Well it's 3 hours before my flight to Miami for Ultra Music Festival. For some strange reason, I can't sleep. Perhaps it's this human emotion known as excitement.
In lieu of sleep, I'm going to download all the algo and crypto class lectures I was supposed to be watching this week, pack my speedos for cheek tanning, and discuss a subject that I know nothing about: users and their experiences.
Unless you're one of the 99.999% (well, at least you get five nines somewhere) of people in the world who don't read Hacker News, you'll know about Dustin Curtis and his complete lack of Svbtletly. If you are in the 99.999%, please click those links.
The first major concern was the lack of openness. Fuck that. The guy shipped a gorgeous blog platform. He can do whatever he want with it. Personally, I like the idea of vetted blog networks. When all the major newspapers die, who will be the filter? Dustin Curtis is pointing two thumbs towards his chest and saying "this guy."
The second major concern was the kudos button. This is legitimate, but not because of the idea of a hover button. It's simply a poor implementation.
If you go to any of the Svbtle links and try it out, you'll be pretty alarmed. This shit is FAST AS FUCK. The first time I did it, I didn't even know what was happening until I had given some kudos (insert sex joke here.) Even when I knew what was coming, the kudos button was still alarmingly fast.
That's the problem and that's the beauty of this button design! Suppose you cranked up the animation time to 20 seconds. All of a sudden the problem isn't "oh shit I didn't mean to give kudos." Instead, it's "man, I need to really really really like this post to hover state over this button for this long." In between the 2s that Svbtle uses and 20s, there an amount of time that works for your application.
The first time I saw this paradigm was in the iPhone todo list app Epic Win. While the action itself was still binary, it feels more analog because of the build-up. The app was trying to create a sense of satisfaction in accomplishing a task and this UX element worked very well. The app also had a kick ass animation after the action was completed, which Svbtle lacks. Given Dustin Curtis's penchant for gratuitous pulsing beacons, you'd think he could at least add an expanding pulse after the kudos is given.
I'm a fan of this UX element and will implement something like it for upvoting in What Does Dubstep Sound Like.
On a side note, the dot in the middle of the button is aliased as a motherfucker. If you have a Mac, do a handicap zoom on that shit. Fuckin' gross, man. It looks like a Conway's game of life gone wrong.
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