MapNotes - Take 2
Posted by Charlie Fri, 11 Apr 2008 06:57:00 GMT
Phew. Beta 2 of MapNotes, our first Facebook application, is finally done. Last week we released the first version to testers, and since then we've been busy fixing various usability issues that our testers have pointed out. If you'd rather hear about all the nitty-gritty technical issues, then head over to my personal blog where I'm running a series of articles about developing for the Facebook platform.
Let's take a look. Here is what MapNotes looked like last week:
An obvious problem is that the map is much too cluttered - the notes cover each other up. A more subtle issue had to do with the ownership links at the top - My Notes, Friend's Notes, Nearby Notes. Splitting your items from your friends' items is fairly standard on Facebook. But it didn't work for us. The main issue was creating a new note when viewing your friend's notes. A user would create note, then pan the map, and the note would disappear! Why? Because the user had asked to see only their friends notes. Not good.
Here's how we solved those two issues:
First, we reduced clutter by only showing one note at a time. The rest of the notes are represented by colored circles on the map. Besides reducing clutter, this approach has another major benefit - its obvious which note is the current note. That important for users that want to add their own comments to a note. Before it was a bit of a mystery which note was active.
Second, we removed the distinction between your notes and your friends notes. Now you see all of them, with your notes having a star in the middle. If you look at the map around Denver, you'll see there is still a clustering issue when zoomed out, but its much better than before.
Although conceptually simple, these two changes took about a week to do. As is often the case, it wasn't the direct work to implement these features that took time. Instead, it was building the underlying infrastructure to support these features that took time. Obviously you'd never be able to tell that from the screenshots, since the notes look exactly the same, don't they? But it required a fairly big rearranging of our code to correctly support all the ways a user can interact with a the notes - mouse overs, clicks, etc.
We still have a few more usability issues to solve, so onto Beta 3!