Pointlessness

[gothick]

Hmm. My utterly pointless Facebook application now has seventeen users. People are strange.

In other news, I managed to escape my Greek aural test last night because the teacher was ill. Knowing me, this means I'll now slack off until next Monday and try to do last-minute revision again. Ho hum.

Oh, and speaking of pointlessness, I just added an RSS feed of new sentences to Unique Sentence. There's really something to be said for pointless web sites that do actually do something. It's great for learning web design/programming, because everything's real and live and you can even have a user community — but nobody's going to complain too hard if you break things...

Comments

[ahnlak.livejournal.com]

I think I broke your pointless Facebook application!

I tried moving it into the left hand side of my profile, expecting it to re-orient itself, and it didn't. So I clicked on it and resellected my toothbrush and now it doesn't appear in my profile at all.

Still in my list of apps, though (the little icons), and when I click on _that_ it reappears, asking me to select my colour. I click on _that_ and it tells me I already have the application!!

Either it or I is confused.

[gothick-matt.livejournal.com]

Odd. So, presumably it was working when it was in the right-hand side of your profile, and showing you a toothbrush and everything? It should switch fine over to the left.

I'll have a look tonight.

Can you do me a favour and take a screenshot of it in its state on the wide column of your profile?

And are you definitely clicking on the button to change the colour rather than the toothbrush? There are two links on the profile item; one is a link on the toothbrush which goes to the application page, one is a link to change the colour. I suppose it may be a browser bug; maybe I've got some ropey HTML in there which is working in Safari but not in other things... What browser are you using?

Note to self: Don't link to the application page if the user's looking at their own profile; if they've already has the application installed it just leads to confusion...

[ahnlak.livejournal.com]

Aha! Now it seems to be playing somewhat better - it does now flip round to (the top of) a vertical toothbrush. It's still a touch confusing because I just have a "? what colour is your toothbrush", although it's rendering in the right colour.

However, yes I was clicking on the toothbrush itself rather than the change button. That's why it was taking me to the "you already have this application" page.

Part of my confusion is that Facebook has quietly started pruning my profile page (I'm guessing down to the number of apps rather than yours specifically) so it "helpfully" hides the last app behind a "show more..." thing. Gits.

[gothick-matt.livejournal.com]

Ah, okay, I think you've run into a few problems at once, most of which are already on my list of things to sort out:

1) The toothbrush pictures are always "What colour is your toothbrush?", with a big question-mark on the icon for the narrow column. This doesn't really make things clear. What I should probably do is have different graphics with "My Toothbrush is..." or whatever. You can easily change the graphic depending on who's looking, using FBML, so I can make it a lot clearer than it is.

2) I'll make it so that both the image and the "change" button link to the "change" screen if you're looking at your own profile/already have the application installed.

3) It's possible you hit some kind of transient timeout when moving the toothbrush, which maybe meant that you didn't get the grapic you should have got. I'll see if there's anything more graceful I can do if that happens...

[ahnlak.livejournal.com]

Bet you just love users like me :)

[gothick-matt.livejournal.com]

Absolutely; you prove that all the little things I've had in the back of my mind as probably being confusing _are_ actually confusing :) It means I'm thinking correctly about my user experience, at least!

[adronus.livejournal.com]

Make that 18 users. I got it...just because you made it.

Nerd alert.