Imagine this:
- A friend sends 30 people an email saying "Hey, BBQ at my place this weekend?".
- You open it up in gmail and click in the reply box.
- The full reply window displays itself you and you write your response: "Can't go this weekend - we have a wedding to go to."
- Hit send.
Until a couple of weeks ago, this email response would just go to your friend. If you wanted it to go to everyone, you would have to hit "Reply to all" and it would automatically CC everyone.
For some reason, gmail changed this, and it now defaults to "Reply to all". (This can be verified by playing with the "Older version" in gmail)
What's the problem? The problem is that when I accidentally discovered this, I let my friend know that Sara and I were engaged - something I hadn't let anyone else on the email list know. Is it a big deal? No. But it wasn't really how I was planning on letting them know.
I consider clicking the text entry box at the bottom of an email a shortcut, and arbitrarily changing shortcuts in programs to do almost-the-same-thing is very bad.
On the other hand - this is probably the way gmail should have been working from the beginning. The problem is that users get used to one behavior - and if that behavior changes, it should be made VERY clear.
It could have been a lot more embarrassing.
The standard "store locator" right now does exactly what it advertises: it finds stores. Probably near you. You get a big old list, and if you click one, you can view more information on it. It answers the question, "Where is the nearest X store?"
However, I think if someone really dug into what users really were looking for, I think the question would often be closer to: "Where is the nearest X store that I can get to right now?"
This is a subtle, but big difference.
Let's take the case of Bank of America. Banks are notorious for their strange hours; however each branch usually has one or two days a week that they are open late. Living near Boston, this means that at any given weekday evening at 4:55pm, there is probably one or two bank branches that I can get to before they close. (the ones that are open until 6pm...)
Right now, if I wanted to find that branch, I'd have to use the store locator and sift through every result until I found the one I was looking for. There are plenty that are open til 5pm, but those aren't very helpful to me. I gave them my address - they should be able to tell me the nearest branch that I can reasonably get to before it closes.
Due to my silly youtube video, I get a fair amount of youtube messages. When this happens, youtube send me an email which links me to a log in page. I'm supposed to type in my username and password and view the message.
Easy enough, right?
WRONG.
They screwed up their input focus-order somehow. What does this mean? I click "Log In". It asks me to type in my username, which I do. After this, I normally hit "tab", and type in my password. Unfortunately, when you hit tab in the username field, it brings you down to the "email address" field on the sign up form.
What does this mean? This means that if someone is sitting next to me while I'm logging in, and I act like I act on EVERY OTHER LOG IN SCREEN and typing in username, tab, password, enter - that person next to me will see my password in plain-text.
Well done youtube/google.
I know it's been said before, but while designing this blog I really tried to keep it as simple as possible.
Viewing and adding comments should be able to be done in-line (while viewing the main page). On other pages, I always found that when some bit of text suddenly appears and the whole page gets reorganized that I had to re-orient myself before I could continue reading the page. To prevent this I first make room for whatever is going to show up, and then fade it in. It takes about a second or so, but I think it's worth it. Any input/suggestions on this would be great.
Besides the comments, I have a hierarchical set of 'tags', that act as categories, with special cases for the dates.
(On an aside, another benefit of doing the ajax-style comments is that it hopefully will prevent spam-bots from coming and doing their thing. I'm not sure how well the spam-bots simulate javascript, and I'm pretty sure this isn't going to be popular enough for someone to spend the time and figure out what ajax calls I'm making, etc. We'll see.)