Review: Getting Around HubPages

HubPages does something very right -- they provide a simple, intuitive interface that I suspect few users have much trouble with. This is much, much more difficult than you might imagine.

Most users of technology have frequent cause to curse it. They can't figure out how to format something or how to make some piece of software work correctly. They can't find the right button to make their Blu-Ray player go back to the main menu. Or maybe they can't find the topic in Help that tells them how to create a formula in Excel.

One of the biggest challenges with designing technology of any kind is how to design user interaction. You essentially have to create simple interactions with extremely complex devices and software.

The Holy Grail of user interaction

Technology designers love user interaction that requires no documentation. The iPhone is an example of such a user experience. Most everything on the iPhone works the same way and the learning curve is very shallow. Touch a button, swipe the screen.

If everything you did on the web or on your desktop computer was designed this way, we could put a lot of tech writers out of work (not my goal, since I spent years writing documentation). HubPages has done an admirable job of designing their interface but it's not all sunshine and poetry.

Love this...

I spend most of my time on my account screen and the start a new hub screen (hub editor) in HubPages, so I'll cover the good and bad of both.

My account

My account's greatest virtue is its simplicity. The most important information to anyone who has been writing on HubPages is the statistics about their hubs. That's exactly what dominates my account.

The stats section has a large header, Hub Traffic Statistics, making it plain what information the section displays. On the opposite side of the screen from the header is a Help button.

All of your published or unpublished hubs are viewable from this screen. You can click an edit button to launch the article in the hub editor. You can see how many times an article has been viewed and whether the views are going up or down. There's a convenient key for the stats table at the bottom of the screen.

Crucial information in an easy-to-view, understandable format.

Hub editor

The hub editor is a bit more complex due to the nature of what we use it for. Still, considering the several tasks that are required for a good hub, the interface is pretty intuitive. Each section of a hub has a toolbar that has controls that are for the most part easy to figure out. Some of them, like the control to move a capsule (the green double arrow), take a little experimentation to understand their function.

Keep in mind that you can't break anything in here. Click buttons, mess around, and you'll find that the interface won't let you do anything disasterous.

The sections are ordered logically, starting from the title on down. Adding and ordering capsules is fairly intuitive, and once you've done it, it's a snap.

The bad

As I said, it's not all rosy. There is room for improvement.

My account

My account's greatest detraction for me is the gray box at the top of the screen with links to other screens. From a purely graphic design perspective, it doesn't work. I'm not a graphic designer but I know enough about user interaction to know this one is broken.

The problem for me is that my eye cannot quickly and easily land on anything in that box. Everything has the same weight and there are too many choices for me to remember where something is located on the page.

I wish the links were different colored buttons, still organized by groups the way they are now. Or even better, I wish I could group the buttons that I use most into one area. Peronalization, baby! That's where user interaction shines.

Hub editor

I can find anything I need to use on the hub editor screen but again, most of it has the same weight. It's good that they don't move you through a wizard for all of the functionality on this screen, but I don't like that I have to type in this little box on top of the main screen. I'd prefer to type directly into the text window and be able to jump around to other capsules without closing this one.

Ordering capsules, as I said, is pretty intuitive but I did have to experiment and then preview the page to see what happened. I didn't quite understand at first that you could peg capsules to the right and essentially get the text to wrap around them.

I just guessed at the fact that I could add my own choices for Amazon books. That's not too bad. I wish, however, that there was a way to click a button on Amazon's page to enter the URL into my capsule instead of cutting and pasting back and forth.

The overall

I really had to stretch a bit to find something to grouse about. Having been in the high-tech field for so long, I skew toward the tech-savvy end of the user spectrum. I can figure most things out given enough time.

But I think most novices could find their way around here without too much trouble. As I said starting out, I believe HubPages did a good job here. Now, if they'd just write my Hubs for me.

Is there anything about the HubPages user experience that you either love or hate?