Friendfeed

FriendFeed disappoints – start to finish. From the empty-feeling opening page to the lack of interactivity, this site is a big downer.

The first thing I noticed was all that space. The opening page looks unfinished and rather ‘cut and paste.’ The only clickable icon was to ‘create and account.’ I wanted to find out what I was creating an account for first, so I looked around. On the right-hand side are icons with some minimal info, I clicked on them, but nothing happened. Very frustrating. After all, everyone knows all icons are clickable now.

I had to click on some smallish text toward the bottom right-hand side to find out what was going on.

The bottom navigation is simple and efficient, but nothing special. The internal pages tabbed navigation on top was nice, but not entirely consistent throughout the site.

Overall, I think the site needs a lot of work. If they want to make the product appealing, they need to make a much more attractive, interesting, compelling site. I was instantly put off by the lack of the familiar and functional interface and I had little interest in pursuing the site further. If it wasn’t for this assignment, I would have left immediately because there was nothing visually appealing at all and what little content was there was too bland to get excited about.

Friendfeed.com

Animoto

Animoto – the End of All Slideshows

It analyzes your images, it feels your music, it customizes a video.

Animoto is a really cool site. I really liked the layout and the simplicity of finding exactly what I was looking for. The first button I saw said ‘get started, create a new video’ so I did. After a few more prompts I was watching a slick, custom, attractively presented video of my flyers coordinated with an accompanying customized soundtrack.

Although I instantly liked the look and feel of the sight, I had little hopes that the program would work (or if it did, that it would be any good). I was pleasantly surprised by the ease, proficiency, and brevity of the process of having a pretty-nearly instant ‘product.’

I checked out the slideshow presentation and was again surprised at the high quality and sophistication of the presentation. I’ve stumbled my way through making a similar Flash presentation that took me 2 weeks to build. Animoto did it in 3 minutes. There are several options to mail, share, post, remix, etc. the video and each is easy to find, understand and act upon.

The site is laid out in three comfortable columns, each filled (but not crowded) with relevant information. The bottom navigation is easy to find and search through, as well as thorough and simple.

This site is very nice, clean, concise and immediate. I liked the fact that I could easily implement this service with such little hassle and confusion. Because of this user-friendly, intuitive design and instant results, I felt like I was accomplishing something and felt good having a usable, useful result when I was finished.

The product offered is as impressive as this beautifully executed site.

Animoto.com