QTsaver - be click happy
Over the past months I've written a wee bit about usability, why design matters even in beta etc.
Today I came across QTsaver thanks to Emily Chang's eHub (is there anyone who is in to tech/web 2.0/current dev's that doesn't subscribe to Emily's feed?).
There's some room for improvement here! QTsaver is based on the API's from Google and Yahoo! and this "microcontent engine [...] extracts relevant multiple large chunks of microcontent from popular search engine sites."
The results are presented as one long page with ticked check boxes in front of each chunk of result content. The idea is that "When you're done removing all the results you don't find useful, click on the Save button. All the results you didn't hide will be saved in an editable format."
For this to be valuable, you have to be incredibly click happy.
I stopped counting and unchecking check boxes at 74, the other 40 or so didn't seem worth my time.
Granted, there are a few key words towards the left hand corner of the page that help cut down on the frantic clicking in your next search, but it still isn't an effective way of working.
Here are my two suggestions for improving QTsaver based on my first visit:
1) Let users tick the boxes that correspond to content they are interested in instead of unchecking.
2) When a user clicks a word in the "key word" list, let that trigger a refined search. Don't force users to hit "search" again. If you stick with it, move the search field and button to within the key word box.
I'd be curios to find out what the teams thinking was behind the functionality, the presentation of the results etc. I feel that there's potential in the idea, but the current implementation leaves me with quite a few doubts.
Today I came across QTsaver thanks to Emily Chang's eHub (is there anyone who is in to tech/web 2.0/current dev's that doesn't subscribe to Emily's feed?).
There's some room for improvement here! QTsaver is based on the API's from Google and Yahoo! and this "microcontent engine [...] extracts relevant multiple large chunks of microcontent from popular search engine sites."
The results are presented as one long page with ticked check boxes in front of each chunk of result content. The idea is that "When you're done removing all the results you don't find useful, click on the Save button. All the results you didn't hide will be saved in an editable format."
For this to be valuable, you have to be incredibly click happy.
I stopped counting and unchecking check boxes at 74, the other 40 or so didn't seem worth my time.
Granted, there are a few key words towards the left hand corner of the page that help cut down on the frantic clicking in your next search, but it still isn't an effective way of working.
Here are my two suggestions for improving QTsaver based on my first visit:
1) Let users tick the boxes that correspond to content they are interested in instead of unchecking.
2) When a user clicks a word in the "key word" list, let that trigger a refined search. Don't force users to hit "search" again. If you stick with it, move the search field and button to within the key word box.
I'd be curios to find out what the teams thinking was behind the functionality, the presentation of the results etc. I feel that there's potential in the idea, but the current implementation leaves me with quite a few doubts.
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