A dull but ultimately satisfying day, unpacking and shelving six boxes of books that have been waiting since the end of June. And then tidying up some scans of slides from Canada. Much, much duller. Waiting for my machine to deal with a 70Mb file is worse by far than watching paint dry, and makes a mockery of using Preview in Photoshop to judge by eye the impact of any fiddling. Still, the job’s done, and there’s a new set on Flickr to prove it. (More will have to wait.)
Flickr is impressive, no doubt, but there’s one thing that annoys the hell out of me: re-ordering. You have to upload in reverse chronological order if you want the Photostream to appear in the correct order. And re-ordering the images in a set is a right pain, dragging each one but having to stay within the confines of the silly little scrolling window. I realize why it is hard — because the image is given its unique Flickr number as it is uploaded — but how hard would it be to enable decent control over the order of photos in the Photostream?
Add your own comment
I’m not a Flickr member, so I can’t see what it is you’re talking about, but I design things like this for a living for a Giant Internet Service Provider I imagine you’ve heard of, so I can take a stab at it.
The guys who designed the interface were the guys who built the interface. Coders, not designers. They aren’t trained or even particularly interested in Human Factors Engineering, and they didn’t approach the design with sympathy for you or your needs in mind. They had an assignment — build a photo-upload interface. In the fulfillment of this brief they solved a few very large problems and failed to solve a number of small-but-significant ones — reordering images, for example. They built an interface that worked well for its primary purpose, but then they had to retrofit a lot of bad solutions when the flaws started appearing in the original design. Probably there was a time crunch too. There always is.
These problems, they reason, will be solved in Version Two. Which, of course, will never exist.
In short, they didn’t think ahead very well, didn’t diagram out interactivity, didn’t puzzle over usability issues before they started banging out a prototype. Happens all the time.
Also, they assume you’re 25 years old, have been using computers since you were 8, and have the manual dexterity and acuity of vision of a 25-year-old Flash programmer. And the patience of a saint.