Ramkumar's Log

UI Clutter

I swear looking at Google Reader again almost gave me a headache. For an RSS reader, the level of noise on the page is unbelievable. No wonder there have been a number of attempts to de-clutter it. Amazing how much difference good presentation and design can make. Love you Feedly.

A practical boarding pass redesign

timoni:

Improving the air travel experience is something of a passion of mine, so when I saw Tyler Thompson’s boarding pass redesign, I was intrigued. His article is well-thought-out and provoking, but unfortunately his redesigns don’t address a lot of the practical issues that airline travelers and airlines have to deal with.

Tim Morgan discussed some of the obvious shortcomings in his summary here, and after talking with both him and James Yu I’ve taken a first pass at a practical boarding pass redesign. (Edit: I’ve also discussed another use case here.)

Really well written post, re-thinking the airline boarding pass. Be sure to click through and read related posts/comments as well.

Snap Shots are annoying when they’re everywhere

Yes, it’s about those little link previews you can have on your site. Here’s where you get them from. But wait…don’t. Or at least be careful how you use them.

1. The site previews are too small to be useful. They list down some examples for audio, video and pictures. It might work for audio, but something tells me I’d prefer a bigger embedded versions of flickr photos or youtube videos.
2. Also, I’m not sure if embedding videos or content inside a ‘snap shot’ will get them noticed or viewed.
3. If I see interesting links, I usually open new tabs and check them later. But Snap Shots brings up an annoying pseudo pop-up, which blocks out the content and breaks continuity when reading.
4. They can get redundant sometimes and that’s when they get even more annoying, like on this page. There is no need to have a ‘snap shot’ for the Get Started link. If people want to sign up, they’ll click it anyway. Otherwise they won’t. What’s the point of having a little pop up, which is also too small to be of any use in the first place?

To be fair, there are some examples where snap shots are useful. They include showing stock prices, celebrity info or highlighting a product’s amazon page. In those cases, it works very well. Quick little snippets of information which are still very readable in the little preview box. More like good-to-know metadata. For things I won’t need to click in the first place. Techcrunch has a nice way of handling this. You only get a preview if you hover your mouse over the little snap shot icon next to the text links.

Just don’t snapshot-ize every link on your site.