$ whoami

I have two twitter accounts: my personal account and my developer account. I do not like to mix these two accounts and be very careful about it. I even login from two different browsers just to make sure that I do not update a wrong account by mistake.

I recently received an email from twitter when someone started following me on twitter. I clicked on the link which took me to the account detail page of the account which started following me:

Before I return the compliment by following this account, I wanted to make sure that I have logged in with my right account so that I do not follow someone from my other account and spam them.

I spent about a minute to identify which account I have logged in from. I was surprised by that fact that there is no way to know which twitter account I logged-in to. There is simply no way to know whether I logged in from my personal account or from my developer account! What happened to good old "Welcome Viraj Turakhia" or "You are logged in as virajturakhia"??

This design flaw clearly violates "Recognition rather than Recall" heuristic of design principles!

May be it is not common for people to have more than one twitter account and that is why this flaw went unnoticed!

I hope this blog escalates the need to this information on Twitter account detail page and Twitter finally fixes the issue. Share this blog with your friends to spread the news. :)

Providing Location Information - II

After my previous blog on providing location information on websites of businesses, I received questions from my readers asking for examples of websites which has provided location information in a better way.

It didn't take long for me to find a website where location information is easily accessible.

Take a look at http://www.kylieschicagopizza.com/ and compare how easy it is to find location of the restaurant as compared to examples I enlisted in my previous blog.

Challenge yourself to perform following tasks on these websites and you will get the point:

• find address of the business
• get directions from your home/office to the business location
• try to send the address in an email to your friend
• try to use a different maps application and pin point the location of the business in that app
• find out business hours from the website
• zoom in to the map to find out minor details
• zoom out in the map to see its relative location with your city

Drop a comment on how easy/difficult it was to perform these tasks on the websites.