Windows Live Photo Gallery - User Interface Fail

I continue to be underwhelmed by Windows 7.

The latest petty annoyance is the way "Windows Live Photo Gallery" chooses to display photos grouped by month: most recent year at the top - great! So why invert that when it comes to displaying the month, leaving November 2009 right next to January 2008... sigh.

On creating an effective and polite forum

When Neville and I launched ukga.com back in 2003, one of the first features we knew we wanted was a forum, i.e. a place where pilots and trainee pilots could discuss flying and learning to fly, seek advice, etc. And being software developers, we naturally decided to roll our own.

Now, while we were looking forward to running a forum, we also knew that we most definitely didn't want to spend our days moderating a forum. Having been active users of websites since the Mosaic days, we were well used to well-intentioned forums descending into petty squabbles, name-calling, back-biting, oneupmanship, anonymous flaming, pedantry, and worse (from our site-owner's perspective) defamation/libel.

Looking back five or so years later (and over 100,000 postings), we seem to have achieved a very busy, active forum which needs remarkably little intervention. And so I thought I'd share with you 4 very simple design decisions we made early on, which seem to have served us well:

1. No anonymous postings. Every poster must create an account on UKGA (Free, and only asks for email, name and location, no "favourite books" or other Facebookish nonsense)
2. No pseudonyms. Unlike almost every other forum I've ever visited we strongly discourage (even if we can't rigorously enforce) the use of "wacky" alter egos. So goodbye "nuttyflyerswindon", hello "Terry Jones". And this seems to discourage bad behaviour. We've only had to pull a handful of threads in 5 years.
   
3. No clutter. No "member since 1842". No "3462 postings". No points, badges, age, or other fluff. Every forum user is considered equal, which we think encourages discussion from "newbies" (bleurgh). And no HTML. Compare and contrast with off-the-shelf "Bulletin Board" software used on many other sites (e.g. http://www.pprune.org/), where the content is sometimes lost amongst the "meta" content.
   
4. Personalisation. Not in the frivolous "change colours" way, but more usefully, for logged-in users, the forums by default only show you discussions with new or updated content to you. So each time you come to the forum, whether that's every day or just once a month, you can see what's new. To you.
   

Obviously some of the above is unscientfic conjecture - we haven't run A/B testing to see whether allowing pseudonyms would increase the overall levels of spite, for example.

Finally, some further feedback from some of the site users:

“UKGA works well for all the reasons you've listed, plus in my view the tone of a forum comes from the people who run it. Clearly you and Nev are nice guys!”

“I often quote the UKGA forum as one which sets a good example of manners and humour.”

“Best forum site of all. Easy to use, you dont have to keep trying to find individual threads. In fact, its the only one I now use (look at regularly, and comment when needed)”

“I have used UKGA since before I took my first lesson. I believe the 'no pseudonyms' rule has been pivotal to the tone; and the tone is pivotal to attracting the sort of people who are more interested in chatting to like-minded individuals rather than massaging their egos by flaming those who ask stupid questions in all innocence (as my boss says, there are no stupid questions - only stupid answers).”

“I agree that the focussed 'unread by you' thread view is masterful - I think that when I first arrived, it was the comparison with the frighteningly permanent array of threads on [other site] that made me choose here”

TRIP Database Related articles

We've just launched a fun-but-powerful feature on the TRIP Database: "Related Articles". Now, rather than just searching for a small number of keywords (Google-styley), you can paste in the content of a document/web page, and the TRIP Database search will bring out the top 50 "similar" documents, based on word frequencies.

Jon explains some of the uses for clinicians here: http://blog.tripdatabase.com/2009/12/related-articles-on-trip.html

Do. Fail. Improve.

Another great post from Mr Godin: Is it too late to catch up?, in particular:

Don't have any meetings about your web strategy. Just do stuff. First you have to fail, then you can improve.

"Just do stuff". One of the main things I love about freelancing is being able to just do stuff. Fail early, fail frequently, but do often. One immense frustration at a previous employer was producing a great piece of technology, and then waiting for sales and marketing to work out a "strategy" on how to price and market it. And waiting... and waiting...