Removing usability barriers

April 28th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under

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favorite_me_logo5.png

I wanted to just to recount a small piece of wisdom from one of Joel Spolsky’s books. I have been fiddling all day with favorite.me and one thing became obvious, that there was a ‘barrier’ that was stopping people using the site easily. Joel in his book devotes a whole chapter to the topic of barriers. In general terms this is anything that stops your customers from using/buying your software.

I quickly noticed that people were not adding favorites because the site redirected them to Technorati, then expected them to hit a button, then return back to the site. This was not happening and with good reason, it was not simple enough. So the solution was to put Technorati within a iFrame thus they never leave the site.

So a lesson learnt, things can always be made simpler.

And lastly a big thanks to the first 12 who have signed up to use the site.

There Are 9 Responses So Far. »

  1. Comment by Geoff on 28 April 2007:

    Hey Nick, looks like an interesting site with some great potential! Looking forward to see how it works out.

  2. Comment by Douglas Karr on 28 April 2007:

    You bet, Nick! Thanks so much for the invitation!

  3. Comment by Kevin on 28 April 2007:

    It’s an interesting idea idea you have here, and one that could probably be expanded upon to encourage reciprocation on almost any site with similar community features. I suspect you’re already considering adding other services.

    One problem I see with the current implementation is the need to manually confirm favorites. Not only is it an extra step in the process, there’s also a disincentive to do so. Whenever I confirm someone who has favorited me, I move further down the list. If I ignore my pending confirmations, I actually benefit by staying at the top of the list.

    Why not handle the confirmation of favorites within the application? It seems like it would be fairly simple (though perhaps bandwidth intensive). It wouldn’t have to be done instantaneously, though. At some regular interval, you grab the OPML files from Technorati of every user who has recently favorited blogs via your site, and confirm that the blogs in question are listed in the OPML file.

    That way you’d eliminate the need for manual confirmations, and keep everyone honest. What do you think?

  4. Comment by Kevin on 28 April 2007:

    Sorry for the double comment - I forgot the mention:

    When you open the Technorati fave add page in the iframe, it looks like you’re opening: http://technorati.com/faves/TechFinder?add=someblog.com
    As a result, “TechFinder” is displayed on the page, and after the user clicks the “add to favorites” button, the confirmation page displays your favorites.

    It still works, and the correct user name is displayed at the very top of the page, but seeing “TechFinder’s Favorites” on the confirmation page is likely to give some users pause. I know I did a double-take.

    I think you’d avoid that by pointing the iframe to http://technorati.com/faves?add=someblog.com instead.

  5. Comment by nick on 28 April 2007:

    Firstly, thanks Kevin! I doubt I would have spotted that, it’s fixed now.

    Yes, I have considered other services, (Digg, del.icio.us, etc..) and I have a lot of ideas of how they would all work from one single user profile, so people could build up a network. I need to think it through what added value I would be giving beyond all the other social networking sites.

    The layout, as you have probably noticed has ‘Service’ in the banner, which was setup initially so you could have ‘technorati.favorite.me.uk’, ‘digg.favorite.me.uk’,.. and so on. But I wanted to get the Technorati part up quickly to see everyone’s reaction.

    Automated confirmation was also in my thoughts, and as peoples list of favorites gets longer they are less and less likely to bother verifying them correctly. I agree that bandwidth could become an issue, this is not currently on a very big server (may have to change…) and It only supports (yuk, PHP 4) rather than 5, plus a whole host of other limitations, but moving it onto dedicated would require me to start putting advertising etc. which I will only do if it is a success.

  6. Comment by hh on 29 April 2007:

    hi, thanks for the mention. Good site it is…

  7. Comment by sabro on 30 April 2007:

    Hi thanks for adding my blog into ur techno favs and i added ur blog and feel free in visiting my blog

  8. Comment by esofthub on 6 May 2007:

    I appreciate the invite Kevin. I hope others are find the tool useful, too.

  9. Comment by esofthub on 6 May 2007:

    I appreciate the invite Nick, not Kevin. (Sorry about that). I was reading the comments and I had Kevin…dangit. I hope others are find the tool useful, too.

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