Tuesday, November 30, 2010

New Toolbar!



Well you may have noticed the nice new toolbar when you last logged into the site. The new toolbar integrates experience from the shortcomings of the old toolbar.

The old toolbar was a bit large. This made it hard on our customers who had smaller screens. It also limited the number of tools that could fit into the visible toolbar.

When I first created the site my guiding mantra was 'make it simple to use'. The large tools made it obvious that you only had a few choices, which is comforting. However this was done at the expense of actual usability. I think the new toolbar fixes this.

I also moved the Tools, My Tools, Photos, and Add Pages tabs to the top and moved the admin, logout and other controls to the upper right hand side. This made these controls available from every tab. Customers found it confusing that they could only get to the admin link from the tools tab.

Thirdly, I hope you like the new design of the tools and the bar. I tried to bring them up to date while still making it obvious what they do.

The last great thing about the new toolbar is the slider for the photo tray. The old slider was a brown rectangle. Yuck! I had really been wanting to sharpen it up and make it a more obvious slider. Well it is now!

Well I hope you like it! Please let me know what you think. If you have any feedback at all please let me know.