Blog 13: Interface and navigation

Blog 13
Interface and navigation

Flickr:
Let me just start by saying that I don’t really care for Flickr. I understand how it can be nice for some though from a usability perspective I find it very tedious to navigate through an individual album. Unlike other photo sharing services Flickr for the average user wishing to share photos with family members or friends makes it hard to “flip” through an album. What Flickr does excel at however is the ability to sort together the communities group of photos so that people searching for specific photos can find similar shots. This happens in a few different ways. The main way is through tagging photos. A user who uploads a photo can tag a photo with different keywords that correspond to the subject of the photo. Since computers can’t yet identify what is in a photo these keywords are all the photo has when it comes to searching. The drawback here is that a photo is only as good as its keywords. If I am searching for photos containing the terms “football”, the results won’t include pictures that were only tagged as “49ers”. This leaves a large human element prone to both error and a lack of time and thoroughness. The other way pictures can be sorted are into groups and sets. This is a cousin of the album concept and allows for a photo to be contained in an unlimited number of sets which share a common interest, flowers or airplanes for example.

In recent years the human element of having to tag photos manually is being replaced by computerized elements in a couple ways. The first such way is the idea of a geotagging photos with the location of where the picture was taken. By hooking up a GPS receiver to a camera a photo can be tagged with the exact time and location of the picture. In Flickr this concept has been incorporated and photo that are geotagged appear on a map search where a user can enter an address and see photos taken around that location and even search for specific tags of photos taken around the same location. Another computerized tool that is now available is the ability to automatically sort photos by color. This is more practical if you are looking to set the mood for a web page and want a photo with a certain tone. Another Web site that I found takes the concepts of sorting photos by colors even further by allowing you to search for multiple colors in a photo. http://labs.ideeinc.com/multicolr/?1.

The other Web sites:
I thought the idea of the red button Web site was intriguing though lacked purpose. Sure it was a fun story though there was only one path to follow. It was clever how it wrapped back around at the end, though I wasn’t so intrigued that I had to go back and do it all again.

The “Don’t Shoot the Puppy” Web site reminded by of the Impossible Quiz, another similar flash game. However I found that the DStP game to be much more stupid as there was little thought involved, just lots of patience as you waited for the dumb puppy to bounce off the screen and not get shot.

Finally I was really drawn to the concept of Dontclick.it though I found that it had some shortcoming in the overall concept. First, what is wrong with the click anyways? You don’t just move your hand to the corner of a page in a book for it to turn, you have to pick it up and flip it. To me there is nothing wrong with clicking in the first place. Secondly, the largest problem I had was that it was too easy to lose your place because you try to readjust your hand on the mouse and the cursor all of a sudden jumps to another menu that you never intended to move to.