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Filed under: usability

What's missing from Piictu

I have been playing with Piictu for a few days now and I must say I am liking it. You can't really compare it to instagram, picplz or path but it has something about it - a different approach that I think is interesting. The idea of sorting piics (how they call pics and pic-replies) by topics/headlines in so called streams feels like groups that everyone can follow and add their pics to. I still want to point out a few things I am missing, mainly usability issues and some features that would make the overall experience a lot better. 

But first some screenshots:

(download)

Now, some things that don't feel right to me:

  • tapping on stream "buttons" results in frustration, cause nothing happens - this should bring up a list of those streams
  • the activity stream won't let you tap on an activity to get to that user or the picture they liked (uservoice vote)
  • new activities are indicated by a nice green numbertag on the lower right profile icon when you launch the app. you have to tap here and then tap on the upper right icon to get to the new activites. one tap too much.
  • why not share who liked someones piics by being able to doubletap the heart icon or something similar?

And things I am missing:

  • search for exisiting streams. I guess there are dozens or hundreds of duplicates already. (uservoice vote)
  • search for users (uservoice vote)
  • share piics on twitter or facebook later. not only when uploading them to piictu (uservoice vote)
  • add piics to multiple streams without having to upload them again
  • tagging with hashtags would be nice
  • push notifications (for all kinds of new activities) (uservoice vote for likes)
  • what about comments? too much to ask maybe :) (uservoice vote)
  • you can't see a date/time of the uploads

 

 

Why ‘Ok’ Buttons in Dialog Boxes Work Best on the Right - UX Movement

But­ton place­ment is impor­tant, but remem­ber to also pay atten­tion to the visual weight and labels you give your but­tons. All of these design aspects come into play when users process dia­log boxes. Now that you under­stand the rea­sons why ‘Ok’ but­tons work best on the right, you’ll have some­thing more to refer to when fig­ur­ing out but­ton place­ment than the flimsy plat­form con­sis­tency argument.

Twitter Postings: Iterative Design (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

Text is a UI

It's a common mistake to think that only full-fledged graphical user interfaces count as interaction design and deserve usability attention. As our earlier research has shown, URLs and email both contribute strongly to the Internet user experience and thus require close attention to usability to enhance the profitability of a company's Internet efforts.

In fact, the shorter it is, the more important it is to design text for usability.

Some true words in here, even though i think you shouldn't spend too long thinking about your single tweets. For business okay, it's important to do so to get the best chance people will see and click, but still... i'd compare it to the subject of a newsletter. People will open it if they are interested and the subject caught their eye. Really important is WHEN you send/tweet it, i think.