I read about NORG.com, a kind of local Digg, at TechCrunch and wanted to check out this site. I’ve found two usability flaws, the one that drove my attention first was that each story title has a number next to it but it is difficult to guess what that number is for if you don’t know what the site is about.

Second usability problem is that it’s not totally clear the way they rate news. How this happens? No information at the About page. Also, users looking at the Top Stories ranking could be a bit confused, logically the story with more votes is at the top, but it is not clear to me that the number next to the title is the number of votes. Maybe their interface could be improved.

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Disclaimer: with this kind of article I want to point out usability and interface problems some sites could have. Please do not take this as an attack, take it as a free advice. I would like to make clear that this design problems could happen for many reasons, including lack of time or money.

Popularity clouds (or tag clouds) are a way to show your audience what’s hot in your site. As a concept it has been around for some time and there is nothing new here. The could is made by hot tags your users have been using, the bigger the tag is displayed, the hotter the topic.

A good example is Flickr, the photo sharing website. They have the “Popular Tags” section on the Explore menu. This shows that the tag cloud is not a secondary feature on Flickr and might be something very popular that users like to use to discover popular photos.

A whole section for the tags…

The Flickr tag cloud…

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Disclaimer: with this kind of article I want to point out usability and interface problems some sites could have. Please do not take this as an attack, take it as a free advice. I would like to make clear that this design problems could happen for many reasons, including lack of time or money.

The main charts are “Recently Listened Tracks”, “Top Artists This Week” and “Top Artists Overall”. Information is combined with artists’ pictures, the design in general is very cool:

Although I love this site I have found two usability problems. One is that for some charts some of the information is like hidden, for example, in the chart below is difficult to see the arrows indicating if the artist moved up or down on the ranking.

The second problem, that you can see on the same picture, is that the charts are updated from time to time, once a week or so. In my opinion, most users would expect to see this information updated all the time, or at least to have the option of getting “The last 7 days” or “The last week”. Probably to get the maximum of the charts in your site you have to keep them updated, so the users will come more often.

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Disclaimer: with this kind of article I want to point out usability and interface problems some sites could have. Please do not take this as an attack, take it as a free advice. I would like to make clear that this design problems could happen for many reasons, including lack of time or money.

The New York Times organizes and presents the most popular articles in a neat way. They also add a small description below each title (e.g. “Articles most frequently linked to by bloggers on the Web”). What it’s important but missing at nyt.com is the time range, it might be not very clear for many users that this page is presenting the most populars for this day.

Digg, knows better the importance of the time range settings:

This time the BBC News site messed up, giving users to many choices and making a simple feature something complicated to understand. Here, the BBC shows a traffic monitor that tells users how busy the site is. Does anyone care? Also, the mos popular list moves all the time, it gets automatically updated on every minute. Is that necessary?

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Disclaimer: with this kind of article I want to point out usability and interface problems some sites could have. Please do not take this as an attack, take it as a free advice. I would like to make clear that this design problems could happen for many reasons, including lack of time or money.