Jyte usability could benefit from a clearer distinction between read and write modes (see claim page for explanation)
By
Jonathan Schofield
on July 05, 2007
To state the bleeding obvious, Jyte is a 2-way interface. You can view and read stuff (read mode), or you can vote, comment on content, give and remove cred, edit your own profile, etc (write mode).
1. In most cases, there is no page state change required to add info (write mode): either there is a form or button already present in the page, or you go to a new page - either way, it's obvious.
2. But there are instances such as managing cred when the page state changes, and the visual feedback provided in these situations is not as obvious as it could be.
The interface design could help make these distinctions clearer and thus make the site more usable. For example, a modified colour palette could help indicate a page state change and highlight the area within the page that now requires interaction. If colour were used in this way, it could easily be extended to the contexts in point 1 above for the sake of consistency. The one exception being the act of voting itself, which is so instantaneous that presenting it as entering 'write mode' would be overkill (though, even then colour could be carried through to the hover state).
Note, I'm not saying necessarily that colour is the sole way to do it - I'm merely using it as an easy example.
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Discussion (6)
As far as I'm concerned, Jyte is not sufficiently modal to warrant this much interface.
D'A
Why?
…bearing in mind that Jyte is destined to reach a far wider audience than the web-savvy early adopters that have gravitated towards it thus far?
I assume you mean "how". "Why" is a question for the designers.
Pretty much every page on Jyte is interactive in some way, so I can't think of it as being modal in the way you describe. If there's stuff to read, there's stuff to do. We *could* flag every page which can originate a data change as being a write-mode page, but that would flag every page and create no signal.
I consider this a feature; I'm quite unclear for the motivation underlying this claim, since it runs contrary to the user experience as I understand it.
D'A
Essentially, all I'm getting at is that the visual cues as to what one can do and, at times, is in the process of doing, could be made clearer. I'm not saying they're crap or deeply flawed, just that they could be better.
I think it's jsut time to redesign the relationships between the various functions available. Jyte has grown organically, and finding all teh current features is non-trivial.