agitcraft

I was reading somebody’s Flex blog the other day and noticed they had a Share Widget at the bottom of the post.

I’ve seen this widget around town. It’s a fairly popular way to share content with other networks.

When you roll over the widget, it animates, with a slide reveal effect, to this state:

When you roll over individual icons, they pop out almost all the way.

It’s a neat widget, but I have a few criticisms that seem obvious to me:

1. Sharing is not sexy, even if we’re just trying to be playful and clever. I challenge you to find me even one person who finds sharing obscure posts about Flex to be sexy. I challenge you.
2. The interface is slow. I don’t mean the transitional reveal is slow, but rather my experience with it is slow.

What do I mean by slow? Let’s play a game: Pick a sharing service off the top of your head, and see how long it takes you to find the correct button for it in this widget. Need I say more?

When I was at AdobeMax on the convention floor, I noticed that MapQuest had a booth touting their API and a new logo. Now honestly, I was more curious about the logo than the API. Does MapQuest do anything better than Google Maps? If so, I’m not aware of it. Anyway, on to the story of the logo redesign.

Maybe you remember MapQuest’s old logo?

Old MapQuest Logo

It’s fun. Quirky maybe? What’s up with that font?

What it really is is dated. That’s not to say that everything should have a reflection under it, be written in helvetica, or look like a fucking sticker peeling off the wall, but this logo clearly comes from the days of a more innocent internet.

Enter the new logo:

New MapQuest Logo

I don’t like this much better. In fact, I specifically don’t care for the superscript thrown on the Q, or the balance of font sizes between the M and the Q. The color choice is okay, if not a bit loud for a company that’s been around for almost as long as I’ve been using the internet.

Hmm…come to think of it, how long has MapQuest been around? I remember using them before Google Maps came out, but how early did that start? Let’s head over to the About page. Maybe there’s some information there.

MapQuest: The Company!

Ok, reading along here…woah! Now just wait a minute! Did you read what I read?

MapQuest has been helping people find places, get maps and directions for over 40 years. As one of the most recognized and trusted brands on the internet, we’ve created mapping solutions that support consumers and businesses alike. Learn how MapQuest mapping solutions can help you get to where you need to go.

40 Years? How could that be? Did they publish printed maps in the past? Then again, this is starting to make sense. Look at this:

MapQuest Classic

This is what MapQuest used to look like. In fact, MapQuest has looked pretty much like this for a long time. If anything has happened to the interface in the past decade, I believe it was that the map down screen got larger and had improved controls added to it.

Have you seen the new MapQuest homepage?

The New MapQuest!

This design is definitely much cleaner. You couldn’t see it in the screenshot of Classic MapQuest, but a lot of garbage content has been stripped from the interface in favor of a design that brings you straight to the point: Maps! There’s even a press release about the redesign.

Something about this redesign doesn’t sit well with me. It gives me a strange sort of “uncanny valley” vibe with regards to some other website…

Google Maps

Oh that’s right! Google Maps! Isn’t it incredible how similar the two now look?

Let’s get to the point and call this exactly what it is: A midlife crisis. MapQuest is 40 years old and has been replaced by a much younger competitor with a better design and better functionality, so they’ve gone the route of the redesign in a very pathetic attempt to outdo their youthful nemesis.

This is no different than an older man buying a motorcycle, or an older woman getting cosmetic surgery. It’s a sad attempt by MapQuest to remain youthful and relevant in a world that is leaving it behind.

I don’t doubt that flexicious is, as their site claims, a “MUST HAVE” flex datagrid. What I do doubt is that many people will have a better idea than I do what the hell is going on when I look at their demo.

Ho. Lee. Crap. What we’re looking at is a very complicated DataGrid, the flash world’s version of the spreadsheet. Considering that most people’s entire experience with spreadsheets consists of, at most, viewing Excel documents this presentation is unnecessarily complicated.

Upon first glance, I have no idea what many of these controls are supposed to do. Clearly, this is a powerful spreadsheet. I think. I am kind of afraid to touch anything though. Admittedly, I don’t do as much work with large sets of data as some people certainly do, so perhaps its my limited experience with this volume of information that makes so much of this interface seem foreign and confusing to me.

Without jumping too far in depth as to what I found so confusing about Flexicious, I’ll just present my general reactions to it with a few accompanying screenshots. My reactions proceed as follows:

1. I don’t like this.
   
2. I DEFINITELY don’t like this.
   
3. This is pretty clever, but the layout makes me claustrophobic.
   
4. This seems wrong to me on many levels.
   

I understand that it’s hard to invent new visual metaphors for navigating data, especially as the volume of that data grows, but that’s all the more reason one should be extra careful not to go over the deep end and risk alienating users. I’m impressed by the amount of functionality that’s obviously built into flexicious, but at the same time I’m afraid to use it. What good is that?