Mint Usability

Note: Also includes a reply to PC Magazine’s article “The Google vs. Apple War Begins“

It’s always sad how the big players don’t seem to realize that user experience and usability matters. Specially when you want to have user created content on your website. I just spent some minutes reading an article from PC Magazine and decided to comment about the speculations in the post. After scrolling some time downwards I eventually found the (quite easy to miss) “Add Your Comment” box:

Like the picture above would lead you to believe that you don’t actually need to register to post a comment, like in any clever web platform (there are other, better, ways of getting rid of the spam), so I happily typed down my reply and pressed post, only to bounce back from this:

Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot?! I still need to register, even though the form clearly said “Post”. So I let out a deep sigh, let my shoulders slump a bit and press “Create an Account”, here we go. And what do I find? A form long & complex enough (PC Magazine – Member Registration), and full of Dreaded Red Dots *, that it could be a registration form for a bank loan. Needless to say that all it took was few quick glances up and down the form, decide it’s not worth the effort and then just forget the whole thing.

One can only wonder how much more content and discussions there would be if the posting wouldn’t require a process equal to launching a nuclear missile (… Note to self: I hope that it’s not THAT easy, or rather more complicated than that), thus bringing more traffic and revenue for the magazine. Take heed PC Magazine. Take heed.

* Dreaded Red Dot means a field that is required for the registration. Usually not a good thing if you want to have a fluid user experience.

To those who still are interested, here is the reply I wanted to post

“I personally don’t think that this whole FCC commotion is specifically about the Google Voice app being pulled, rather than the fact that Apple just yanked a “random app” from the store and is making the developer to pay all of the refunds for the app, even the 30% part that they are taking from the transactions. In my books, FCC just wants to make clear what are the rules of the app store, so that developers might defend themselves when next time Apple decides to pull apps from the App Store and make the developer pay the refunds.

-Mikko Tikkanen”

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• Apple taking steps towards the dark side, hatred, anger
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• Is Apple becoming evil?
• Top 10 Usability highs of the Mac OS – Debunked
• Multitasking with iPhone OS 4 – Apple got it right!