Weirdest fan I've ever seen
We're in downtown (?) Columbia City about to get lunch at Tagla Cafe, getting coffees first.
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Redfin.com is an awesome online resource for prospective home buyers (and sellers) to gauge the market, and to scope out potential homes to buy (or sell). They threw together an iPhone application that integrates very nicely with the website and the profile you create on it. However, a problem is that they inversed the UI behavior that all of us are used to over the decades ... spanning a vast multitude of applications. The problem is best illustrated with an example.
In the cases depicted below - the state is "off", "on" in the first case, whereas in the second, "Milk" and "Cheese" are not selected whereas "Butter" is selected. Clearly, in a "checkbox" style toggle-mechanism, the image shown at any time depicts the current state you are in.

Redfin's iPhone application reversed this metaphor, much to my frustration and annoyance.

In the image above, the "broken heart" tells me that this home is NOT in my favorites list, so I go ahead and click it to add it to my favorites since I like the home. Sure enough, the heart fixes itself promptly. Much to my surprise, the actual effect is the opposite. Their icons indicate what state you would get to, by toggling that switch ... notice carefully that I'm actually browsing 1 of 16 homes _within_ my "favorites" list (as indicated by the left-pointing "Favorites" button on the top left of the screen)
So my standard use case is this:
This is not just a "minor annoyance" unfortunately; it totally kills the iPhone application experience for me based on the use-cases applied to Redfin's application; there are often condo complexes with 20-30 homes in them, i.e. 1530 NW Market St, Apt 123, Apt 234, Apt 345, Apt 456, etc. and my effort at painstakingly narrowing down which of these 20-30 actually work for me go in vain when I accidentally push the iPhone "favorites" button while "on the go". I literally waste 2-3 hours' worth of effort previously invested. This wouldn't be so bad if I could login to my profile to view a "log" of all my actions ever with helpful "undo" buttons next to them and I could easily/quickly revert my mistakes, but no, there's no record and trying tricks like just checking address history in my browser's address bar is of no use because I usually have addresses to all 30 homes in the building in my history ...
Example of how an "Event Log" could be supplied:
[ ] Added House XYZ to favorites - via website on 01/25/2010 at 3 PM [Undo]
[ ] Removed House XYZ from favorites - via iPhone application on 01/25/2010 at 7 PM [Undo]
...
[ ] Select All actions
/ Undo / / Clear from history /
I showed this to User-Experience (UX) experts in my team at work simply asking them, “Hey, this is a home-finding application, what do you think pushing this solid heart does?”, and the first reaction was, "A heart? I have no idea what it does, and I sure as hell aren't pushing it while at work, or logged into a work machine since it feels like a dating website thing - is it pulling up my contacts and sending them a 'flirt' message?", and the second reaction, after I explained that “it had something to do with the ‘favorites’ feature” was, "Back in Internet Explorer 7, someone did a trial run of exactly the same thing in an 'Options' dialog and the results were disastrous - people don't want to unlearn habits they've learnt over time just to work with one certain application. We switched it back promptly.”
So yeah - if you're listening dear Redfin iPhone developer team, here's a few suggestions:
For now, I've stopped using the iPhone application. The cost of using it is several hours' worth of my time, and the frustration and annoyance is crazy. I've used computers and software on various platforms (BeOS/Linux/BSD, Windows, Mac) and a "toggle" paradigm that I've learnt over 15 years ago is not so easily unlearnt in one certain scenario in one certain application ... hopefully this will be fixed and I can go back to using the Redfin iPhone application someday ... Thanks for reading if you got this far J
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