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Filip Mares


technically me

Filed under: usability

A Feature Request for GMail's Undo Send

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I've always been a fan of GMail's undo feature. I can't count the many times the feature has saved me from misspellings in an email, forgotten content and forgotten recipients. 

The other day i was sending something in an email to my friend who was sitting right next to me. Don't ask... My undo setting is maxed out to 30 seconds. We were both left staring at the screen as we got the message displayed in the screenshot. The waiting was excruciating. We didn't care about undoing anything in the email yet we were forced to wait for it to send.

Why is there no option next to 'Undo' and 'View message' for 'Just send it already!' ?

Rethinking the Google Chrome Pinned Tabs

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I am a big fan of the Google Chrome's 'Pin Tab' feature. I keep my GMail, Google Calendar and Tasks pinned as tabs all day long. My application switching has turned into tab switching. I cannot wait to get my first Chrome Notebook and finally live in a browser.

However, one thing does bother me about this feature. When interacting within a pinned tab application, the user is still presented with the navigation bar. This makes it very hard for myself to disconnect from the fact that GMail is a web site instead of thinking of it as an app. If i have an app as a tab, do i need to browse to another website within that pinned tab?

Maybe we can do without the bookmarks and the navigation bar and the user can open a new tab in order to navigate to another site. Not only does this "appify" web apps, but the end user gains the extra vertical screen real-estate.  Here is a mockup of what this could look like:

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Please leave a quick comment if this is possible with the current version of Google Chrome and if this is something that would make sense to yourself.

Single vs. Multiple Textbox Event Creation Experiment

Recently at Twegather we have started thinking about optimizing the event creation process. I recently wrapped up an experiment (A/B) involving the event creation inputs on the front page. I was interested in seeing how users perform when changing to a single textbox input. This is a sneak peek at what's to come for Twegather. 

Here are the slides from my experiment presentation and the research paper.
 

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Video Evaluation of the Pulse News Mini iPhone App

Click here to download:
Filip Mares- Pulse News Mini Video Evaluation.doc (1.59 MB)
(download)

This paper was written as complementary to my previous Pulse News Mini app heuristic evaluation paper. In this paper i document my video evaluation conducted with 5 users. The goal was to identify the validity of my heuristic evaluation results and discover other problems not caught by the evaluator (myself) previously. Many new problems were identified. My future plans are to do a follow-up soon on how version 1.2 has improved on these problems.

Please feel free to leave a comment as I'd love to discuss my evaluations further. 

Cheers,

Filip 

Heuristic Evaluation of the Pulse News Mini iPhone App

Click here to download:
Filip Mares-Heuristic UI evlautation - Pulse iPhone App.pdf (1.89 MB)
(download)

I performed the following Heuristic Evaluation as a requirement of my Software Usability grad course. This was my first ever UI evaluation, but i'm sure it will not be my last. I've discovered my passion for usability evaluations and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). So check it out, but i warn you, it's a long one.