Does Posterous have usability issues?
I was thrilled to get a compliment on my Gen X Nurse post from Jennifer, who writes an excellent Generation X blog, but one thing about it troubled me. She writes:
"This post is anonymous. As best I can tell, it's not even linked to a specific blog."Now, it's very obvious to me that if you can either click on "PixelRN" at the top of the page or click on the on the "Back to blog" link, and see who this blog belongs to. I even link to my Linkedin profile from the sidebar. So I'm far from what you'd call anonymous. But even though I say it's obvious, I'm not trying to be snarky or imply that Jennifer should have been able to find my info. Far from it. I see it as a fault of posterous. My philosophy on usability comes from the web design classic "Don't Make Me Think," by Steve Krug. What I learned from Krug is that you should never ever assume that something about your blog or website is obvious and easy to your readers, just because it's obvious to you. It's funny - You would thing the minimalism of posterous would create great usability, but maybe it's just too minimalist. Maybe people look at a single posterous post and just see a blank piece of paper with a few paragraphs on it. Fortunately posterous just launched theme and customization abilities this week, so maybe that will help.
2 comments
Sep 21, 2009
NurseJoc said...
Where did you hear about posterous? I've never heard of it before... It looks awesome! If I wasn't all snuggled in at my current location, I would certainly make "an account" here. Neato.
Sep 23, 2009
Garry Tan said...
Try Ginza or Dakhar or Paramaibo as themes -- those all have more info on the sidebar for posts.
