Design vs Art Blog

I happened to try MyBlogLog, a site bought some time ago by Yahoo!. MyBlogLog is a social community for bloggers and blog readers, they are the ones making one of those widgets that tells you who was reading your blog.

The good thing: in the last weeks MyBlogLog was having problems with the login but this was recently fixed. In my opinion is very cool to be able to login with the Yahoo! ID, after all, we are already using that to login into many services (as Yahoo! becomes bigger and buys more and more companies).

The bad thing: in my opinion MyBlogLog has a few design and usability problems to resolve. For example completing my profile was quite hard task with a not very good looking form:

I have noticed in many parts of the site that they use some terminology that not everybody understands. That would be not that bad is they would include some kind of online help, but they don’t. Is opt-in and opt-out clear to everybody?

They also try to explain the users things that they probably don’t want to know about, using maybe too technical terminology:

“To opt-out of data collection from MyBlogLog, click on the button below. Please note that when you do so, our system will set the following cookie: “mbl_sid=Nxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx” in your browser. The capital letter N simply means “do not collect my data”.”

Another thing you should keep in mind when designing your site is to try to explain what the different sections are for. In this example, I clicked on My Account > Services, but MyBlogLog does not explain why they want my other services’ accounts or in which way filling this information will be beneficial to me.

In general, I like MyBlogLog, they have a cool service and I added their widget to my blog. On the other side, I think they could improve their service from the interface and usability point of view.

Disclaimer: with this kind of article I want to point out some usability and interface problems some sites could have. Please do not take this as an attack, take it as a free advice.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Have you ever been interested in your family tree? I have been using Geni, a free family tree builder that rocks, a “tool for understanding and staying in touch with your family”.

This family tree builder has a nice and clean design, it is easy to add relatives to your tree with all the personal information, including an email address that is going to be used to invite that person to your tree. Then, together, all the relatives can continue building that tree.

The tree itself has a nice design and easy to use navigation tools. The rest of the site is mostly navigated through tabs.

Geni also displays relatives sorted by location on a Google Map.

I like Geni but I have some negative critics. The site could have more integration with other services, for example, allowing me to link my flickr account to Geni. The site is only in English language, but, how many families now a days are based in only one country?

Another important thing is that Geni does not have an import/export feature right now, but they say that they are working on that, using GEDCOM files. Also, a mobile interface could have been nice.

At last but not least, I have seen that Geni has only ads provided by Google and most of them are from competitors. Someone in Geni should have a look on that.

Popularity: 23% [?]