Jay, Design Curmudgeon

I decided it was time to upgrade Eudora, my email client, so I surfed over to Qualcomm's site.

See the network chart over the gray grid top right? That little dude is in continual motion, sort of like the Visual Theaaurus or Inxight except without the labels. To find out what's what, you click on one of the moving nodes.

In putting this together, some ersatz designer chose the wrong end of a usability trade-off. On the positive side, the moving network diagram is attractive. On the negative, this doo-dad means it's unclear what one's choices are (unless you click on every node). The movement insures that most of the time, you'll make an incorrect choice before the correct one. The inquisitive visitor will hunt around for some reason Qualcomm chose to put this confusing thing on the front page of their site. The message I get is that Qualcomm thinks I came to play games, not transact business.

To summarize Edward Tufte, if it ain't part of the solution, it's part of the problem. Qualcomm's thingamabob is electronic chart junk.

What were they thinking?

Posted by Jay Cross at February 29, 2004 12:12 PM | TrackBack