MMMeeja

Blern is pretty cool, it’s a web-page recommendation tool that attempts to learn from your RSS subscriptions, social bookmarks etc. to provide you with articles that are likely to interest you. I’ve only just signed up and so far it thinks I have an unhealthy interest in subversion, but that’s OK because, compared to most people, I do.

So I got my email of my daily recommendations from Blern with four out of ten posts that covered version control systems (not a problem, I realise I still have to train it) and one post caught my eye. Jim Priest has posted a great article on SVN that I clicked through, read it and wanted to bookmark it for later in del.icio.us.

This was Blern’s first triumph! An article they had recommended that I wanted to read, then wanted to keep and share. Go Blern!

But Wait, It’s Wrapped In A Frame!

I don’t want to bookmark Blern’s recommendation, I want the recommended page itself.

This is the kind of trick that was used to build a “sticky site” in the 1990s and resulted in the kind of bloated portal pages that we still see at Yahoo today. Luckily, as a Mozilla Firefox user, I could right-click and select This Frame -> View Only This Frame to get to the page I wanted. Still very annoying, though.

There Are Lots Of Fixes...

The reason for the frame is obvious - Blern want to know what I like and dislike. So they put some buttons at the top of every page with voting options. I want to give them this information, otherwise they cannot improve their recommendations for me.

Using an IFRAME is not the way to do it. The typical Blern user must be web-savvy since they need OPML files and/or del.icio.us/FriendFeed data to get any hope of having a good guess at recommendations in the first few weeks. This is a demographic that is willing to experiment, it’s willing to give away personal data - it’s GOLD!.

Two obvious alternatives to the IFRAME are a Firefox plugin and cross-browser bookmarklets. Either of these could also be clicked to let Blern know when I like something that wasn’t recommended by them. More information makes for better predictions.

Blern knows which links I have clicked through a link on their email (or my Blern page) and from that it could infer that I like the title and snippet. If I do not click the like or dislike buttons, it could ask me next time - but only for a few items, please! This kind of feedback shows concern for the user.

Blern Learns

The tagline for the website is “Blern learns”, I hope they do. I want them to succeed. They seem to be aiming for the right results without being evil, and that’s exactly what the semantic web needs right now - results for the user.

Digg is pretty cool, and I’ve been a subscriber to their RSS feed for a long time. The feed always had one problem that I was prepared to put up with, but recently they have changed it to make me seek an alternative.

Every entry in Digg’s RSS feed used to point to their own page, making you click another link to get to the page/story they were promoting. I put up with this (just) becuase there were a handful of benefits:

• The Digg page has some useful comments
• If the dugg site went down, the comments would usually point to a mirror
• Digg showed me an advert (or nine, very slowly) which paid their bills

Then the change happended.

The straw that broke the camel’s back.

They made the Digg story page open a new bowser window. 100% of FAIL! Nobody messes with my browser. Digg, You are out!

An Alternative - Feedit

Luckily, there’s another service that is ready to provide Digg’s content without making readers pay through their blood pressure - Feedit.com provide a handy alternative to Digg’s RSS feed that takes you directly to the site being promoted. I am much happier and the number of clicks required to get where I want has been halved.

Of course, some of the benefits of the original feed have been lost - immediate access to comments etc. but the time saved across a hundred or more items per day is significant. Feedit’s feed includes links to the Digg page, comments and submitter so the information is readily available without much effort anyway.

Conclusion

Seemingly small inconveniences can annoy your readers and it’s easy for them to find an alternative. Designers and bloggers should always strive to improve the user experience and doing the opposite for the sake of a potential improvement in revenue (I assume that was Digg’s motivation) is always wrong.

Welcome to the first of a new series covering the little annoying features that crop up in web pages and applications. No doubt this will be a long running series, but it will be complemented by a series of “nice touch” entries covering those moments when I’ve been pleasantly surprised.

With this inaugural entry, I’m striking fearlessly at the heart of The Man...

Google Reader

Google Reader is a great tool. It’s my RSS reader of choice, but recently they added a feature that I instantly hated.

I subscribe to a great many feeds and typically get about 700 new items every day. A great many of these (probably 70%) are duplicates obviously irrelevant to me so I skip over them, get to the bottom of the unread items and hit “Mark all as read”.

There are loads of other ways to use the tool but this is the one that works for me. It saves me a ton of time and saves me from information overload. Scan, click, scan, click, read, comment, scan, click, read, done!

Then about a fortnight ago, this dialog popped up for the first time. I went to mark all as read and switch tabs but the dialog got in the way. I clicked yes and then went to the settings to try and turn it off - no joy there.

The next couple of times I used Google Reader, it didn’t appear. “Great,” I thought “it must have been an experimental feature that’s been ditched”.

Then it was back again. Then it was gone.

From my experiments, it seems that the warning is shown when you mark more than 50 items as read. Why 50? Who knows.

I cannot find any setting that will change the threshold, or turn off the warning permanently.

Inconsistency Is The Usability Killer

It is the inconsistency that makes the dialog annoying. I have no idea how many unread items I’ll be marking when I click the button. If there were few enough to count, the dialog would not appear!

It's hard to overestimate just how much consistency helps people to learn and use a wide variety of programs - Joel Spolsky

In web pages, consistency is key for your readers, just as it is vital in application design.

The use of a javascript alert is annoying too - it takes over the browser and prevents me from switching tabs.

A Better Solution?

I can see why the engineers have added this feature, but it’s just not right. A couple of changes could make it work for me:

1. Switch from a javascript alert to a GWT dialog box, then I can still use my other tabs.
2. Allow me to set the threshold. Fifty items is too few for me, it’s probably way too many for others. Let me choose.

I bet you have loads of suggestions for this series on annoyances, leave a comment and I might agree with you.