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Someone wanted to know what my thoughts on PeopleBrowsr were, so I’ve copied the email I sent to them in reply to their request for a review.

(Now that I’ve finished writing this, I realize this might come across as a bit harsh. I apologize in advance and I appreciate all the work that went into building this. It’s a lot easier to criticize than to actually go out and build something yourself.)

I’ll start with the initial set up process. The homepage itself wasn’t clear – what does PeopleBrowsr do? How will it help me? Then, if I’m ready to take the plunge, it’s not obvious that I’m supposed to click the Twitter icon – it looks like a graphic, not a “click me!” button. 37signals does a great job with their homepage. Once you do click the Twitter icon, you are presented with a login form, which is fine, although it’d be better if you explained why you need my private Twitter password and why I should trust you with it. The form submit buttons are also not very clear. First, there are two of them, and they both look like they might be video players or something. Second, clicking on them without filling in the username/password info leaves you with a javascript alert box error, which is tacky design.

So then I am presented with the following screen (which I got to by clicking the rightmost Go button – the one that I thought would give me the three column view):

Now what do I do with this page? How is it helping me? I use twitter to read people’s tweets, but this page has no text on it at all. Some of these avatars I don’t even recognize. Where is the content? At best, Twitter is a conversation. At least, it’s a stream of status messages. This grid, however, is just static. Imagine I’m at a conference or there is a major world calamity – how will this view give me “more power for twitter”?

Smaller nitpicks about this page – I don’t think the Search tip is necessary. Search boxes are so common these days that if, in your user testing, you found people were confused, then a redesign of the box should clear things up. Apple does a good job by simply including the magnifying glass icon. The icons to the left of the search box are opaque. What do they do? I should be able to have some intuition on what something is before I click on it. Otherwise, a majority of people just will ignore it. Also, the Search tip obscures the input fields when you do click on the icons.

OK, so let’s assume that I’ve managed to discover the small blue icon in the bottom right corner of the window and I’ve figured out that “Go to Stream” (the tooltip) will give me what twitter.com has always shown me: the tweets of the people I follow (that is the point of twitter, after all).

First, notice the vertical alphabetical index bar. 1) I don’t know how it got there. 2) I don’t know how to get rid of it. 3) It’s obscuring the only way I can interact with people (reply, DM, retweet, etc), because that functionality is hidden behind the click of an arrow. Second, these tweets are old. There is a 30 minute gap between the latest tweet and the one before that.

I do really like the Followers column. I’ve never seen that before, and it’s a really nice stream, especially for those of us who have more followers than people we are following. I also like that you can tag your friends, although illustrating the public/private distinction with a padlock is a little unclear.

I think I’ll stop here, as this was the point I got to yesterday when I just gave up on PeopleBrowsr and went back to TweetDeck (fast, easy to use, groups). One feature request I do have which I think would be powerful is the addition of my Facebook friends’ status messages, as a majority of them are not using Twitter. If I could have one dashboard for all of my status message needs, I’d find that very useful.

Thanks,
David