StumbleUpon Has Severe Usability Flaws

.abelafonte — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 06:32:19 +0000

So, after hearing so much about it for more than a year now, I finally signed up for a StumbleUpon account. I haven’t really explored all that it has to offer, but I’m sure it’ll be as exciting as everyone says it is.

Looking forward to that.

In the meantime, I’m busy trying to find all of the usual buttons and features that one would expect to find on any website… But I CAN’T. It seems like they want to force the user to behave the way they want us to. Here are a few of my brief observations regarding how poor the usability is on StumbleUpon’s site:

If logging out is something users might want to do, they’re forced go to homepage and select “login” to get to the “logout” button. Shouldn’t this be on the ‘Preferences > Personal Information’ page?
But, If you’re using the toolbar and attempt to log out from the site, forget it! You have to log out using the toolbar.
Forced to download the Firefox toolbar to be able to change password. I signed up on Safari, so I was lost for a LONG time.
Toolbar offers to ‘enhance your browsing’ and the alert box disables the ‘close’ button… User is forced to click the tiny ‘No Thanks’ button at the bottom.
Can’t add friends easily. User is forced to migrate address books from other services as only option to add friends.
For some unknown reason they use dropdown menus for the birth date. Glad I wasn’t born any earlier, I’d still be scrolling.
What the heck is this? I have to rollover to find out what these icons mean…

That’s all that I’ve noticed so far.

Now, excuse me while I go stumble this posting.

Tab Through All Fields On Mac OS X

.abelafonte — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 05:46:27 +0000

There is a very small feature of Windows that I got accustomed to while I was stranded on a Dell back during 2003-2004. On a PC, you can tab through all fields in the interface and click with the space bar. A feature like that comes in handy when you’re a quick-key lover who doesn’t like to jump back and forth between the keys and the mouse(pad). But, what about on a Mac?

The image below is an example of a Windows alert that I could manipulate by simply tabbing to the checkbox and pressing the spacebar to select/deselect, then tab to the button option I prefer and select with spacebar once again.

To enable this awesomely useful feature in OS X, follow the steps below:

Go to System Preferences
Select ‘Keyboard & Mouse’
Click the ‘Keyboard Shortcuts’ tab
Choose ‘All Controls‘ under ‘Full keyboard access’ at the bottom

Voila! Now you can tab through input boxes, radio buttons and check boxes, etc in the Mac OS like you may already be used to doing in your web browser.

To disable, select ‘Text Boxes and Lists Only’ in the preferences. It may not stop immediately, though. Sometimes you have to hit Ctrl+F7 to get back to normal mode. (But why would you want to, silly!)

Usability – Belafonte Code

StumbleUpon Has Severe Usability Flaws

Tab Through All Fields On Mac OS X