Comments on: Zooomr Popup Icons

By: yanz

yanz — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 01:15:06 +0000

I’m from zooomr’s official blog and just found my photos here that tag “evening”.
I say “thank you” for choosing my photos up on zooomr screenshot ,although it happened accidentally:)
Anyway, interesting talks here for hoover-over icons.
I agree with Andy for adding displaying short sentences automatically for tips, say, like clips on the top of “Gmail” and “tutorials/learn more” on the bottom of “Gmail”.

By: Andy Kant

Andy Kant — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 22:12:44 +0000

To everyone that is lamenting the lack of text next to icons…have you ever heard of a tooltip? If that’s not enough, add a help/tutorial page somewhere to explain the features.

By: Scott Schiller

Scott Schiller — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 16:36:18 +0000

The icons are useful, but I can see them being difficult to target (with a mouse click) for some folks given the size (16×16 pixels or less?)

They have strictly informational value (public/private status, popularity/rating for example) and the interaction adds to this, but I wouldn’t want it to be the only way to get to that information or modify attributes as I think some people might miss it entirely.

By: JD

JD — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 13:44:39 +0000

Zooomr who?

By: dclagoa

dclagoa — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 12:57:59 +0000

Absolutely, trackbacks work like a charm. It comes handy when you stumble upon 500+ views on one of your photos…. :D I’m a zooomr user since last November or so, and i must say i’m quite impressed with all the features, especially with the geotaging/lightmap. And they are constantly adding new ones. I truly recommend trying zoomr, it’s free after all…

By: Morgan Roderick

Morgan Roderick — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 12:56:25 +0000

Michael, I agree … for more experienced users, most of the icons should be quite obvious, and a nice little addition. Those buttons are not essential to get real use from Zoomr. On the site I am developing for a client, they insist on this type of icons, even though it’s the users primary means of interaction with the data. Not cool.

I guess I’ve just gotten a bit allergic to them, especially when people actually hide the _primary_ controls from the user, when they should make them 200px tall and blinking red! (joke).

By: Michael Mahemoff

Michael Mahemoff — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 10:42:43 +0000

Morgan, maybe it’s a matter of taste, but especially for these miniature icons, I prefer suppressing any text until the hover happens. If you open up the image, you’ll have more explicit controls as well, but for these redundant controls, is there any harm in relying on users to stumble upon them? Icons can be harder to understand initially, but they’re less obtrusive. Also, more experienced users recognise icons faster than text.

dclagoa, I think you just highlighted another popular zoomr feature – trackbacks!!!

By: dclagoa

dclagoa — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 10:02:55 +0000

Hey, thanks for linking my photo :)
I’ll never have guessed that it could be an example for anything.

By: Morgan Roderick

Morgan Roderick — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 09:00:16 +0000

Very eye catching indeed … and that’s the whole problem of doing stuff like this. It’s eye-candy, or webworld bling, if you like. From a usability / accessibility / whateverbility perspective, these kinds of “controls” give the user very few clues to what’s going on. You’d have to accidentally hover the picture, and after that, you have to figure out what the icons / pictrograms actually mean.

Best bit is … I am implementing popup icon-based controls on a site for a client right now … and the client just won’t take my advice of at least supplementing them with text.