del.icio.us misses the Web 1.0 train

Continuing my trend-bucking look at web services and technologies that have been around for a while, I wanted to talk about del.icio.us (which I’ll be spelling delicious), a social bookmarking service. The core idea is that you can save bookmarks, and other delicious users can browse your bookmarks. It’s a simple, powerful idea that has spawned a host of competitor services (such as Magnolia and Furl) because it just makes sense. If you’ve ever had to move data from one computer to another, or switched browsers, you know that data migration can be a pain. Why not keep your data online? In my mind, that’s the primary advantage of delicious, not the sharing and exploring. Sharing and exploring already exist via email and Google (or a number of other interfaces), so while it’s nice that those features are all in one place, I don’t think they’re key.

That’s why I’m surprised that delicious dropped the ball on making it easy to save bookmarks. The main route that the delicious folks want you to use to save bookmarks is a browser extension. I think this is a very elegant design decision, because it eliminates interface modes. No need to switch your mental context from researching to going to http://del.icio.us, signing in, copying the original link, etc. You just click a button, and the interface comes to you. Removing barriers to use: smart.

But what happens when you want to save a bookmark from a different computer, like your friend’s laptop, or a terminal at a school or library? You don’t have your browser extension in this context, and I think it’s the context you would most want to save a bookmark in, as you won’t be able to check the computer’s browsing history later. I was in this very context, so I went to http://del.icio.us, logged in and then looked for a link to save a bookmark. And looked. And looked again.

I saw how to save a hostlist item, but nothing where I could paste in my own URL and tags. I google “save a bookmark to del.icio.us”, but that search comes up naught. Ok, I’ll take a look at the Help section I decide, though I’m not thrilled about the prospect of discovering what a moron I am. I head to the help section, and am rewarded with a link entitled A guide to saving bookmarks. Yes! I read through it, and am dismayed to find that there is not a single mention of saving a bookmark without a browser extension. I’m back to square one, and pretty frustrated that I just spent five minutes trying to perform a task that should take 10 seconds. Five minutes may not sound like much, but imagine how you’d feel if an every day task took 30 times longer than you expected.

I’m about to abandon my attempt, and just email myself the link, when I arbitrarily decide to click every link in the header (as there are only five), just to see if I could have missed something obvious under “your bookmarks”. Lo and behold! Clicking the “Post” link gives me a text field to paste in my link. That’s right: Post. Despite the fact that all the del.icio.us documentation uses “save” as the verb, the developers have decided that Post is the correct word for saving a bookmark.

There are many rules of thumb for web development, and one of them is that users don’t read pages, they skim pages, so writing for the web needs to be very concise. Jakob Nielsen found throwing out half of what you’ve written to be very helpful. However, you have to be very careful what you remove. Delicious was so eager to be succinct that they didn’t use ‘Post Bookmark’ which would have been about a million percent more understandable. Also, they weren’t consistent in their terminology. Using the term ’save a bookmark’ several times in their help pages made me much less likely to look for another term to describe the action I wanted to take. Had the ‘Post’ link been called ‘Save’, or the help docs talked about ‘posting a bookmark’ in the first paragraph, my search likely would have been much shorter.

Delicious is actually very well executed and very useful, but little encounters like this can make it seem much less well thought out than it actually is. The challenges of being consistent through a large application, and being descriptive with your link terms are just a few that litter the path towards creating usability.