Thursday, February 19, 2009

Netvibes.com - the worst first impression I ever had

— You never have a second chance to make a good first impression.


Today I have visited Netvibes



highlighted problems of netvibes


I havent seen so much fail in quite some time.

  1. The page is composed from modules that use _three_ different languages at the same time - English, German and French. This is simply incredible. Different languages are even within the same widgets (see "Liste de tâches. Nothing to do")
  2. Every service I've seen so far properly identifies my IP as Swiss. Netvibes shows me weather report for Paris, France. Even more, it shows me news from Switzerland and offers me to use german Google Site (google.de).
  3. Too much spam in the first few seconds of our acquaintance ("Set netvibes as my default homepage", "Sign up now, it's free"). I want to see first what you can give me, not what I can do for you.
  4. Inconsistent interface - three different types of "close" buttons on the same page.
  5. Set netvibes as my default homepage image gets cut badly on lower resolution (not seen properly on screenshot)
  6. Duplicate search boxes. Why would I need two google searchboxes on the same page? Oh, I forgot, one is german Google search, even though I am in Switzerland.
  7. What the hell will happen when I press "close" button near "Remind me later" and "Don't show this again"? "Remind me later" or "Don't show this again"? One out of these three ("Remind me later", "Don't show this again" and Close Button) is clearly redundant and even brings confusion.This is overall poor design - and on the page that is supposed to make the first impression on the user, in the most important part of screen real estate - header (see Fitt's law).
  8. Wtf does that check box does near search field in "Recherche Web" multilingual failwidget? You'll have no idea until you click it when you already have some search results to display

Google-bomb "failure" should point to http://netvibes.com/ , not G.W. Bush's profile. I wouild rather set my browser's homepage to about:robots - it is as much informative as default Netvibes page, however less irritating. The only real use of Netvibes was, probably, this.

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