Blank Slate

37signals likes to talk about “designing the blank slate”:

The blank slate is the first screen someone sees when they do something new. Where do you drop them right after they create a new account? What do you tell them on a screen that starts blank but will eventually be filled with content? That’s the blank slate.

Logging in to Yahoo! Photos for the first time I see:

I flipped through the help bubbles and clicked on My Friends’ Photos:

In both cases Yahoo is helping me adjust to a new interface. The walkthrough of the new features in particular helps me learn where everything is and introduces me to some new concepts (assuming that I didn’t know what tags were).

These niceties should be part of any new design (or re-design), but more often than not users are thrown in to new surroundings without any orientation. Particularly when re-designing interfaces, we have an obligation to ease the transition as much as possible. Not doing so raises the possibility that we alienate our existing users just when we’re trying to improve things for them.

Verdict: I Like It!

I’m very particular about my RSS readers. They must be online, they must use a “river of news” view, and they must make it easy for me to quickly skim a large number of feed items. It should also be fairly easy for me to manage my subscriptions.

Bloglines does all of these things right. It may use frames, but those frames mean that I can view all of my feed items at once. I can easily view feeds by groups or all feeds at once, and I only see new items unless I ask for old items, I can easily mark everything as read, I can easily manage my feeds, and I can easily subscribe to feeds.

Google Reader use a river of news view, so it’s easy to skim the items in a feed. I can mark individual items as read or an entire feed as read. I’ve always liked how Bloglines marks all items as read when I view them, but a couple of recent crashes (NY Times, I’m looking at you) have made me rethink this idea. Google Reader only marks items as read when it knows you’ve read them — items are marked off as you scroll past them, or you can do it yourself with key commands. For the first time ever, Google Reader has me hooked on keyboard shortcuts. I’m using J and K to quickly skim items and mark them as read. It’s all AJAy, so it only loads about 20 items at a time. Fortunately, Loading new items is pretty fast, and it happens automatically, but it’s still slower than Bloglines’ frame setup. I don’t feel like I’m taking much longer to scan than I do with Bloglines though. I can view all unread items, unread items by label, and unread items by feed depending on my whim (handy when I’ve been away for some time).

The biggest problem is feed management. I imported my subscriptions via OPML from Bloglines, but some of my categories weren’t imported. Also, I’m confused about the difference between labels and folders. Are they the same or different? If they’re the same, how come they don’t act like the labels in Gmail? Gmail lets me have spaces in label names, Google Reader doesn’t. I can’t rename tags (are those labels? folders?) for some reason. Actually, I can’t rename labels and folders either (if they happen to be distinct from tags). If they could make feed management easier, I would consider Google Reader to be the first feed reader I’ve found that gives Bloglines a good fight.

See Also

A review of the new FeedLounge feed reader