Archive for September, 2008

Facebook is trying hard to get users to user and like its new profile re-design.  I think one of the funniest new additions are little yellow stickies on all the new and non-obvious additions.  Kinda of a “we know you’ll miss this if we don’t tell you” approach to interface design.

I’m not sure how successful this will be with users.  In my case I’m mostly just clicking the x to get rid of these and non-obvious features will probably be lost on me or at least until Facebook changes something again.

A few weeks ago I wrote about my frustrations with the CIBC visa opt-out upgrade program.  Since then CIBC and I have parted ways, my Aeroplan Visa card was the last CIBC service I retained from them since openning a bank account with them as a child.   A few years ago I switched to Royal Bank after CIBC was unable re-issue me a bank card without me returning to Hamilton Ontario.  I am now free of all CIBC services…

Being with Royal Bank I thought it would be easiest if I just chose their Avion Infinite Visa.  It seemed similar enough to my CIBC card until it arrived in the mail a few weeks ago.  Royal Bank has decided to be the first bank to take ‘advantage’ of the new Visa chip and PIN option.  This is a system Visa has been using in Europe for years and it hads a PIN to Visa transactions similar to Interact payments in Canada.  Unfortunately it seems that while Royal Bank is ready, and maybe Visa is ready, vendors are not.    I was unable to order a Pizza, make purchases at BestBuy or even use it at the driver through.  With the exception of BestBuy ( where it took 20 mins for staff to figure out how to process a payment with a chip and PIN ) it seems that most vendors don’t support the new system.  In additional Royal Bank doesn’t actually send me a PIN.  Instead the card is essentially useless ( unless you want to talk to a RBC operator about every transaction ) until you visit an RBC branch and create your own PIN.  In anycase the Royal Bank Avion Infinite Visa with new Chip and PIN technology and I are no longer seeing each other.  Its been cut into little pieces as per instructions…

I’m now waiting for a TD Visa, which I’m assured is Visa Chip and PIN technology free, at least until 2011 when its mandatory and hopefully vendors will know how to handle them.  One unfortunate surprise around the TD Visa was the TD won’t actually send the card to my house.  Instead I have to pick it up at a branch.  I suspect this is so they can check my ID and TD bank seems to have really good branch hours with most branches open 8am to 8pm.  I’m hoping their Visa will be the winner…

New Facebook Application List

Facebook has changed the Application List again.  Instead of having the Applications list accessible in the header they have moved access to the chat bar.  The presentation looks alot like the Microsoft Start bar but I’m not really sure its an improvement.  I think alot of people pretty much ignore the chat bar ( I haven’t been on FB chat in months ) so its not an ideal location.

There seems to be a common trend with the Facebook re-design to combine items of low value ( ie Chat ) with items of high value ( ie Application navigation ).  We saw the same thing with the new wall where mini-feed items ( low value ) were combined with wall items ( high value ).   I’m not a huge fan of this paradigm and at minimum I think it creates confusion for users.  Areas where they could previously ignore are now much more relevent.

The other big concern I have with this design is the size and the location of the bookmark option.  Instead of being in the top ( where booking is done in every browser on the planet ) its now down at the bottom an relatively small.  Bookmarking is very important for applications going forward because its how users will remember to interact with applications.  I hope Facebook reconsiders this design location or provides applications with a “Bookmark Application” FBML object to make it easier for users.

It looks like Facebook is reacting to user feedback about how hard it is to find and navigate applications in the new profile design.  In response last week they changed the application list so that the “browse all applications” actually connected you to all your applications.  This week they’ve changed the application drop-down so that it displays a shortened application list.  Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a way to configure which applications are displayed or easily get to any of your installed applications.

The other point of confusion with this design is the Facebook term change from “installed” application to “bookmarked” application.  I don’t think they’ve done a job of explaining to users how these terms are essentially the same but “bookmarked” applications don’t automatically install a profile box.  I’m  hoping Facebook introduces a better definition.

One my main frustrations with the new Facebook profile design has been the Application list.  The new design had a menu option entitled “All Appliations” that really only led to your bookmarked applications.  To make things even more confusing bookmarked applications were applications you ‘installed’ under the old profile.  Facebook has gone along way to improving this situation with a new application list that does show all applications:

The new list includes filers to display only bookmarked, profile or authorized applications.  This is a big improvment for the application list and it provide the user with a much better idea of how they are interacting with applications.

After trying the IE 8 Beta2 I thought it would be appropriote to talk about Chrome.  My first thoughts after reading the Google Comic was that it was going to be really fast and very unstable with the V8 engine.  My tests showed that its actually pretty stable ( about as stable as Safari or Opera ) but not really fast.  The only site I think it actually handles faster is Gmail.  Facebook is definitely slower, which is also a heavy Javascript site.  If v8 was really gonna shine it would be on Facebook.  I’m not sure if Chrome is just optimized for Gmail or if there are components of Gmail preloaded in Chrome.  It would be kinda smart of Google do to that, IE8 has benefited from Windows pre-loading stuff for years.

One area which was a great surprise was the developer tools.  Its has the equivalent of Firebug built-in ( Mircosoft, where is yours? ) and it includes a javascript console.  Its going to be great to debug/develop Javascript environments but unfortunately I don’t really see it challenging IE or even Firefox.  I think Firefox is still a better browser experience and the reports are that v3.1 is going to be even faster for Javascript processing.

As it stands it might be a browser I leave open as kind of my Gmail client but I’m not going to invest alot of time it switching over to it.