Pre-mobile and pre-Google Plus, Google had a handle on the creation and sharing of photo albums. Picasa took some time to learn, but once you got the hang of it, photos synced correctly from the desktop to the web, and you knew with whom you were sharing—key features of any social site/app/service, and usually difficult to get right. Everything seemed to work. So, with my photos I stuck with Picasa, and dismissed Facebook and whatever Apple was doing, which seemed to lag behind its competitors in features. I also use Gmail so I figured that t...

Google, you drive me nuts with this: when I’m in Bethany Beach, DE (before this screenshot I clicked the current location arrow and it showed me where I was in BB), and I search “Parkway” to get the phone number of a restaurant a half mile away, why are you giving me as a result the town of Parkway-South Sacramento, CA? This happens quite a bit. Please fix your algorithms.

Yelp: stop showing me this screen. You’re wasting my time and are chipping away at my goodwill toward you. I already have the app. I’m on the mobile site for a reason (usually because I clicked on a Google search result). At least let me click to never show this screen again. Maybe better: deliver the mobile result (I might want it vs the app for some reason), but ask me if I’d like to see the page in the mobile app instead (I might think that’s a brilliant, time-saving idea under certain circumstances).

iOS calendar, why can’t I tap on my meeting location and have you serve up a map? Fix this, so I don’t have to: tap Edit tap the title/location area long tap the location field tap Select All tap Copy tap the home button find and tap Maps tap Search (if i’m not there already) or Edit if I’m in the directions area) long tap into the field tap Select All tap Paste tap Search or Route button Apple, save me 12 steps, please. Provide a link to the meeting location when you recognize that it’s an address.

This is a very smart request. Instead of just asking me if I want to rate the app, TripTracker prods me to join the thousands of people who have rated the app with five stars. It’s a great psychological move: “don’t you want to be among the many who realize how awesome this is?” My guess is that this significantly improves response rate (number of people prompted that rate the app), which also helps insulate the app against lower reviews.

Here’s an iPhone news app (New York Daily News) that misses the mobile mark. Maybe 25% of this screen is for actual news stories? That leaves 55% for navigation and 20% for advertising. Insufficient mobile design.

Truly brilliant. So much fun. Homeplus, Tesco’s chain of grocery stores in South Korea, wallpapers a subway station with actual images from its store shelves. While consumers wait for their train to arrive, they can shop by capture the QR code for each item and adding it to a mobile shopping cart. Orders are placed on the spot, and are delivered after they arrive home. Consumers are the big winners here: After a long day, they get to look at a beautiful, expansive, mood-lifting wall of color instead of a grey wall. They re-capture other...

My excitement over the recently released version (2.2) of Epicurious for iPhone evaporated when I discovered three things: A fee to sync recipes on the iPhone with those saved in the inadequate recipe box on the website (I had presumed this would be free); An advertisement with a close button that sends people into the App Store, repeatedly; The failure to correct major navigational shortcomings in the app. Let’s take a closer look at why Epicurious mobile has been sent to UX Rehab. 1. A $1.99 for syncing your recipe box I know: itR...

I’m going to kick a horse while it’s down. Last night at 9:23 pm I sent a friend who was at the Yankees/Red Sox game a text—I couldn’t make the game as expected but wow, what a nail bitter.  Just now, at 12:28 pm—the day after—I get his reply: “That is too bad. It is a great game. Fans r very rowdy.” 15 hours: 5 minutes later. He was sitting in the bleachers, under the giant AT&T advertisement, texting me from his iPhone. I would have liked to have gotten his message last night. Maybe we would have trad...

Looking at the opening still of this video, I began to rant to myself about the lame-ness of trying to replicate real world environments on the computer screen, but this “3D” tablet “desktop” goes beyond that and showcases some interesting touch screen innovations (the standard conventions of, oh, two weeks now are just getting so stale). It will be interesting to see if Google, who just bought the company that developed this interface, will integrate some of this behavior into their tablet project—or maybe make it the tablet’s ...