UsableMarkets

User experience professionals are often driven mad by little things. For example, some web sites can appear perfectly reasonable and usable to its users, but can drive us batty because of the few, minor things which were so easy to get right, but for some unfathomable reason were completely screwed up.

Take socialPicks, for example. socialPicks, a stock market prediction market (please ignore the redundancy), seems to be a perfectly good site … until one looks closer.

To start with, lets look at the global navigation.

All …?

While Stocks, People, Groups, and even Tags makes sense, what is Explore: All? What’s wrong with Home? They already use it their other global nav. And, now that we’re at it, why not integrate the two global navs? Someone wasn’t thinking very hard on this one.

Another place where some thinking might have helped is the personal portfolio. For an example let’s use the thebulltrader’s portfolio.

“I have a lot of … um … stuff … in my portfolio”

I have nothing against pie charts, but why is it that they are the most abused of all chart types? Perhaps it’s because pie charts look pretty, and are therefor seductive to use, but they quickly become meaningless once you have more than four values in the chart. And if you want to make your pie chart even worse (which apparently socialPicks does), then limit the chart’s color palette.

Perhaps the most obvious and serious problem at socialPicks is that they appear to be unable to ignore any idea that smacks of Web 2.0. For those of you who want a quick primer on what we mean when we say “Web 2.0″ a quick visit to socialPicks should clear up any confusion. There is Ajax and dynamic pages; social networking, wisdom of the crowds; and folksonomies (otherwise known as tagging for the uninitiated).

One has to wonder if all these Web 2.0 ideas were part of the “story” to pick up funding, or just the result of over-enthusiasm. While I have no doubt that socialPicks has a very clear understanding of their business model, their design strategy leaves a lot to be desired.

As always, thanks for listening.
~alex

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