Thinkcorps

I spent about 4 hours on Flickr this weekend, searching for photos to illustrate a presentation for SMITH’s new six-word memoir book. If anyone you know doubts the future of participatory media, have them dig around for 10 minutes. Yes, most amateur photos are probably crap, but so many are incredible. Couple that with Creative Commons licensing, and Flickr suddenly becomes “important” to the mediascape in a whole new way.

That being said, Flickr, you have a major design flaw that needs immediate (and super easy) correction. On search results pages, the cursor is focused into the search input. This is a no-no. Automatically focusing the cursor assumes you know what I want to do. But how can you know on a page with several possible activities?

In fact, the primary purpose of a search results page is to browse lots of results. By focusing the cursor, you’ve broken my keyboard control (arguably the more important of my two input devices) and I cannot page up or down. I have to click (sometimes double-click) the mouse to unfocus and get my pageup/pagedown working.

In fact, on a typical web page, with all the options it presents: why assume anything when the page just finished loading?

Like I said, I was on the site for 4+ hours this weekend and I was about to ring someone’s neck over this.