Posted on 17/3/2009, 3:17 am, by Colin Charles, under
Usability,
Web.
Today I was listening to what is becoming my new favourite radio station, BFM 89.9, and I heard the Marketing Manager for Guinness (well, GAB Sdn Bhd) talking about a range of topics, from the sin tax on alcohol (2nd highest in the world, following Norway!) to what a big deal St. Patrick’s Day in Malaysia is (must be — GAB disgustingly pays bloggers to write about it). If you care to listen, BFM is all modern with the relevant blog/podcast. Two things come to mind.
St. Patrick’s Day Drunk Dial
Check out the St. Patrick’s Day Drunk Dial. Call the number anywhere between March 13 and 23, to win a prize even, for the best entry ;)
Why do I even mention the site? Because my colleague Dups, is one of the guys behind this. Check out his journal entries on this.
Guinness has a stupid website
I won’t link to what I consider silly, but Guinness Malaysia needs to think twice about their website.
One should think its sufficient to enter based on clicking “Yes, I am a non-Muslim aged 21 years and above”, but asking for the I.C. number? The I.C. being the Malaysian Identity Card is not something one should give away lightly. How do you know if the number isn’t cached? Isn’t stolen and used for other devious purposes?
I wonder how many people check out the site and freely give away their I.C. numbers. Probably far too many, that don’t know much about identity theft.
Posted on 24/9/2008, 12:44 pm, by Colin Charles, under
Usability.
From a UI perspective, Google got this right:
How thoughtful can you get? I mean, in a regular IM client, statuses mean next to nothing to many folk. They will still ping you anyway. Google’s interface actually tells you “You may be interrupting”. Smart.
Posted on 22/7/2008, 6:58 pm, by Colin Charles, under
MySQL,
Usability.
I don’t know about “me too” types of bug replies, but before everyone goes to the bug database and starts saying “me too”, “this affects me”, “please fix this ASAP”, “I won’t use MySQL 5.1 till this is fixed”, I wonder if this will cause more harm (i.e. more bug spam for the developer, and all those subscribed to it) than good.
It seems like the public Worklog interface gets this right – via voting. Having a count of those that have the same problems, even displayed via “stars”, is a much better interface, and shows urgency a lot better than “me too” posts.
Take one of my favourite worklogs – WL#148 (to implement engine independent foreign keys). Not only can you tag it, you can also comment on it (like a bug report), you can subscribe to it (watch it) and in the event you felt like a “me too”, you just login, and vote!
Lots of bug tracking systems have voting. I remember this being implemented on the OpenOffice.org system (IssueZilla) a few years back, and its definitely proven to be useful. Maybe this is a feature request, for our bugs system?