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delicious usability

Posted on 11/8/08 by Felix Geisendörfer

Initially I was fairly unhappy with delicious's recent redesign. Why? Because they broke my most common usage case for their service:

I have a safari toolbar bookmark for "my delicious" that I invoke using Option+3. Then I hit Option+f to search my tags for something I want to look up. Once the tag I'm looking for is highlighted I press Option+1 to invoke my follow selected link bookmarklet (you can drag & drop this link into your safari toolbar). So without leaving my keyboard I used to be able to retrieve any information (link) I've archived at some point in time.

When their re-design came out I was incredibly frustrated to find out they broke this workflow by collapsing the list of tags one has per default. Only a couple days later this is fixed. I guess a lot of people had a workflow similar to this and complained. But the lesson we can learn from this is:

It is incredibly important to know how users interact with your application. Unfortunately we usually learn it the hard way ; )

-- Felix Geisendörfer aka the_undefined

PS: My Option+2 bookmarklet is "post to delicious" which I use a ton as well.

 

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Neil Crookes said on Aug 11, 2008:

What's your delicious username Felix? I wanna checkout your bookmarks ;-)

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