I admit it. I do not see the purpose of Gowalla for me as a user. I have been using it for 3 weeks, and I just do not see what is the end game.
Just in case you have been living under the rock in the last months, Gowalla is new game-social-attentiondeficitdisorder internet thingie with an edge for locations. As you walk through the city, you can check-in into a location, like your favourite pub or restaurant. If that place is not yet Gowalled, you can easily add it right there, and neatly categorize it. The base platform for Gowalla is iPhone, preferably 3GS so Gowalla can pick up the fine GPS coordinates. The website is here just for the registration and some tweaking of location (for example, if iPhone missed your location).
With all this comes the game element of collecting items and pins. When you first create an account you get a few random digital items, like boots, pizza slice, toy robot. You can drop those items on locations, or swap them for items someone else dropped there. Basically, you can collect some digital items.
By doing some combo check-ins, you get pins like awards. I collected a couple of pins, I am "Wanderer" and "Explorer" and got some pins for creating 10 spots, and all that. That is neat.
However
I am not sure what the end game benefit for me as a user is. Why would I use Gowalla? Twitter has uses - it keeps me informed about stuff happening in my city, in my country, in the world, and on the internet. Facebook also has uses, there is a benefit for me as a user in it. But I just do not see benefit for me as a user in Gowalla.
First of all, it requires work from my side, but let's say we got that covered. I, as well as many of my friends, are early adopters, but more than that, we are willing to help for a good cause. It is not a problem for me to walk around my usual routes and just mark all the locations so that later generations of users can see them.
But what after that?
Checking into locations becomes just a boring task that I need to do, with no real benefit for me. I check in Nivas every day. I check in restaurants and apparel store. So what? I sometimes find digital items there. So?
One good thing that I have managed to find in Gowalla is that it could force me to visit some locations that maybe I would not visit on my own. But walking around the city just to get some digital pins; I do not see it happening.
The more I use Gowalla, the more I fail the see the point in it. Can you enlighten me? Tell me why is it good?
I've had some spare time before bedtime to put into digital form something what I discussed with the guys at the office - inconsistent cross browser behavior of default tooltip functionality.
First, a little introduction to the subject of tooltips:
The tooltip is a common graphical user interface element. It is used in conjunction with a cursor, usually a mouse pointer. The user hovers the cursor over an item, without clicking it, and a tooltip may appear — a small "hover box" with information about the item being hovered over. (Wikipedia)
In your regular computer usage, you see tooltips every day (all day) and chances are that you don't even notice them anymore. All browsers display the title attribute of an HTML element as a tooltip when a user hovers the mouse cursor over that element. Some browsers will also display the alt attribute of an image as a tooltip in the same manner (if a title attribute is also specified, it will override the alt attribute for tooltip content).
On the wide spaces of world wide web you can also find custom generated tooltips (eg. in javascript or Flash or just by absolutely positioning of elements via css), but they are not the subject of this post. I did my fair share of tooltips in different Flash projects I was working on, and each time we did a new tooltip type, we tried to make tooltips an integral part of visual part of design having in mind usability.
From user stand point - I never paid too much attention to browser tooltips. Probably because I got used to them. If website I am visiting is done well, if I hover something (probably an image) - a default browser tooltip will appear over that element. That usual and expected behavior was enough for me to put browser tooltips somewhere in back of mi mind. But, recently something about tooltips started to bother me and I couldn't pinpoint it.
Just around the time when we were working on release of Globus portal, I finally did figure out what was wrong with tooltips - tooltips in Firefox to be exact.
Firefox (tested on 3.5.5) has a nasty bug which causes hovered element to fire up onmouseout event when you rollover a default browser tooltip which that element invoked. When you rollout of the tooltip (because tooltip disappears), the browser element fires onmouseover event again, and that can cause some really nasty behavior.
Firefox 3 tooltip bug
(i've recorded this behaviour. you'll need flash player to see the video. if you can't - try MOV or AVI file.
On Globus that bug caused so much problem in elements which change layout when you hover them - that we had to remove title tags completely. And that from SEO standpoint is a BIG inconvenience. I've tested tooltips in all browsers, and AFAIK only Firefox 3.5 (Win) tooltips are "working" that way. I've submitted this bug to Bugzilla so will see what they'll say about it.
While doing tests in browsers I had around (Firefox, Safari, Chrome and IE8), I've noticed another inconvenience. Not a single browser did not displaying the tooltip the same way.
I've put up a little html demo for you to test by your self (ignore my css 'skills'). The 'demo' contains one div with image inside it with a link. If you hover the image, the link's title will show up in a default browser tooltip. Take notice how tooltip:
appears when you roll over element
disappears when you roll out
behaves when you move around element
behaves when you try to rollover the tooltip it self
You will notice that not a single respected browser currently available on Windows is not displaying tooltip the same way.
Chrome 3 toolip
- lazy (shows and dissapears with an delay), you can rollover it with your mouse without any side effects. The fact that you can rollover tooltip in combination with rather long hide delay can be inconvenience.
Internet Explorer 8 toolip
- pretty standard windows based tooltip behaviour. if you hover a tooltip - it will disappear which I think it's best behavior.
- has a nasty habbit of blinking two times when you hover an element. it doesn't produce other nasty effects to dom events
Safari 4 toolip
- has a nasty habit of disappearing and reappearing while you are still hovering the element. it doesn't produce other nasty effects to dom events
I haven't tested Opera on purpose. It's market share is just too low. :-(
I have no idea why not a single web browser doesn't have tooltip behavior configuration setting like follow mouse, delay in ms, different show/hide effects etc. I think that would be cool. :)
Last year, precisely - November 2008, I wrote about traffic lights with progress bars that would visually signalize how much time there is until the switch from green to red (or vice versa).
Recently, an idea about progress bar traffic light got a Red Dot design award for safety and ecology. You can read about it here:
I am quite willing to accept the fact that more than one person can think of an idea at the same time in the world, after all, there is over 6 billion of us chillin' on this planet.
I am also quite willing to accept the fact that on Relogik site, only the traffic light concept has a little disclaimer under Project info saying: "Date:Apr, 2009 (initial sketch: 2006)", clearly stating, for just that one project, that they thought of this at 2006. All other design ideas are, I guess, an instant thoughts that get thought of, concepted, visualized and created in the same day and do not need further disclaimers. But I digress.
What I absolutely cannot accept is the fact that such traffic light is NEITHER SAFE OR ECOLOGICAL.
Let me elaborate on Ecology part, it is simpler:
The project proposes that people should turn off their car engines when they see there is a lot to wait at the red light. I call bullshit. First of all, turning off your engine just to restart it again after 30 seconds is not that much of a save. Most modern engines are very ecological when idling. Googling just a little on this subject you can get a good read. I recomend this article on Slate about turning engine off.
But what is probably the biggest point why NOT to turn the engine off is the fact that a car with engine off does not have power steering and power breaking and on most cars - airbags will not deploy. Let me repeat that for you: if you get hit by a truck with your engine turned off, your airbags will most likely NOT deploy. You will not be able to steer, and your breaking power will be minimal. This is why in most countries turning your engine off on public roads is ILLEGAL. So, thanks, I will just keep my engine running.
Also, the wear and tear of your car's starting system and battery will in the end produce more carbon output than if you just keep the engine running. If you have to replace your battery sooner than regular - you have just polluted the world A LOT.
Second point, the Safety.
By showing timer, this concept gives drivers an ability to predict and speculate how fast they can go. Imagine this scenario; you turn around the corner onto the main street, and 50 meters in front of you is a red light with progress bar almost empty (meaning it will be green soon). What do you do? You speed up knowing that the red light will go off soon and that most likely you will pass that intersection at green. The words "most likely" are the catch. Because you could as well misjudge the timing and distance and cause crash.
The more you give to the drivers to speculate and calculate the more accidents there are on the streets. As simple as that.
On the other hand, the traffic lights already have timer, it is called: yellow light. It acts as a progress bar - it tells you that pretty soon the red will turn to green. And, if you are an experienced driver, you know that most intersection related crashes are directly linked to the yellow light speeding cars (be it yellow going to green, or yellow going to red). This is a clear indicator that even a simple progress bar, represented by yellow light, is obviously problematic. Giving more flexibility in misjudging time would just cause more accidents.
Furthermore, the signalization in modern cities is not done by "stupid" fixed-time traffic lights, but by smart traffic light systems that change the timings according to traffic load. The system can determine that the traffic load is low and can instantly switch to green light - rendering the timer useless.
Institute of Transportation Engineers
If anyone had any doubts, there are institutes all over the world that devote their full time on research of public signalization. It's not like someone invented traffic lights back-in-the-day and now noone is looking further into development of signalization. There are people who work on this 24/7 and if they did not conclude that progress bar traffic light is good, I believe that stands for something.
