Metaphor/Picture/RIA Silliness
The Viking Penguin Bookclub has promise as an idea: a publisher curates its offerings, supports it with a blog, and allows users to do book club like activities around it. It starts out with a nice highlights/selections interaction:
(On a design note, I started out liking the entry note: tab key-accessible entry fields, with good coloring. But it kind of fell apart. For the second field, seen above, I forgot what field I was entering, and without a label, discovered that my fingers are used to entering passwords after the name, not email. I was also bummed when the tab-accessible state pull-down, didn’t support up and down arrows or first letter.) Starts out promising, highlighting three books that you wouldn’t find on the bestseller list and emerging authors.
But then, it got stupid:
This is an slightly shrunken image of a browsable bookshelf and, I fear, the future that I will be facing in Flash design meetings. These titles, with the exception of the (excellent translation of) Anna Karenina and (somewhat overrated) Collapse are unbrowsable. When you rollover the book cover, you still get precious little information:
I still can’t make out what the book is.
I can’t tell if the interface above is “pictures are always superior to text” or “recreational of physical reality always rocks users”, but I know that, as a CD/CD manager, I’ll have to suit up and deal with a lot of sad, silly, stupid, sucky interface ideas like this.
Link found via Konigi.