{"id":1142,"date":"2015-06-15T07:02:45","date_gmt":"2015-06-15T14:02:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/?p=1142"},"modified":"2015-05-30T15:14:17","modified_gmt":"2015-05-30T22:14:17","slug":"improve","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/2015\/06\/improve\/","title":{"rendered":"Internet tools needing improvement"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There are a lot of software applications &#8211; apps &#8211; I use regularly &#8211; and some that I&#8217;m using less-regularly, because of &#8220;improvements&#8221; by developers. So many apps are becoming so poorly-designed that they are becoming unusable, yet I read about many of these companies whining about how many users they&#8217;ve been losing.<\/p>\n<p>So let me do you a favor, designers: here&#8217;s more than a dozen ways that the apps I use regularly &#8211; and millions of others use regularly &#8211; really, truly could be improved:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Flickr<\/a><\/strong> &#8211; Bring back the narrative slide show view. Yes, most people just look at photos, and look at them on their smart phones. But there are a lot of us who want to see the narrative too &#8211; not every photo is self-explanatory.<\/li>\n<li><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook<\/a><\/strong> &#8211; So many changes needed:\n<ul>\n<li>Make adding and removing people from lists as easy as adding and removing people from circles on <a href=\"https:\/\/plus.google.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">GooglePlus<\/a>. Right now, it is SO hard to do. And there&#8217;s no &#8220;at a glance&#8221; way to see who is one which list. I would use Facebook oh-so-much more if the lists were easier to use.<\/li>\n<li>Make it possible to put Facebook pages into lists. I would love to be able to put causes I really love, and want to follow, on a list, so I could look just at that list sometimes.<\/li>\n<li>Make it possible to delete smart lists from a person&#8217;s view of lists &#8211; I have a company listed on my account that I have NEVER worked for. I have no idea how it got there, but there&#8217;s no way for me to remove it! It looks like I worked there &#8211; but I never did.<\/li>\n<li>Create a blog space for users the way <a href=\"http:\/\/www.myspace.com\" target=\"_blank\">MySpace<\/a> used to have. I could create a blog that someone could view WITHOUT being a member of MySpace &#8211; but the only way for someone to comment it on it unless they were signed in. You would end up taking market share from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tumblr.com\" target=\"_blank\">Tumblr<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.medium.com\" target=\"_blank\">Medium<\/a> and so many blog spaces if you did that.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.twitter.com\" target=\"_blank\">Twitter<\/a><\/strong>:\n<ul>\n<li>Make it possible to view lists I create, as well as the list of accounts I follow and the list of those that follow me, viewable however I want (alphabetical,\u00a0oldest to newest, etc.)<\/li>\n<li>Keep it simple! That&#8217;s the beauty of Twitter! Please stop trying to be like Facebook. I connect with people and organizations I really need to know, even get job leads, from Twitter &#8211; that NEVER happens on Facebook. You are going to ruin Twitter if you keep &#8220;adding&#8221; Facebook features.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/groups.yahoo.com\" target=\"_blank\">YahooGroups<\/a><\/strong>, formerly my favorite app:\n<ul>\n<li>Please, please, please go back to non-threaded discussions. You&#8217;re threaded way of doing things have killed discussions on most of the groups I&#8217;m on.<\/li>\n<li>Create a fee-based service for users who don&#8217;t want ads on their groups, including no ads in emails generated by messages on the group. I will HAPPILY pay that fee! So would many, many thousands of other users!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><strong>Google<\/strong>\n<ul>\n<li>regarding <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/groups.google.com\">GoogleGroups<\/a><\/strong>: go look at YahooGroups from 2002 or so &#8211; if your interface looked more like that, you&#8217;d still massive numbers of users from not only Yahoo, but from various online collaboration web sites as well.<\/li>\n<li><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/calendar\/\" target=\"_blank\">GoogleCalendar<\/a><\/strong>: Please reconsider <a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/calendar\/answer\/45351?hl=en\" target=\"_blank\">your decision to stop sending calendar updates via SMS!<\/a> I don&#8217;t always have great Internet access. And there are LOTS of people that still use feature phones that don&#8217;t have apps. We need our SMS reminders!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.itunes.com\" target=\"_blank\">iTunes<\/a><\/strong> &#8211; STOP BEING STUPID. Instead, start beta-testing your interface with non-software developers, as well as people over 25. I am not a stupid person, and yet, it takes me way too long to figure out how to add a song to a playlist, how to remove one, how to play just one album, and on and on.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Those are my ideas. Get right on that, &#8216;kay?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are a lot of software applications &#8211; apps &#8211; I use regularly &#8211; and some that I&#8217;m using less-regularly, because of &#8220;improvements&#8221; by developers. So many apps are becoming so poorly-designed that they are becoming unusable, yet I read about many of these companies whining about how many users they&#8217;ve been losing. So let [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[13],"tags":[1086,50,195,204,217,1085,1084,504,1080,549,550],"class_list":["post-1142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community-relationsoutreach","tag-apple","tag-apps","tag-facebook","tag-flickr","tag-google","tag-itunes","tag-myspace","tag-twitter","tag-user-friendly","tag-yahoo","tag-yahoogroups"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s3fFJB-improve","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1142"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1262,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1142\/revisions\/1262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}