Blogs

Under the banner of token moves to re-connect with customers, last week Starbucks launched a website (My Starbucks Idea dot com) to encourage fanatics to lobby for new directions that the coffee mogul should consider in an effort to convey topics ranging from product based ideas to social responsibility. The site design is pretty slick (of course) and generally usable. I signed up to give it a spin with particular interest in the interaction of discussion threads and to vote for the Joe that wants to see Starbucks to serve 100% fair trade product (can’t argue with that idea). I would like to see some top level thoughts from Starbucks for each catrgory, rather than just a silo for Social Responsibility. I’d like to know what that means to them as a company and thoughts they’ve put into it, for example.

Good effort on their part. I think we can all agree that they’re an easy target and it’s only a matter of time until gets polluted with bitching and ranting like every other general public community site but they’ve had some incredible traffic in just about a week of going live. It’ll be interesting to see how the moderation unfolds, if any at all.

To my surprise this morning I stumbled upon the new UI for LinkedIn. My first thought was “oh…. so this is what might happen as a result of putting Facebook and Flickr in a blender.” While it sure is slick in a “web2.0-ey” portal kinda way, I can’t get on the bus and agree that the new design is terribly usable.

Andre and I were briefly chatting about the font treatment in terms of it’s difficulty to distinguish content amongst the sea of blue. In the same respect, the content headers suffer the same fate and I’m really quite surprised that a third color wasn’t utilized in anticipation of the site being difficult to browse for content. Granted, the old UI wasn’t the best design in history but it sure was straightforward to use. The interaction implemented in the new left nav is nice as are the drag & drop organization of panels, but then again why can’t I overcome the “People You May Know” panel? Strange that a decision was made to “give me control, but not total control.”

The section headers are a bit of a question mark too. All of the top level content sections, Profile, Contacts, Inbox & Groups, have that familiar blue header treatment (where have I seen that recently?), yet the home page lacks the same treatment. C’mon guys!!

Kudos to the folks at LinkedIn for taking a leap of faith with the new UI but I would have expected a bit more from them in terms of UX design. AS I noted above, the new interaction elements are a nice addition, but I’d still like to see some changes. Please comment, tell me I’m crazy. I’d love to chat about it….