There's Facebook, with a 2 choice drop-down:

Then there's Google+, they're a little more flexible, with 2 defined choices plus "Other":

And then there's Diaspora... a free-form TEXT FIELD!

Can you guess which platform is most concerned with the requirements of advertisers?

OK, so I'm not the only one! I primarily use my iPhone with one hand and I often find that the phone suddenly handles like a stick of butter whenever I have to use my thumb to access something on the opposite corner of the display (i.e., when trying to reach the top right corner with my thumb while holding the phone in my left hand, and vice versa).

Space is a a premium when you design mobile applications, so I understand why buttons are placed near the corners. That said, I believe this particular design problem may be the result of not testing designs on an actual phone early enough in the design process. There are plenty of tools that will let you quickly test a design on an actual phone (Prototypes is one), but I think a good rule of thumb (get it?!) is: never place buttons for primary app functions in the top left or top right of your application. At least not unless you want to make your app significantly less mobile!

I recently read an article on some interesting research regarding how our brains react when our expectations about what we're looking at aren't met. Researchers found that test subjects had typical reactions when viewing robots that act like robots and when viewing people that act like people. So far, so good. However, when viewing robots that act like people (so called, "androids"), our brains have to work much harder to make sense of the situation.

It occurs to me that the same principle is at play when we interact with automated telephone systems which are based on voice recognition, rather than numeric menu navigation. I overheard a coworker recently attempt to interact with a telephone system based on voice recognition and, at one point, he was laughing because the system clearly wasn't understanding his request. That laughter, was his brain's response to the incongrous situation of being forced to verbally communicate with something that clearly didn't understand him.

Designing telephone systems, or IVRs, isn't easy. I know from personal experience. However, using the latest and greatest technology isn't always the best choice. I believe that "old-fashioned" systems based on numeric input are still better in most circumstances because:

• They match user's mental model of the experience: user's aren't forced to talk to a machine as if it was a human.
• They're unambiguous: you know what input is expected from you, rather than having to guess what the system can or can't understand.

None of this is to say that voice recognition doesn't have a useful role to play in modern telephone systems, just that it should be used sparingly, rather than forming the basis for the whole system. At least not until they can really understand what their  users are saying!

The section "Your Stuff" in Google Reader contains three items: "Shared Items", "Notes" and "Trends". I'd like to see a fourth one added called "Read History". This item would link to a view of recent posts that you have scrolled past, sorted in reverse chronological order. To distinguish between an article that I actually read and one that I just zoomed by with the mouse wheel, the view should only include articles that were visible in the browser for more than X seconds (X to be determined by user testing).

I often find myself trying to find posts that you can't search for easily (such as posts that only contain an image or video) but that I know I looked at sometime yesterday. This view would help in finding those posts.

I've noticed recently that both of the Web messaging apps I use the most, Gmail and Facebook, have introduced what I'm calling Scroll Shadows. (Maybe they're actually called that, I don't know! lol) The purpose of a Scroll Shadow is to subtly indicate to the user that the content they are scrolling has now scrolled under another page element. In Gmail, this effect looks like this:

Before scrolling...

After scrolling...

In Facebook the effect looks like this:

Before scrolling...

After scrolling...

In general, I think it's a great idea. It's minimal, it serves a discrete function and it has the potential to add some depth to a page. So what's my beef? I don't think either of these was implemented very well. How do I know? Because one of these sites did implement the concept well, on a different part of the very same page! Can you guess which one? If you said testing-subtle-variations-is-our-middle-name-Google, then you're right! Here's what the Scroll Shadow for the Ad section of the same Gmail message page looks like after scrolling:

It's a subtle difference:

• Gradients: It's hard to see directly but the Ad version has four shades of gray in it's shadow (Facebook has one and the other Gmail version has two). This makes the transition in the Ad version "under" the top element much smoother and "believable" as a shadow than in the other two variations.
• Edge: Both the Ad version and the Facebook versions have a defined darker "edge" (the other Gmail version has no edge at all). The edge serves to deleneate the "thing" that is casting the shadow. Without it, the shadow looks a little out of place.

It's hard to know why Google is using two different shadow styles on the same page (could be A/B testing, could be different teams working on different sections) but I know what I like: the style used in the Ad section is the best implementation of this idea.