Aug

5

Pixie – more than just a cool name!

August 5, 2008 |  Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Ok – so it’s Tuesday and I missed Damien’s Push of Pixie a couple of weeks back so I’ve decided to put up my own thoughts on Pix.ie – I commented on Alexia’s post here last week and Marcus Mac Innes replied (which I always appreciate) but I still have a few things to say (as usual). The site is still in beta and I have some suggestions that may or may not make sense but I figure if we don’t ask we can’t expect them to be psychic… (There’s going to be some overlap with what Alexia and Damien have said here so please read their articles so I don’t have to keep saying, “as so and so says”…)

First off let me just say how much I like Pix.ie as a site – I’m using it way too much! I’ve pretty much maxed out my quota for July and am waiting eagerly for August 9th to roll round…

Now and then a great site comes along to surprise you. Pix.ie is one of those, it manages to embody both what I think is best about the internet and what I like most in web design:
1. Nice clean simple interface – I disagree somewhat with Alexia – it is exactly the kind of site I see my parents / grandparents being able to use and preferring! Whether they’d want to upload photos or not – well that’s another question. The green is great both for underlining the Irish identity and as a nice gentle eye catcher. The carousel is also a great UI idea! Which brings me to number 2…
2. Originality – I haven’t seen the carousel before and it really is a neat little device. At first I thought it was just “good looking” but as I use the site more and more I’m realising how handy it is to be able to get a good idea what’s in an album before I click!
3. Extended beta – unlike some I really appreciate it when a product (especially a web site) stays in beta for some time as it gives ample opportunity for feedback and suggestions (giving the user input into design is something that is often sorely neglected online) – more about the feedback later though…
4. Great “suggested photos” – I visit the front page at least once a day to see what’s suggested (even though I have my profile page bookmarked) Flickr has the same kind of thing on the front page (last time I compare to Flickr I promise) but I pretty much never go there because a) the front page is ugly *IMHO* and b) the suggestions generally aren’t my cup of tea… That may be because of point 5 however…
5. Good community – The folks on Pixie are friendly and in the main appear to be interested in voting up good photos rather than just their friends’ photos. Plus I’ve seen a lot of pretty good constructive criticism on Pixie and almost none of the pointless negativity that has become pretty common online.
6. Web 2.0 the right way – As you can see here there’s a useful API that can be used for all sorts of nice jiggery-pokery without having it “clumsifying” the site itself. Pix.ie is also very fast and functional which makes a nice change (hopefully it will scale nicely as well but only time and traffic will tell)… Oh and did I mention – PicLens for Firefox works a treat!

Now for some questions / suggestions:
1. To start with a really small quibble – Item 7 of the getting started page poses the question “Can I make a suggestion?” the answer being “Sure you can, in fact we welcome all your comments! To send us a suggestion simply select the feedback link at the very bottom of the screen.” Ummm – either it’s not there or it’s too well hidden for me – as will be seen I have a bit of feedback and I spent a while looking for somewhere to submit it. Of course, I have since realised (in a real palm->forehead moment) that the word feedback in that section is a mailto link… ‘DOH! In my defence, I was reading the instructions and not being a web person right then… *blush*
2. I’m pretty confused by the Privacy Settings. Does “Entire Account” really over-ride the others? So why are there settings for the others? Does it only over-ride the others when it’s not set to “public”?
3. My biggest complaint was that while I can Digg, Reddit, Stumble (etc etc) cool photos that I find – there’s no way for me to bookmark photos I like within Pix.ie (so people can immediately see my favourites). Marcus has pointedout however that all our “votes” are being stored in the back end and will later be used to generate a kind of ranked favourites page. Neat-O! :-)
4. Ouch I typed in an album name that already exists – The result were two different albums with the same name. I couldn’t work out how to move the items from the new “Seaside” album to the old “Seaside” album. When I used “Add to Album”, the photo was added to the “Seaside” album it was already in and as I was navigating to the photo through the album I couldn’t delete it from the “Seaside” album it was in. I didn’t realise at that time that I could navigate to it through the stream and remove it from the album but I still don’t think that would have helped because when I deleted the photos entirely and re-uploaded them to the old “Seaside” album they were put back in a new “Seaside” album (which was pretty frustrating). The only way I could recover from this was to delete both albums entirely and upload all the photos together… Now maybe I wasn’t thinking laterally or something but to me, just reading the last few sentences, I don’t think a user should be able to get that confused – especially not when everything else is so seamless and easy!
5. Having a “Number of Photos” somewhere under a user’s profile would be nice. I can see how widely viewed someone’s photos are (“Photo Views”) but that doesn’t really give me an idea how prolific they are…? Even just for the user themselves it could be handy for keeping track of how many photos they have uploaded in total.

Overall I’m so happy with Pix.ie that I’m signing up my wife (a complete non-techie) and I’m confident that not only will she be able to use it easily but she’ll greatly enjoy the experience!

Great work Pix.ie team: 9/10 from me…


Comments



1 Comment so far

  1.    Marcus Mac Innes on August 6, 2008 11:58 am

    What a great and detailed review! Many thanks for your kind words and I’d be really interested in your feedback.

    We have realised recently that some feedback emails are being put caught by the SPAM filters and it is now impossible for us to check the junk mail folder as we are getting 10,000+ SPAMs per day.

    In order to combat this we will be starting a support group shortly where you can add discussions topics with general feedback, bug reports and feature suggestions etc. We hope to have these groups live shortly.

    To answer some of your questions from above:

    1) We’ll check the wording on the help pages and make changes to avoid this confusion. Thanks!

    2) Entire account does override the others. If you set your account to private, nobody will be able to access your account at all.

    3) Yes your votes will facilitate a rich favourites list. This is coming, :)

    4) Album names are arbitrary in Pixie and have no significance other than for naming the “photo container”. We might look at making these more intelligent as we could for instance check if an album of that name has already been created in the past and prompt accordingly…

    5) The reason the number of photos for a given account is currently missing is because of technical reasons. Given the permission permutations for photos, this number is unique to each visitor and requires a little extra work for us to display, at the time we left it out and have been meaning to revisit it. It’s now on the list for implementation! Thanks!

    Thanks once again and see you on Pixie!

    Regards
    Marcus Mac Innes
    Founder and CEO
    Pixie

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