Ellen Beldner

Woohoo -- new design for the Google Base bulk upload dashboard! The old bulk upload dashboard was a 3-second one-off using our generic tabular data widget. Since most of our bulk uploaders have only a couple of files, the tabular format was overly busy and misused the screen real estate. The page was also getting messier as we added promos (for AdWords, Checkout, and some of the other inernal tools, like using FTP to submit your files).

These changes were some of the few we've made that didn't stem directly from usability research mandates. Rather, they're based on design principles and heuristics. We left most of the info architecture untouched. I suggested moving to the blurb style instead of the tabular format, and moved all the promos to the righthand side to hierarchize the information. The tabular format is almost totally useless for this page's main tasks: "What's the status of my file?" and "I need to update my file". Most users only have one bulk upload file: tabular data display is good for comparing across rows, and most people only have one (maybe two) rows. We have better error messages and links to help for specific item types.

And instead of the previous "upload" widget -- which has users select the file they are updating and then browse for the file -- we now make "upload" a function of each file. Throughout our system we present bulk upload files as granular objects, so it seems more appropriate to have "upload a new version" be an action on a particular file. (There aren't enough actions-per-object, I think, that it's necessary to have both object-verb and verb-object models embedded into the system.)

This is another example of where thorough programming and PMing really made the page. The engineer who implemented this did all of the logical conditions correctly: so when you update a file, we have extra text that warns you "This will erase all the items that you currently have and replace them with whatever's in your file." And it only shows up if you're updating a file, not when you're uploading for the first time.

Pironimo.net is a twiki installation that I deployed, customized, and maintain for a small community of friends (around 30 people). It began on another server in September 2002. Since then I've done about three major UI revs and one software upgrade.