As del.icio.us as a giant, steaming turd
I often dislike the interfaces that I’m forced to use. Banking sites are about the highest on my list of horrid. The pain these things inflict.
However, today I got a new jolt. Clicked on my handy del.icio.us shortcut in Firefox and was greeted by a bizarre interface. Not to worry, I powered on, since of course, the reason I use del.icio.us in the first place is because it was super quick and easy to add a bookmark. Quick is no longer in the vocabulary for del.icio.us. Instead of simply typing a few characters, hitting <tab> and being done with it, I now have to arrow in this stupid drop-down? Amazed, I started taking a closer look at the unwelcome intruder in my nice browse + bookmark flow.
The lame new auto-complete behavior is a breaker for me. However, it’s hard to say if that’s the worst of the UI redesign. The 3-option choice for the main list display goes from bad to worse to horrid. Is the date, in washed out grey, really the most important piece of info that I need to see in my normal scan from left-to-right? I can barely scan any of the options quickly for the information I need to help me select a link. And where did my nice big entry field go for typing in a tag? Oh, there it is, camouflaged in that bar at the top of the list. Don’t really want me to use that, huh?
I could go on, but what’s the use. The amazing thing to me is that someone, somewhere thought this was a good idea. Have these idiots never heard of Alan Cooper, IxD, the rich body of books describing why you don’t design interfaces like this? Harsh? Damn, right. Horrid.
7 Responses to “As del.icio.us as a giant, steaming turd”
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August 1st, 2008 at 02:33 PM
Agreed!
The tagging got screwed up. You can apparently right-arrow to auto-complete on a selected tag.. but it’s nowhere near as smooth as it used to be.
August 1st, 2008 at 08:35 PM
thank goodness the firefox plugin still works!
August 1st, 2008 at 09:24 PM
Hey Brian, sorry to hear this is causing you pain.
I don’t know if you’re a Firefox user, but the delicous Firefox addon is really quite nice
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3615
You can use your regular Cmd+D to create a bookmark and have it bring up a nice interface for tagging that bookmark and automatically sending it to delicous.
It’s really easy to dial back the interface so it doesn’t affect the Firefox chrome at all. I was never a delicious fan until I could use it without it getting in my way whatsoever.
August 2nd, 2008 at 02:17 PM
Contrary to those who recommend the firefox add-on, I think it’s a total overkill and bloat not really needed for such a simple thask as submitting a bookmark to delicious server.
And the new site looks very busy and complicated too. Yes, I can live with it and can probably adjust my habits, but is definitely not as simple and elegant as it was.
August 2nd, 2008 at 02:58 PM
Thanks for the suggestions, guys. I tried the FF plugin a while ago, but disliked it for the same reasons as Vladimir mentioned.
I actually emailed the creator of del.icio.us and asked him to make us a new one. Fat chance, I suppose. I’ll probably not be using del.icio.us in the future. Hopefully I’ll be able to scrape all my bookmarks before they break that, too.
August 10th, 2008 at 10:25 PM
Just to let you know, I just noticed tab completion has been fixed, fortunately.
October 18th, 2008 at 01:54 PM
Hey Brian,
I totally agree with you.One thing I dont understand is the most frequent thing you do on bookmarking site is, Post a new one. When I first encountered this new UI I had to search for a while to find a small link on right to do this frequent thing. Another bad thing is while posting new bookmark it takes too many clicks to do that. I mean why cant they let us do it on home page itself with ajax. New design is a total mess.
Brian, thanks for those IxD and cooper links. I think they can also get some really good tips from Paul Graham’s essay on design http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html.