The product planners have taken a wrong approach to bring more and more users to product. Once you click on an invitation it asks you to choose user name and password. In the second screen it shows you Gmail login screen and once you login it sends invitation to your entire Gmail address list or the people whom you ever interacted. More than that it send sends multiple auto generated emails.

I have received at least 10 invitation from a single user with subject like “Do we like the same Books”. I emailed this sender saying please do not spam me, and he is getting similar emails from other friends too. I’ts a really embarrassing situation for the person who has Joined Shelfari and has sent invitation by mistake to all his Gmail address book. These tricks sometime create a bad image of the product and may be after some time people never use it. Similar cases I have seen with Yaari.com which a copy of orkut.com.

People have different type of email address in their address books like a VP of a company, HR of a Company, A discussion board group ID and similar which are very sensitive where one will never send such invitation but I have seen people sending invitation on yahoo groups where thousand of other user thinks bad about the sender not about the product.

It’s a good example of intentional unusability for money…

Google has blurred the thin line between messaging applications and web messaging application. So it’s no wonder that I do most of my unplanned chats on Gmail. Once I was talking to 4 of my friends at a time in my Gmail chat pop-ups. If you look at the screen the first chat pop-up opens from the right corner. My screen was full and now one more friend comes online. But when i tired to open a new chat window the first one disappeared. I again opened the 1st one window by clicking on the list of people and now second friend window disappeared. In short the least active window will disappear. It took me a moment to realize that only four windows could be open at once on my PC. I tried this thing with wide screen laptop and it supported five active windows. So it must be dependent upon the width of the screen. And after a limit it starts disappearing.

If the disappeared fellow messages you than his window appears and the least active disappear. Assume a case that you talking to 10 people at a time than probably you will see an animation of windows coming and going and you will not be able to write .

Where do those windows go actually? Can’t the previous windows remain minimized when I open more and more. One design solution could be minimizing and stacking those previous windows. When the person messages you it could change its color to orange as it does in active chat window. All information will be visible to me at the same time. I will be more in control when system will keep me informed.

99% chances are that you are reading this on a browser. So being a usability/design blog why not analyze your browser first. For starters let’s just focus on very basic browsing goals, in three web browsers mainly IE7, Firefox 2 and Opera 9. And we won’t be going into how these browsers render html code or how margins behave differently in IE and other browsers. Because the users do not care; all they want is a browser which lets them do things they want. And they won’t change their browser if a margin goes a little here or there. Wo what we will do is analyze how these browsers respond to normal basic browsing.

What is normal basic browsing? Opening new windows, new tabs, typing in a URL etc. We will go task wise and try to accomplish each task in each browser.

strong>Task: Opening a New window from file menu by either File> New Window or by the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + N. Then typing in the URL and pressing enter using the keyboard.

IE: It duplicates the existing page instead of opening a fresh new window. In some cases it might be useful but in most of the cases it is completely useless. Now if the user presses the stop button or presses the ‘Esc’ then the page loading stops. Let’s assume the user does not stop the loading page, instead clicks with the mouse on the address bar. While clicking on the address bar s/he is looking at the monitor. After
bringing the cursor into the address bar, the user looks down at least once towards the keyboard and begins typing. Meanwhile during this time what many times happens is that the duplicate page has loaded and the browser puts that URL into the address bar. The user’s click has gone waste.
There are two problems here:
a) The browser opens a duplicate page when ordered to open a new window.
b) Once the user clicks any editable textbox, s/he should be its master. But here the browser usurps control.
Opera: Opera has got it exactly right. It opens a fresh new window with cursor blinking on the address bar. The behavior when starting opera, and when opening a new page are totally different and as expected. A new page is a new page. And users can set what they want when starting opera, homepage, or last open page, etc.
Firefox: It opens a blank page when a new page is opened, as it should. This takes it’s value from the Tools>Options>Main>Startup. The options here are blank page, homepage or last session. When either blank page or last session is selected, it opens a blank page when we do Ctrl + N or File>New Window. But if the homepage is selected it starts opening the homepage in every new window. Architecturally the problem here is that the browser behaves in the same way when it starts as well as when a new window is opened.Here we have to look into the benefits of setting a homepage. One would set the homepage as something which s/he wants to see the first time s/he opens a browser. It maybe an email site, a news site or whatever. But once he has opened the browser, the homepage is loaded. And the marginal utility of the homepage loaded on any new window is considerably lower.

Here too the problem with the browser loading the URL over a clicked address bar is present.
Task: Opening a page by pasting a URL into the address bar.

IE and Firefox: Behave similarly and as expected.

Opera: We copy the URL from somewhere and paste it in the address bar. To start page loading we would need one thing, the ‘Go’ button. But where is it? Opera has added a feature, when right clicked in the address bar; it has an additional option, ‘Paste and Go’. Though this is very useful as it eliminates a click, removing a very basic button, just because you have a new feature does not make sense.

Task: Opening a new tab window by either File> New Tab or keyboard shortcut Ctrl + T

There are multiple ways of opening a new tab in each of these browsers.
IE: a) File>New Tab along with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl +T. They have put this option above the New Window option. Guess they want to propagate tab navigation.
b) Click on the rectangle, which gives a new page icon on hover. Which I guess is a little less discoverable. The easy thing could have been to put in the icon by default and on hover a text box saying ‘New Tab’.
c) Clicking on the tab bar, in the vacant space opens a new tab. The problem with this is when the number of tabs increase to 4-5 the tab bar is fully covered. And there is no vacant space. So this feature is only useful when the tabs are less than 4-3 (in different monitor resolutions). The workaround IE has done is, even when the number of tabs increases the rectangle still remains and remains to the right of the tabs, where new tabs should come. So the users flow is maintained.

Opera: a) File> New Tab along with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl +T. Here also it is above the new window. No surprise because these are the people who started tabs.
b) On the left of the tabs is the button for the ‘New Tab’. It has both text and the icon which makes it quite intuitive. But the utility of this button is a little suspect because of its positioning. Also it is too near the File>New Tab.
c) Here also you can click on the vacant area on the Tab bar and open new tabs. But as soon as this space is taken by the new tabs the user has to go back towards left to the ‘New Tab’ button. This totally breaks the flow. They could have easily put the button to the right of the open tabs, like IE7 which would solve this problem.

Firefox: a)File> New Tab along with keyboard shortcut Ctrl + T. But it goes below the Ctrl + N option. I can’t understand why.
b)It does not have the tab bar by default. Only if you open the first tab in a window does the tab bar come. This hugely reduces discoverablity. People who may not know about tabs, may never come to know of it. Also there is not default button for new tab. User’s can customize and add it. Now how many people do actually customize?
c)Here also you can open a new tab by clicking on the vacant are on the tab bar. Again the same problem of having no vacant area as soon as 4-5 tabs are open.
The rest of this post will be posted in a few days. It will include rest of the ways of opening a page, i.e clicking on a link, right clicking etc..