MMMeeja

Wow, chalk up two successes for me with Google!

After complaining about a dialog in Google Reader, they fixed it a few months ago. Another Google annoyance was that I’d been seeing a lot of emails being marked spam in Gmail that I wanted in my inbox.

The problem was that all comments and submissions from the contact form get sent to my email account and, unfortunately, spammers have been trying to abuse these forms. Whilst I was happy for the spam comments to get filtered, a lot of legitimate stuff was being falsely marked as spam too.

GetSatisfaction.com Rocks

I set up a query on Get Satisfaction (a truly superb web application) and received some good advice, but none of it quite worked.

Then, what do you know? GMail added a new filter option, “Never Send It To Spam”. My wish was granted!

Props to Susan Beebe for alerting me to the addition, otherwise it might have passed me by completely.

So...

What should I ask the Google fairy for next? Any suggestions?

One of the first articles I wrote in my series of web design annoyances was a moan about Google Reader’s use of a Javascript alert to confirm whether you really want to mark all items as read. The nice folks on the developer team have fixed it!

Now, instead of the old Javascript alert, there is a nice HTML dialog and, best of all a checkbox to never see it again!

The “don’t ask me again” is accessible via the settings page too, so it will be consistent across your work and home PCs. Great stuff.

This was everything I asked for in my original rant - well done Google Reader team.

This is the second post of my “nice touches” series of natty little pieces of web application design that really impressed me.

Colour Lovers Pattern Editor

A cool article by Ann at SEO Smarty ended with a couple of links to sweet tools. One of which is the Colour Lovers Pattern Tool.

This tool is easy to use and built to a very high standard, as I’ve come to expect from Colour Lovers. It uses loads of AJAX and the loading indicator caught my eye - it is a beating heart!

Annoyingly, the site is too quick for me to get a screen grab on my ancient ibook, so you will have to see it for yourselves.

Many other sites that use AJAX (including this one) have a spinning indicator like the Firefox page loading icon, or an oscillating bar which is quite techie and clinical. The use of a beating heart is genius for several reasons:

• It fits right in with the Colour Lovers branding - they already use hearts for their favicon.
• Heartbeats are often found in computer hardware, telling you that a headless server is working or a router is configured OK.
• Even if you’re not a techie, you know that the beating heart means that something is “alive” and working.
• It made me smile during a busy day.

So there we have, the tiniest of design touches but pure gold!

This is the first in a series of (hopefully many) entries detailing design decisions that have really impressed me. It is a complement to the annoyances series, and it will be interesting to see whether I find more nice touches or more annoyances.

Knowing my personality, there’ll probably be more annoyances.

Facebook Status Entry

There are loads of well thought out user interface items, but their status update window is a great example of a change that is not intrusive.

Many months ago, Facebook switched from forcing everyone to use “is” at the start of their status texts, to allowing anything. This was a welcome change for many people, but many others were used to just clicking on the edit link and typing.

There was a danger that people would forget that “is” was no longer mandatory and their statuses would make little sense or appear neanderthal, like:
Andy disappointed in United’s poor performance

The solution was pretty clever and one that I think many designers would not have thought of - if the previous status began with “is”, then all words except “is” would be automatically selected, otherwise the entire status would be selected.

This is great, for many reasons:

1. It gives people time to adjust to the change.
2. It visually emphasises the new functionality.
3. The editing process is just the same as before - click and type.

The whole Facebook site is awash with great usability features like this, although some features seem deliberately hidden (preventing application spam, for instance) so I’m sure they will be appearing in this series later.