Archive for the ‘interface’ Category
UI Review: Ad Council on Global Warming
Notes on an ad I saw on the side of a muni bus this morning (See the original here):
The problem here with checkboxes is that the user is not required to select either of them. They could leave them both blank, or even check them both off (and what would that mean?). Given that the choices are mutually exclusive, radio buttons (or even a drop-down) would be more appropriate.
No Image Images
A more-or-less random sample of default profile images from across the web:
So many ways to say the same thing: I’m an actual human user of this site but I haven’t done the work necessary to differentiate my profile yet.
Why would I collect this list? I don’t know really. Something to do with how people are represented vs. how they choose to represent themselves online. For one thing I think it’s funny that the default profile photo is something that differentiates services from eachother visually, but it doesn’t differentiate between the users of a particular service at all. Is it possible to offer default photos that differentiate both? They would have to be stylistically similar enough to fall neatly into the visual feel of the rest of service, but also different enough from eachother to be usable as distinct visual indentifiers.
From another angle: Not everyone wants to use their actual photo for their profile on these services. Lots of people use one of the zillions of free avatar generators to create a distinct profile picture without being personally identifyable. The avatars are visually distinct from eachother individually, all derive from a shared set of visual motifs. See Yahoo Avatars (flat, hand-illustrated look) vs. Meez (3d, animated). Yahoo avatars look sorta like eachother, and Meez avatars sorta look like eachother by Meez avatars don’t look like Yahoo avatars.
From yet another angle: Instead of giving all profiles the same default image, some services vary it based on gender. For example see the Hi5 and Bebo default images listed above. Taking this a step further, you could vary the default image based on age or location. Actually, why not just generate a default image based entirely on what is known about the user, and have it evolve as more is known. For example you could make the profile photo become less and less saturated the longer the user goes without logging in, giving it the visual cue that this person is fading from the site.
The Shapes Project and VisualIDs come to mind.
There’s no point to this, I’m just rambling.
You know, if you really wanted to get users to customize their profiles sooner rather than later, you’d make the default image be goatse.
UPDATE- It occurred to me to make an all-purpose animated .gif out of these:
