Ravi Rao

Why we need a new bank that works

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 20:20:00 -0700

This is ridiculous! I was just moving money around, and left an account empty for ~45 days, and Wells Fargo silently closed it for me. I need a new checking account that doesn't suck - recommendations anyone?

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Screenshot of thoughtundermind.com on my iPad

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 08:06:07 -0700

Sent from my iPad

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Hail in May 2010

Mon, 03 May 2010 17:50:36 -0700

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It's hailing like crazy in Redmond :)

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Trader Joes owns!

Sun, 02 May 2010 18:18:50 -0700

Trader Joes is proof that there's a god out there :)

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Lonely Planet guides on the iPhone

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 23:08:01 -0700

Lonely Planet was kind enough to put out their iPhone guides for a bunch of European cities for free to help alleviate the pain of travelers stranded due to the volcano in Iceland. Whee, now to figure out where to plan my next vacation ;)

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Weirdest fan I've ever seen

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 11:32:50 -0800

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We're in downtown (?) Columbia City about to get lunch at Tagla Cafe, getting coffees first.

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Chicken Souvlaki with lentil soup and Greek potatoes for lunch

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:12:34 -0800

Service was long and the food was mediocre, unfortunately. :/

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Chennai is roasting

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 06:30:28 -0800

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Nana's Soup House

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 21:00:29 -0800

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Dinner tonight was a bowl of Sweet Corn Chowder soup with a baked potato for me and a bowl of Creamy Tomato Basil soup with corn bread at Nana's ... Yummy veggie soups, sandwiches and quesadillas in Fremont!

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Dinner tonight

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 19:37:20 -0800

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Dinner is an awesome home made salad with green curry chicken and Thai basil fried rice :)

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The problem with not conforming to regular UI concepts - Redfin's iPhone Application

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:40:00 -0800

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:

Add 5 homes to my favorites list while at home on computer #1
Add 5 more homes to my favorites list while at home on computer #2
Add 5 more homes to my favorites list while at work on computer #1 on browser #1
Add 5 more homes to my favorites list while at work on computer #2
Add 5 more homes to my favorites list while at work on computer #1 on browser #2
On the commute from home -> work or work -> home (I ride the bus, vanpool or carpool regularly), I fire up the Redfin iPhone app
I start browsing around on the iPhone and at some point am going through my favorites list.
I forget I'm navigating my favorites folder, and I see this broken heart which I interpret to mean, "broken heart => not a favorite!"
I push the button to "add it to my favorites" since I like the home, and it removes the home off my list.
I reach home, all excited to share the findings only to find my favorites list empty!

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:

Please please please invert the behavior of the switch; have the icon represent the CURRENT state instead of the destination state
Try using a more obvious icon - perhaps a heart with a PLUS symbol annotated to represent “add to favorites” and a “pressed” heart with perhaps an outline/halo to represent the “remove from favorites” action. You may consider not using a heart symbol too, but that's a different story.

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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