eewBay

My first eBay purchase because my phone stopped working recently.

Why is eBay so ugly and why is the user interaction in almost every aspect of their site so archaic. It is a slow and ugly interface which is inconsistent and often breaks a standard browser view size. In terms of interaction the number of times pages have to be reloaded is much higher than could be necessary, not just in the main use of the service but also in the preferences and many of the other pages a user may commonly see. Preferences are often not great in web services but in the case of eBay it is as though they have tried really hard to make them especially bad.

I do not get why this is the case. They are a large company with a lot of money and a lot of engineers, why is it not better?

Rant over.

iCar - Thinking Agian

Soumitri has started blogging about making an iCar again. We had talked about this project a while back and done a few things for a competition along the lines of an iCar. The idea being worked with at the time is as pictured.

Since then I have become a little less stupid and realised more about what is really needed in an iCar. I in fact think this project is quite fun an interesting so I am going to try to create some kind of solution. I think the approach that I am going to start with is to start to get an idea of what makes a design Apples'. There is quite a lot of literature on this but for now I will just make a cursory list.

1. An obvious reaction to the norms of an industry or expected experience - I think Apple often tries to make the quintessential product of a sector. iCar should be the quintessential car.
2. Anthropomorphic - The user experience should parse logically to all users.
3. Intuitive - New users should have little or no trouble understanding what is expected of them
4. High Quality Experience - Where quality is not possible, design to remove the need for quality (or the perceived lack of quality) is important.
5. No buttons - Specific mechanical interfaces only, as much as possible or none what so ever.
6. Important controlls are really easy to get to. The things one would want to can usually be done with no digging in the interface.
7. Manufacturing is invisible.

So. Please add more things or ideas in comments or link to articles etc. that might be interesting for this project. Soumitri linked to an article on this matter but I think they writer is not completely right. I would love to see more info if anyone has found interesting stuff.

Persistence of Vision with Tag Clouds and Whatever

I was just thinking, setting stronger standards in where, for instance, a specific tag is found on a blog post or whatever item we are talking about is could make a nice difference to workflow. I was thinking specifically in the context of Highrise in which contacts have tags referencing their importance and I thought if it was possible to do something like put common tags in the same relative place per contact it would be a lot easier to quickly analyse the list. 

I don't actually use Highrise but I think this kind of interface optimisation would be useful in a lot of contexts. 

I wonder if there is a way to implement such a thing in Blogger.