[Sigia-l] What am I missing...

[Paola Kathuria]

Will Parker wrote:
> I have seen innumerable otherwise fine, useful, and
> downright vital  pieces of software or hardware where
> little or no thought was given  to the user experience.

This reminds me of Google Base   http://base.google.com/

I'd been using Froogle (which isn't brilliant) but was shocked
when Google Base was recently launched to replace Froogle.

Besides the fact that it had broken links, typos and didn't work
the day it launched, I find it hard to believe that many regular
people would make use of the custom attribute feature.

  "To define a custom attribute in a tab-delimited file, you
  must start the attribute with a "c:". For example, if you
  would like to define an attribute called store_department,
  the attribute in the header column should be called
  c:store_department. You must use underscores ( _ ) to
  denote spaces. You may also include information on the
  value type based on your custom attribute. For example,
  c:store_department:string lets us know that the custom
  attribute "c:store_department" has a "string" value type."

(From http://base.google.com/base/help/custom-attributes.html)

"String"?! Yikes. This lack of consideration is what gives
us a bad name.

It's as if Google let some trainee programmer loose on a
back-water service and went live with it completely
untested.

I use Google at lot but, at the end of the day, these are
the folks who hide 90% of their services under a small
"more >" link...


Paola