Ellen Beldner

Yesterday someone sent around a link to http://hotcaptcha.com, which selects images with the Am I Hot or Not API and asks users to choose the 3 of 9 pictures whose subjects are hot. Very cool idea, drawing on both biological and cultural expectations of attractiveness.

However, amongst my colleagues and some of my friends, we realized that we were all getting something like 100% accuracy for female photos, and 0% accuracy for male photos. I had orignally thought "gee, I'm 100% accurate on females and 0% on males, I wonder why?" My friends' verdict: it's a trick or a bug, and the male images aren't being selected properly for hotness. (For example, the writer of HotCaptcha had written the call to the Hot or Not API and forgotten to set a minimum rating threshold of, say, 9.)

My only way to find out was to get an API key and pull profiles myself.

My first attempts at doing this with AJAX failed, because I forgot that XMLHttp doesn't work across domains. Bleh. I switched to a PHP file() call, but it wasn't working. WTF. Struggled for a half hour.

Then I realized that I had been tormenting my function getProfiles() but had failed to actually call the function in my PHP script.

Sigh.

Posted by Ellen Beldner at 1:16 PM | Permalink

Less suck, more hot. We did a ton of usability testing of Base in the past few months, and this revised homepage came out of it. Goals were to make item types more visible, help users understand what base is, deemphasize search (to keep the focus on Base as place for uploading, not for searching) and help users make better choices about the right upload technology for them.

One of the things that I think makes this design work really well is the IA of the page. Users who come here are either brand new (never heard of Base), brand new but who have heard of Base (e.g. through a marketing email or similar), or are returning users who want to manage their items. I wanted to clearly draw users' attention to the first choice they have to make: how are they getting their stuff on to Base? This is a bit system-centric (how will a user know which technology to choose?) but it turned out in all the studies that we did that people did a good job of identifying the technology that would be suitable for their needs.

Everything that you need to do to get going is on the right: either sign in (for existing users) or click one of the giant iconed links to get started. The blue background draws further attention to the section and, along with the icons, helps balance the huge sea of blue links on the lefthand side of the page.

The left, in its turn, is the "learn more" part of the page. If you're not sure what Base is, you can focus mostly on the left -- browse a few item types, see which ones are popular and which ones are sort of randomly interesting, and get the couple lines of promo / marketing text. Some users really really want to investigate; some users want to jump right in and start playing around to figure it out. (I'm not sure if it has more to do with technology familiarity, age, or how much you need your stuff to show up on Google for your business to survive.)

There are still a few bugs, but those will get worked out soon. Official post on the Google Base blog.

Posted by Ellen Beldner at 8:21 PM | Permalink

Ann Richards died the other day. Salon's Broadsheet blog covered Richards' death with a list of 10 reasons why we already miss Ann Richards, from which the quote is excerpted.

Posted by Ellen Beldner at 5:37 PM | Permalink

Colleague: Do you think that A and B are playing good cop / bad cop with you?

Me: Maybe. But it's more like good cop / crazy cop. [Pause] And either way, it's better than it used to be, which was just plain old crazy cop.

Posted by Ellen Beldner at 2:44 PM | Permalink