90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

Has anyone else noticed how great Facebook image tagging is?

Granted, it is only for putting names to faces, but it’s incredibly quick to use (say 5 seconds per photo), and it’s really satisfying. Your friends see you’ve tagged them (the images appear in their news feed on their facebook homepage), and usually respond with a comment or by tagging some of your photos in return.

Compare this to Flickr where image tagging feels heavyweight, tiring and you get no quick payback for your effort.

Come on Flickr – you’ve dropped the ball on tagging. It should be a rapid, social and fun activity!

Douglas Karr pointed out that I should put my money where my mouth is and explain how it should be redesigned. Having given it some thought, I’ve realised this is a particularly tricky dialog box – the problem does not exist just at the level of the dialog box but more widely, for example:

• The keychain: what the hell is it? To a naive user this is a hairy concept.
• The security of your computer: What caused the application to update? Was the source trustworthy?
• The repercussions: what does the decision actually mean? What’s the worst that can happen? How can I recover from making the wrong decision?

I’ve also just realised that this has been blogged about elsewhere, with some great comment discussions. Read more here, here and here.

My working “solution” is shown here. It’s still fairly wrong but at least it’s more clearly worded and the button labels actually correspond to the question.

I welcome critical comments so feel free to get your knives out