Tag Archives: web

iTunes 8 (from the apple.com website)

This post is off of a twitter exchange I had with greenlagirl (who runs that awesome greenlagirl website).  While it’s inefficient (among other things) that iTunes currently doesn’t have streaming of its online content, a little research told me that it might not be this way for long.  Engadget.com, off a CNET posting, noted in February 2009 that this might be the wave of the iTunes future.   It makes sense after all that iTunes would adopt streaming (evenutally), what with netflix streaming and hulu.com‘s popularity.  My friend Julius remarked that he had recently caught up on his tv shows (while in a sick stupor) and it had almost made him think to cancel his cable (before remembering that it didn’t carry some cable shows).

Screenshot: Downtown News Article

I had an impromptu interview this week with Ryan Vaillancourt of Downtown News about Twitter.  His article “All the News That’s Fit to Tweet” is now up, and a couple of my points about twitter were mentioned.  Great article for those who want to learn more about twitter or wondering if they should sign up.

Downtown News Article – All the News that’s Fit to Tweet

-cct

I kind of hesitated writing “efficient” and “facebook” next to each other, but there are a few changes to facebook I have liked (and I’m kind tired of being a ‘negative nancy’ – where does that phrase come from? all the nancy’s i know aren’t negative – ’cause I’m generally pretty chipper).  The thing that striked me recently  that I liked was when I created an event listing.

Well…

When I finished creating an event.  The process of creating the event itself is quite annoying.  As I do work for an event-related website, I’m a big fan of “add event/create your event” buttons and links.  But wait this was supposed to be positive…

Screenshot: Facebook Sidebar (4/07/09)

Now added to my “Inefficient” Web Commentary* series is Facebook.  Facebook recently underwent a design change that caused quite the uproar with its users (not that it stops them from using the service, but like the current theme, we do somehow seem okay with living life with a marginal amount of dysfunction and a healthy dose of hope – or ability to complain).   In any case, this series will just be about things I think would make Facebook work more efficiently.  We will start with something I noted today about the Home Page.

Lately I’ve been bothered by inefficient user interfaces (perhaps it’s just a theme lately given my “dysfunction function” post previously).  My job is web-based and I understand – to a degree – that some things are hard to change and takes some time to program.  But format and text are perhaps some of the easiest things we can offer to the user.

My first example in this series of posts will be business e-letters.  Letters that have important information, but don’t easily convey to the user exactly what s/he wants to know are inefficient and confusing.  An electronic billing statement is a great example for variability in bad and good design.