Thumbtack is a cool new project from the people over at Microsoft Live Labs.
It’s designed to be a personal storage place where you collect clips, URLs and information from around the Web (imagine a web based version of OneNote). But it’s more than just a static collection like One Note or your browser favourites — it makes the information dynamic and allows you to structure and analyse it to make it more meaningful.
For instance, imagine you’re looking for a place to live using rightmove.com. You create a new Thumbtack collection and map addresses and build charts to compare costs using Thumbtack gadgets. We undertook this process using rightmove.com to see if ThumbTack was of any use or was simply another meaningless application.
To start with we performed a search on RightMove, and from here proceeded to take properties that we liked the look of and pasted them in to our ThumbTack instance. Unfortunately this seemingly simple process turned in to a nightmare and while we understand that ThumbTack is still beta we hoped that we would have an overall positive reaction but simply couldn’t overcome the wide range of bugs, bad interface design and ill thought out features that we discovered such as:
- The short how-to guide for the use of ThumbTack is a snippit like a snippit you would copy and paste in to ThumbTack if you already knew how to use it! It would be much better if this information could be viewed on a simple web page.
- We couldn’t CTRL+V information in to ThumbTack using FireFox for security reasons (interestingly this feature worked on IE8 which we were eventually forced to use, more on that further down)
- After pasting in a new snippit into ThumbTack it wasn’t immediately obvious how to save this new item. We hoped that simply clicking new would save the existing snippit, or better still there would be a big SAVE button! It turns out that you have to use the close button in the top right hand corner to save a snippit. Deduct one point for a lack of user interface intuitivity.
- Half way through our session we were unceremoniously removed from the application with a warning that stated “There was an error with your Thumbtack authorization. For your safety, please sign back in”. At this stage our level of irritation was such that we nearly called it a day but decided to persevere. I’m glad we did because fortunately ThumbTack had saved all of our existing data. However we were then logged out again! This time we decide to change tactics and start using Internet Explorer 8 instead of FireFox in the hope that ThumbTack would play nice. It didn’t and we found ourselves having to log back in at least half a dozen times.
- There was no obvious way in which to delete a snippit of information, again, frustrating.
With our five selected properties saved in to ThumbTack (in between being logged out and logging back in numerous times!) we then thought we’d try out one of the gadgets. The Address Gadget took our fancy, which uses Microsoft Maps in order to plot the addresses in each ThumbTack snippet based we presume on the address that is entered in the snippit. This didn’t work out so well. Only one pin appeared on the map to represent one property, and with no further instructions on how the Address Gadget should work we had no choice but to call it a day for the ThumbTack Gadgets.
Address Gadget
As a final push we thought we’d publish the ThumbTack we had created for you good people to take a look at. Once again the interface to perform even this, the most simple of tasks, was not intuitive. We clicked the publish button expecting something to happen and nothing did. It was only when we then clicked the Publish this collection text that a URL was then generated.
Publish - User Interface Fail
Most shocking of all we then decided to check the published URL to make sure it had worked only to be presented with the following warning:
The second Publish fail
Why the heck are the developers at Microsoft Live Labs not testing their application on the latest versions of Internet Explorer? We can’t think of one good reason. Arguably the most important step for software development is the actual testing of the application, and Beta or not this should not be left to the end users. Especially those who you hope will be early adopters and spread positive encouragement for the new application.
So what do we think of ThumbTack? Overall it’s not a bad idea. It’s obviously a demonstration of the new technologies such as WPF that Microsoft is showing off to everybody and this is reflected in the new concepts in web development that this application demonstrates. Unfortunately the bugs assisted by a poorly designed interface let this application down in such a huge way that currently we would dream of recommending it to our worst enemies.
Now we understand that this is a beta application, but so are most of Google’s applications. Unlike Microsoft, Google appear to have a quality assurance and bug testing department. We have of course encountered errors with Google’s software, it’s just software after all. However not the showstoppers that were presented to us by Microsoft’s ThumbTack.
Don’t take our word for it, why not try it for yourself? – http://livelabs.com/thumbtack/ (you’ll need a Microsoft Live Passport if you haven’t one already).
