A big hurdle—and if you can solve this, you’re halfway there to having a well-designed and effective reputation system—is appropriately marrying the incentives that you offer your users to the appropriate set of goals that you have for your community. You want to be sure that you’re rewarding folks for behaving like good citizens, and not just rewarding them for no good reason. (Or for vague and misguided reasons like “to keep them engaged” or “so we can have a leaderboard.”)
Stikkit is a web app that allows you to enter notes freeform and the software tries to work out what it means. It’s an interesting approach, but what I like about it is that it’s not emphatic that it will always get it right. Rather, it tells you what it thinks you might means and allows you to correct it.
This seems like a good approach to fast data entry for many applications. Suck stuff in more as a quick-start to data entry, rather than thinking a system can get it 100% right all the time.
It’s sometimes tricky to know how to do the login and register dialogs on a site when you offer a Login and Register function in the header of every page.
Do you push to an intercept page where you have more room to do the full-blown register, or do you try to cram into into the small area at the top of the page.
The implementation of this functionality on the New York Times feels nice. It’s snappy and it pops the dialog over the current page, but is both well connected to the Login and Register functions, but distinct enough from the underlying page to make it lift of the page.
Fog Creek launched the Mac version of their remote support software Copilot. In the blog announcement, Joel Spolsky does 2 great things with the copy: 1) have fun with “cheap” and 2) explain the discount/special offer (“free on weekends”) in terms that make his company seem reasonable and nice.
“Today, the Copilot team released the Macintosh version of the OneClick feature, so all the Copilot goodness is available on Windows or Mac, or both (you can control Windows computers from Macs and vice versa). And it’s cheap, by which I mean, inexpensive—I don’t mean that you can just buy it two drinks and take it back to your apartment and expect to be taking a bubble bath with it—most people get the $19.95 unlimited plan; it’s even free on weekends when we have lots of unused bandwidth.”
It’s a great practice to spell out contact hours on a company website and expectations for when someone can contact you and how long the normal turnaround is for a response.
But timezones are often overlooked. Or if they are acknowledge, it’s just a qualifier (eg. 9am - 5pm AEST) and the person reading it has to do the work to translate it into their local time.
Iconfactory, makers of the Twitter client Twitterific, do a great job at being helpful with their contact times - showing the local time and if the office is currently open or closed.
We’ve faced or experienced this challenge before. We have a textbox and there’s a limited number of characters that can be entered.
Basic solution: put a little text hint next to the field (eg. “up to 500 characters”) and stop accepting characters once you get to max.
Better: Do the javascript countdown, so you know when you are getting close.
But, best: I love how Twitterific handles it on the iPhone. As you come near the limit, the countdown character count turns a warning colour. But once you hit the limit, you can keep typing. You can’t submit it and it’s clear you have gone over the edge, but it allows you to review the whole of the intended message to edit it down to the character limit. Better than the back-and-forth of deleting a few characters, adding some more, delete some more, add, delete…
REX’s online flight booking form is probably the worst I’ve used. At every turn it surprises with a new way to have a poor experience.
My favourite is this dialog that comes up to confirm you don’t want flight insurance. Mind you, you’ve already explicitly said you don’t, but they are just checking. And to continue with your booking and confirm that you don’t, you have to press Cancel. Yes, Cancel.
Hulu impressed with how they handled a stuff-up where they pulled episodes of a TV series without giving their users enough notice. Straight talk. Full responsibility. Sensible correction.
They’ve weaved straight, reasonable talk into their site dialogs too. Writing that sounds like it’s coming from someone you’d want to spend time with. You get the message below when you try to access their content from outside the US. It’s a great piece of copywriting. I particularly like how they make it personal with “Given the international background of the Hulu team, we have both a professional and personal interest in bringing Hulu to a global audience.” I believe you.
I’m a big fan of relative dates - such as displaying today’s date at “Today”, yesterday as “Yesterday” and the rest of the dates for the last 7 days by their names, such as “Monday”. Not always. But most of the time if you really think about how people will use and contextualise raw dates to understand them, that’s what they are doing in their heads. So why get them to do it, when it’s nice and easy for us to do it for them.
And that’s the broader principle here. Work out what someone will actually do with the information to make sense of it, and do that for them. Another example is disclosing your age on your resume. Most people will put their date of birth. I don’t care if you were born on 16 January 1971. I’m interested that you are 38.
Shorter durations matter too. My current gripe with the iPhone Twitter client Tweetie is that is displays tweet dates as “Wed 2/4 8:37 AM”, when “a moment ago” is so humane.
So bravo to Weather Underground for being relatives to weather (originally posted by 37signals. Makes so much sense.
PS: Printing a web page with relative dates can be a gotcha. If you are printing to file away (some people do), and then you go back to it 2 months later, “Today” is actually going to cause more work than “4 Feb 09”. But you can have your cake and eat it too. In the HTML, have both the relative and absolute date. Toggle them via CSS with display and print stylesheets. Magic.
