‘No Data’ – Elegant first-time experiences

I am trying out Alice.com and came across the “Budgeting” section. I enjoy the way they give me a flavor of what to expect from the section even though I am too new to have any data available. It is nice that they don’t assume that I buy 5,000 bars of soap each year because I have placed one order in the last 2 days.

 

What I like about this solution:

1. I get to see the benefits of the feature
2. We get to know each other:
   1. It doesn’t start making assumptions with very limited data. The danger of such assumption: It makes it clear that you don’t know me. Personal financial management sites make this assumption a lot. They start making recommendations even though they only know one month of my spending habits. I’d rather a process where we get to know each other a bit.

 

WebToolbar – 10 Useful Web Application Interface Techniques | How-To | Smashing Magazine

More and more applications these days are migrating to the Web. Without platform constraints or installation requirements, the software-as-a-service model looks very attractive. Web application interface design is, at its core, Web design; however, its focus is mainly on function. To compete with desktop applications, Web apps must offer simple, intuitive and responsive user interfaces that let their users get things done with less effort and time.

StumbleUpon WebToolbar – 10 Useful Web Application Interface Techniques | How-To | Smashing Magazine.

Yay multi-select and compound widgets!! Realtor.com enhanced a thing

Realtor.com gets what we (my wife and I) are looking for in a home search site. The “Saved Homes” and clear emphasis on the pictures are stellar additions. The redesign was nice. My wife and I have been trolling realtor.com for the past…6ish months. Mostly my wife driving and me watching over her shoulder asking “now why did you click on that?”… then her grumbling a bit.

This time she was delighted by a minor, but helpful, enhancement. Obviously the big redesign was not the end of their new features, which is nice to see. The multi-select for the surrounding towns is a big upgrade from simply choosing a radius and rolling the dice. For certain price ranges just choosing a circle can really create some noise.

What I noticed:

1. You still have the radius feature. Good if you want it.
2. I can ignore the radio buttons and just start clicking away at the towns.
3. The sort is a nice feature. The distance gave us a sense of how far we wanted to scroll before just starting a new search.
4. The trick with multi-select: where do you display the results? I think Realtor.com made a smart choice. The results are accessible on mouseOver. That was all we needed. The real results are in the main area of the screen anyway.
   
5. They could put some indication of how many results are in each town for your query to let you know whether or not it’s even worth clicking, but I only came up with that after thinking about it for a while (which can be a dangerous thing for an interaction designer to do).

So… I dig it. I also dig compound widgets… oh and I also like the tiny arrow-like design element on top of the widget. No doubt what I am going to affect.