Great way to spend a Saturday afternoon.
Good & Bad
Discussion assignment for my IA grad class this week was the classic “pick a good and bad website” topic (much less interesting than last week’s focus on DTDT). I feel like as a UX person I should have a list of examples on hand at all times — maybe I’ll start a Delicious set (or Diigo…if I ever get around to totally switching over now that the Delicious extinction crisis has subsided). Anyway, this is what I slapped together the past hour. Time to go clean and cook food for my birthday potluck :)
GOOD - Mint.com (someone else beat me to Tumblr)
Mint.com is a free online personal financial management tool by Intuit. After you set it up, it automatically pulls information from bank accounts, credit cards, investments, etc. and tracks transactions to help provide a holistic picture of your financial status and trends. It’s the source of the strange look I give my mom when she asks if I balance my checkbook.
It’s pretty good at automatically categorizing vendors as the data comes in, but makes it easy to customize categories and create cross-category tags to help organize and filter transactions. These labels also help identify trends and automatically suggest a monthly budget.
Interaction throughout the site is smooth, making it easy to drill down through or bubble up information with filters, tooltips, property trays, and interactive graphs. The use of visualizations to help convey trends and budgeting effortlessly on the user end is particularly excellent.
The only thing I don’t like is the overview page is cluttered with offers for related products (Intuit is probably best known for TurboTax, and it seems like they probably get money for referring people to investment and credit card companies). But offering such a great tool for free, I guess they have to make money somehow!
BAD - Sing365.com (and lyrics sites in general)
I often search Google to find lyrics of songs, and many lyrics sites are downright awful. Sing365 is one of the worse examples, with its overwhelming amount of ads - including Google text ads placed right above the page content which forces the user to scroll down a while to get to the content. A lot of these sites also produce pseudo pop-up ads when you first enter (and I’d assume real pop-ups if you don’t have a blocker).
Links related to the specific song (print, comment/review song, submit a correction, author bio, etc) are scattered around the page rather than being organized in some sort of toolbar.
Since I often enter lyrics sites via Google looking for a specific song, I think these sites would be well served to try to engage me further when I’m there instead of scaring me off with ads — as soon as I figure out what the words are I was looking for, I’m out of there…or occasionally I’ll click on another song listed for the artist. It would be neat if the page could present songs with similar lyrics, info about allusions that songs make, and other rich content like that in addition to the standard artist bio, recording/video, and comments section.
The alphabet across the top on Sing365 seems like an extremely poor choice in primary navigation; I think it’s highly unlikely that people would spend time browsing a list of artists’ names (not sorted by genre) to get to lyrics. It would be interesting to include some sort of faceted search that made it easy to browse through artists and genres.
