Facebook
Facebook’s “Are your friends already on Facebook?” option is a smart way to connect members of the site. No wonder other sites have been racing to implement similar features.
Ticketmaster
Anyone else finding captchas harder to solve these days?
Virgin America
Virgin America offers fares within the context of a week view so you can navigate easily forward or back to get a better deal.
Where We Live
Time offered this interesting look at population in America.
JetPens
JetPens makes it clear what you get from their Hi-Tec-C Pens.
Brenton
on 13 Sep 07Every time I click More. . . for this post, Safari for Windows crashes.
Fake Richard Branson
on 13 Sep 07Regarding Virgin America… you’re welcome.
At Virgin we’re always trying to do things with more style – Virgin style!
We’re even geek cool. And let’s face it, you know the real reason you all want to fly on my airline: fit birds!
Warm regards, Sir Dick
Gayle
on 13 Sep 07There are nearly 18 million people living in new york?
shudder
Shaun
on 13 Sep 07I get the captchas wrong half the time on the TicketBastard site. I think it’s an ADA thing. They want the captchas to be as difficult for sighted people to get correct as they are for blind people.
Simon Willison
on 13 Sep 07The Facebook thing isn’t a smart way of connecting members, it’s a horrible precedent that teaches users to be phished. Unfortunately that kind of feature is so prevalent now that you’d be foolish to launch a new social network without it, but from an ethical point of view it’s distinctly unpleasant.
Hopefully the fact that people are handing their passwords out all over the place will help encourage those e-mail providers to provide an API to allow people to export their contacts – better that than have them distribute their password to any site that asks for it and has a good enough design that people will trust it.
Marina @ Sufficient Thrust
on 13 Sep 07I echo earlier sentiments about Ticketmaster. Not to mention, nine times out of ten it won’t load an image at ALL and then gets mad when I try to refresh. Said frustrations have prevented me from two impulsive ticket purchases, which was better news for my bank account but probably not Ticketmaster’s intention :)
I thought those Jet Pens wrote horribly until I realized you re-sized the image. I’d suggest replacing your image with a cropped version of the original.
Dylan Bennett
on 13 Sep 07Regarding the Facebook feature above….
It amazes me that people are so willing to give out their e-mail login information to a 3rd party. If one of my friends came up to me and asked for my GMail account information, I sure as hell wouldn’t just hand it over, no matter what they said they were going to do with it. And that’s how I would react to someone I know and have met face to face and probably trust to a degree. But some random web site on the Internet? People are happy to hand over that info.
Weird.
Chris Fizik
on 13 Sep 07CAPTCHAs! I’ve started to use this for a captcha wherever I can (english only so far) http://recaptcha.net/
I think it looks great, and provides fairly good usability—the audio is a bonus too
Pazu
on 13 Sep 07Pilot Hi-Tec C pens are amazing, and it’s really brilliant how JetPens helps you choose the size and color for you.
Wilson Miner
on 13 Sep 07The Facebook “click the wrong button and spam all your friends” feature is something I wish more people would think carefully about before they race to implement. Beyond the bad security precedents Simon pointed out, it’s just unpleasant and embarrassing to get through the process and realize that by clicking “Continue” you just spammed everyone in your buddy list or your address book.
ML
on 13 Sep 07The Facebook “click the wrong button and spam all your friends” feature is something I wish more people would think carefully about before they race to implement.
Maybe the best solution is to offer the feature but with a clear warning about what it does so unwanted spamming doesn’t occur.
Nathan
on 13 Sep 07I agree, I notice more and more on Facebook that I have to be super careful because I don’t want to accidently spam my friends.
I experienced it with the friend finder, and with numerous apps.
Michael Zuschlag
on 13 Sep 07Time: I was hoping you could rotate it. That would be impressive. Compared to a conventional 2D map with shade-coding of population, this 3D map with height-coding of population makes it easier to see the remarkable concentration around urban areas, but otherwise it’s hard to compare areas or read the map details for many areas, so it’s not the solution for everything.
That annoying animation is not the solution for anything. And if you’re going to number something, then number it. Don’t hide the numbers until mouseover.
Martin
on 13 Sep 07Why do you have to select your mail provider when you already have to enter your email address? You can deduct that from the address.
The Jet Pens one is a nice idea until you realise they don’t help much.
You need color calibration to really judge the slightly different hues and you need a display resolution independent rendering of the example writings so judge the tip-width examples.
Nice idea, only works for “look how many different options there are”.
carlivar
on 13 Sep 07Argh, it bugs me when sites ask for my Yahoo username and password when they could do it so much more cleanly with this:
http://developer.yahoo.com/auth/
I’m not sure if Yahoo Mail or Address Book or both are checked. Unfortunately there’s no API for Address Book (yet) but if they are scraping email from Yahoo Mail it could be so much cleaner with BBAuth and the Mail API.
Mike
on 13 Sep 07@Brenton
Anytime I try to do anything with Safari for Windows, it crashes.
Glenn
on 13 Sep 07Why did Time put New Jersey in North Carolina?
Chad Burt
on 13 Sep 07Hawaiian Airlines (http://hawaiianair.com) has had that same “week view” for a while now, and I actually think their design is much more readable.
anon
on 13 Sep 07Interesting that Facebook requests username/password in order to scrape other sites but doesn’t allow the same to it.
Jens Alfke
on 13 Sep 07Are you nuts? What Facebook et al are doing is horrible. No reputable site should ever ask you to enter the password for a different unrelated site.
Facebook may not be abusing this, but other sites certainly are. One called “Quechup” has been generating a shitstorm lately for spamming invites to everyone in your address book – with emails that claim to come from you – as soon as you give them your email password. I found out about this when a technical mailing list I’m on got one of these spams, after someone on the list signed up with Quechup.
Again, I’m not saying Facebook is going to spam. But making this practice seem legit makes people more vulnerable to being abused by it.
Chad
on 14 Sep 07I’m still embarrassed about spamming my entire address book when signing up for Facebook a couple of months ago…
Captchas suck. Period.
Tomahawk
on 14 Sep 07Yelp does a good job of asking you first before sending invites to all your contacts that it discovers.
jos
on 14 Sep 07The virgin view is cool, but I still like the grid from Delta more. At Delta, you get a clean grid of departures and return flights, showing the price for each combination.
Nicolás Sanguinetti
on 14 Sep 07Almost all captchas suck, yeah. But there are some great ones out there.
Nils
on 14 Sep 07As for airlines providing good tools to find low fares, nobody even comes close to this from Norwegian in my opinion:
You simply choose your departure and destination city, month, and it display two calendars each showing the lowest possible fare for that segment for that day.
Ben
on 14 Sep 072CRDC4V (?)
Josh Walsh
on 17 Sep 07I recently blogged about the problem of Captcha’s. Why do developers think it’s ok to make their life easier by making their customers lives more difficult?
http://www.designinginteractive.com/2007/09/16/how-to-make-captcha-usable/
I’d love to hear more opinions on usability and captchas.
Adam Roth
on 18 Sep 07On a side note—I just flew from SFO to JFK via Virgin. Whenever I have the chance, I will always fly them from now on. Easily the best airline experience I have ever had.
Jake McKee
on 19 Sep 07So here’s my question about captchas…
Are they really THAT easy to hack the clear ones that we have to start using ones like the one in the post? Seriously asking here: are the spammers using tools that really can fish out a captcha code from something that is easy for a human to read?
If so, I suppose I can understand the move to make captchas so horrendous, but if the only way to make captchas “work” is to make them incredibly, ridiculously difficult to read, sounds like it’s time for a new technology to combat spam.
This discussion is closed.