UI Spotlight: Hints in Google Ad Manager
Guide the user in achieving their goals. Simple.
UI Spotlight: The recommend action on Times Online
I’ve recently been working on a large and content heavy site which has taken me all over the place looking at user interface designs and conventions established on similar sites. One interesting UI element I came across today was on the Times Online website.
As you can see from above there is a ‘Recommend?’ presented to the user on every article along with the usual comment count. My first feeling was that I wasn’t really sure what this would do if I clicked it and I’m pretty sure anyway else seeing it for the first time would feel the same way. Was a drop-down menu going to open up? a modal window perhaps? Nope, the text simply changed to ‘Recommended’ and the tick mark icon changed blue. Interesting.
Once you’ve recommended there is no way to take it back and it looks like this feature is quite underused – perhaps due to the unfamiliarity of it? Most of the articles that I looked at from today (26th January 2010) had pretty low numbers of recommendations compared to the amount comments (and, I expect, hits).
Still, it’s interesting data to collect but I wonder how useful it is when any statistics/analytics package will show you how popular a page is without having to get the user to do any work. Perhaps the recommendation data provides a better indication of the quality of an article as well as telling you which articles users are finding engaging.
Unify SBSettings Theme Released
I’m proud to say that Unify, my first SBSettings theme has been released. You should be able to find and install it from Cydia, Rock or even Icy (maybe?). Just search for ‘Unify SBSettings Theme‘.
Unify – An SBSettings Theme
If you haven’t heard of SBSettings before it’s a nice little app for Jailbroken iPhone’s from BigBoss that replaces BossPrefs to give you really quick access to a set of toggles to control various things on your iPhone like Bluetooh, Wifi, 3G, SSH etc. I’ve been using SBSettings since it came out but I haven’t yet managed to find a theme that looked really good and felt comfortable with the rest of the iPhone’s UI so this weekend I decided to make my own. It’s called Unify but I haven’t released it yet. If there is enough interest I’ll finish it off and get it into Cydia.