Max Riffner

The Parlor

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On Left

Every time I ride on the trail, I always yell out “On Left!” as I pass walkers and runners. Some of them listen. Most don’t. Most are walking like morons with their dogs all over the trail. I almost plowed into one guy tonight as he was enamored with something on the other side of the trail and apparently not listening to me yell at him several times.

I hate these people.

But I still yell out, because they are a lot of asshole spandex riders who don’t. When I used to run, they would scare the hell out of me when they swooshed by me, riding on stealth mode (unless it’s someone with a mountain bike — you can hear knobbies coming for awhile).

Spandex set: announce yourselves.

Walkers: get out of the way.

Dogs: Um, don’t bite me?

Simple Etiquette

Folks, it’s really simple: if you are going to get on an elevator, let the people who are getting off on that floor actually get off the goddamn elevator.

I’m amazed and astounded at the number of people who look at me perplexed when I try to actually get off the elevator. Let me off, you selfish bastards. It not only makes sense on a manners level, but if you are getting on and let the people on get off, you actually have more room in the small box that goes up and down.

So it has been one of those weeks… and by weeks I mean six months.

Amazon Drops Tabs

Amazon.com has dropped its tabbed navigation. Greg Storey has a great write-up about how big this is. Since it only seems to appear for Safari web browsers so far, it will take some time before e-commerce managers see it and shit their pants as they rush off to their design departments and request, no, demand a mockup of what their store would look like if it was without tabs. I’m so not joking. The e-commerce industry watches Amazon like dogs lick their own ass: slavishly. And, hey, with good reason. Amazon makes buckets of money. Their experience with customer usability is astoundingly large – they didn’t just “decide” to do this. There had to have been an enormous amount of data backing this decision up. This is why we’ll start seeing more stores emulate the design. Most people figure that they’ll let Amazon do all the heavy lifting. Which is bad and speaks of how little people consider their customers (but that is a conversation for another day).

Having been an e-commerce designer, being forced to use tabs as navigation because “everyone else does it” was frustrating. As stores add more sections/categories to their product line, there is only so much room for tabs, which inevitably starts the uncomfortable conversation about having two rows of tabs. Nevermind that it makes no sense whatsoever and forget trying to come up with an alternate navigation solution that would actually be easier for customers to use. Just tack another row of tabs on there and call it good.

I don’t hate tabs. I think they have their place as a visual metaphor. What I hate out of all of this is the lack of innovation and respect for users/customers. Congratulations to Amazon for making a bold step, and hey, if your store uses tabs – check your data – it may be fine the way it is. Let your customers decide. Just don’t have multiple rows of tabs, that is just painful for everyone from customers to your own designer(s).

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