Very reacquainted...

After three months of getting reacquainted with 43T, I’ve been jotting down notes of the good, the bad, and the ugly:

The Good: Kudos to the Robots

• New image: clean, elegant, and hierarchically well structured.
• Dragging goals: very nice improvement over the previous version.
• New calendar as a recap of past activity by year/month: very cool
• The “How I Did It” section provides a useful place of ideas and how-to steps.
• 43 Places had a nice revamping, and it’s visually very appealing.
• 43Pl: The activity panel is very cool, and it encourages you to improve.

The Bad: Room for improvement

• When you click to “see all entries” of a goal, it brings you back to 1-10. Why not directly go to 11-20 if you already clicked the arrow?
• When you enlarge a photo, sometimes it goes offscreen, and you can’t get out of it unless you back your browser.
• The Neighborhood Watch could have better navigation: once you report or defend a user, it would be better to bring you back to the NW list. Why bring you back to the user if you already took the time to evaluate him/her?
• Too much white space (especially the upper right-hand corner, below your n things, zeitgeist): as much as white space adds to the elegance and beauty of the site, it leads to too much scrolling.
• Too much scrolling: everywhere I constantly find myself scrolling and scrolling. I’d like a better way of navigation, but I really have no ideas now, and maybe the Robots are already working on it.
• The “recent goals accomplished” section was taken off the main page. Somehow, that little section made you aware of the recent successes of other 43Ters. You can still check it in the “I’ve done” tab, but I doubt anyone uses that one much.
• Double posts: There’s a glitch in Safari that takes forever to post something, only to finally come to a screen that tells you that Safari can’t contact the page. So you navigate back and press the “post” button just to find that your original post was indeed posted, and that you just reposted it.
• Cheers: a similar glitch goes on when giving cheers, so it turns it into a cumbersome task, instead of a cheerful joy. I’m guessing Safari does go to the “page of cheers” but then has trouble getting back to the entry/comment/goal cheered. Is it maybe a programming thingy that could be fixed or is it a Safari issue?
• The “How I Did It” section is very static in most users —even more so than their goals!— plus it adds to the burden of loading the page, plus more scrolling. Suggestion: make it a tab next to the “I’ve done n things” tab.
• Also, the “How I Did It” section has different a formatting method than regular entries.
• It would be great to have a preference in the account settings to have “post to blog” as the default when you write an entry. I have to click the pop-up menu every time I post an entry. I’d like to save myself this step.
• Also, a minor thing, when you add a new entry, it would be nice to have the cursor already flickering in the title field, instead of having to click in it.
• I find the “Today’s Tags” in Zeitgeist to be visually more appealing than the ones in our profiles; of course, everyone may think otherwise.
• I miss cheering photos.
• The search feature could be better. When you search for two or more words, the search does not necessarily bring you the most relevant to the top. You may have to browse for several pages before finding something. My guess is this is one of the reasons which has caused so many very similar goals.
• 43Pl: “Browse” and “Neighborhoods” should be separated from the tags and have a more prominent position like before. At first, I was put off that the hierarchy seemed to be gone, and it took me a while to find these two buttons which provide for the hierarchy but are hidden with the rest of the tags.
• 43Pl: you can’t see who thinks a place is worth it or not, like in 43T
• 43Pl: it no longer shows locals
• 43Pl: the entries no longer show the date it was posted
• All-consuming and Lists of Bests seem to have undergone no improvements :( I know that 43T is by far the most used of the sites, but maybe there’s a reason for it. Those other sites could be nicely improved, and I’m sure the user rate would go up. Unless you have goals on 43T of “visit all continents” or “read all the works of x author”, I find it redundant to have goals here like “visit Italy” or “read x book”, when you can go directly to those sites and not only have them as a goal, but you can keep the reviews in one place and easier for everyone to use.
• Lists of Bests logs you out when you choose one of your lists. You have to re-log in to access your lists and navigate again.
• All-Consuming: besides relative dates (i.e. 2 years ago), it would be good to also use real dates like in 43T.
• All-Consuming: posts that have ratings are missing the titles of what they’re rating.

The Ugly: Sad to see it happened

• Photos missing from posts, comments: there used to be a directory where you could post goal photos. It was removed visually from the site, but you could still access it to post photos and link to them (useful in entries with more than one photo). Seems that they have physically removed the folder along with all the photos in there.
• Normal photos missing, too: also photos included the regular way, seem to have gone away. Not sure what the cause to this was.
• In my blog, many photo links are broken, even ones that do appear on 43T.
• It was sad to see many past 43Ters who deleted their profile along with all their entries —and mine if they belonged to their entry. But they left a bunch of deleted comments within my entries :(
• 43Pl: they changed the links, so now my blog does not link back to 43Pl.
• 43Pl: an entry I made has a photo that is not mine (or of the place for that matter), and the rest of my photos were all erased :(

Whew! This sure was lengthy, but by no means exclusive. I really did it for myself: still not sure if to commit more or to commit less to the site. I know we tend to be more critical than praiseful. In my case, I hope to have done constructive criticism. I remember there used to be an “ideas” site which the robots removed, maybe because we bombarded them with much more than they anticipated or could handle :P

The bottom line is that I do love this site and its community, and I can certainly live with the minor flaws it has, but when photos and entries —that you’ve taken the time to post— disappear from your history, it can drive users away.

See more progress on: Get reacquainted with 43 Things and my list