Zappos annoying out of stock message

It’s so annoying. So very, very annoying. Here’s how it works:

Pick a shoe, and select a size on the page with a drop down box. If the shoe is out of stock, this pop-up message appears. The only way to change the size or color again is to click “close this window” every time you adjust the drop down.

This is ridiculous. It probably takes more work for them to check the stock, and use a javascript pop-up, than it would be to just show me on the page which shoes are in stock.

So not only am I told I can’t have these shoes, but I’m inconvenienced because I have this pop-up box in the way now. Ahhhh!

Zappos, you should be ashamed. You’re customer service is so awesome, yet your web site is as lackluster as a grey wall.

I’ll still buy all my shoes from you though.

Tumblr submit breaks convention

Conventions are important to follow, but are worth breaking in certain situations. Namely, when it won’t require any learning curve. This submit button on the left breaks a convention that I didn’t even know I followed.

Tumblr allows me to post with a bookmarklet. In this pop-up posting process, adding a link to this entry with the wysywg editor requires me to enter the address, title and/or target from another pop-up window. All good so far. But the “Insert” button is on the left, and every time I go to click it, my mouse wanders to the bottom right corner first.

In this example, it’s not especially taxing. But sometimes a larger pop-up appears, making the mousing around rather annoying.

Improvements to this could be to:

1. Downplay the “Cancel” button, so it doesn’t look like a button. Instead just a link that says “Cancel.”
2. Place the cancel button next to the submit button. Then I’d be less tempted to mouse to the bottom right corner, the typical finishing point for reading a page.
3. Flip the positioning, align the submit to the right side, cancel to the left.

These ideas are conveyed with excellent clarity and plentiful examples in Luke Wroblewski’s book Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks. Or check out the Flickr set for all those examples from the book.

Save for nothing

I’m on the Save for Web dialog in Photoshop. I’m trying to resize an image. And as I tab through the form, changing the width and/or height, I’m face to face with Mr. Annoyance.

I can not tab to the apply button.

This is a small detail, but it holds up my workflow by a few millaseconds per file. Multiply that by thousands of Save for Web dialog’s, and that’s a lot of wasted time to take my hands off the keyboard and mouse over the apply button.

It’s small things like this that could make Photoshop a joy to work with. Instead it inspires me to waste more time blogging about my frustrations. I blame you, Adobe, for my late nights in the office. (I’m kidding, naturally.)

That is all. More happy posts to come. I promise.

Mac OS X window resizing woes

Perhaps this is annoying to me because I come from a long history of Windows use. I’m used to being able to grab any border of a window and drag it to resize the window.

On a Mac, the bottom right corner is the go to place to resize a window. The biggest gripe I have with it, is that sometimes the right side of the window hangs off the screen. So then I must move the entire window on the page, then grab the bottom right corner.

What would solve this, would be adding another resize control on the bottom left corner.