Ma.gnolia - utterly incomprehensible
You’re new to social bookmarking.
Your friend says you should check out a web site called Ma.gnolia because its like bookmarking (which you only use begrudgingly from time to time), but, like, so much better. Of course he doesn’t mention the bizarro mid-word full stop in the name and URL, but you find the web site nevertheless.
You’re greeted with the Ma.gnolia front page. You are mystified. Baffled even. You scroll down. Huh?!
I think we have a new victim of mini-home page syndrome.
Social bookmarking may be old hat to the hardened web nerd, but outside the sphere of geekdom there must be an enormous amount of web users for whom these services would enhance their browsing experience. That’s the point of them, after all. Whether they will actual be able to use them or not is another thing entirely.
Del.icio.us got the web geeks onboard (case in point - “firewall leak tester” is currently the 10th most popular link). It didn’t matter that the barrier of entry was high (which it was), once enough people were talking about how useful it was, enough users (who were generally very technically literate) signed up and the project took off.
But del.icio.us already exists. If you want to compete, you need to be better and/or different. A great way Ma.gnolia could have been both is simply by being friendlier.
The Ma.gnolia front page however tells you absolutly nothing about what the service actually does. Ironically, just like Flock, there’s a fantastic page with the details a new users need, but those detail aren’t on the front page.
Instead, the front page consists of a clever sentence, an unlabelled screen shot widget thingy, a buried search box, and a highlighted, unexplained ‘Featured Linker’ and ‘Hot Group’. Sure, the “learn more” link is there, but personally I think a “learn more” link is only useful when the user feels confident they are actually going to learn something more. Confidence matters, after all. After their experience with the Ma.gnolia home page, one wonders how likely this would be.
The really perplexing thing is the amount of talent behind the design of the site. Maybe this is how the envisaged it, maybe its not. Lets say the rest of the site is fantastic though and the service is mind-bendingly good. If a new user hits the front page though, how will they ever know?
Update: The Ma.gnolia guys have started a discussion about their front page, in part due to this article. Nice one guys, and if any readers want to go over and add their 2c, by all means feel free!
I love ma.g’s look. Exquisitely crafted yes, but I agree, it doesn’t have a quarter the ease of use as good ‘ol del. I have come to the ma.g threshold several times, tempted by the pretty graphics but always lost interest. it’s seems like all fluff. del. is too easy and I already have my 400+ bookmarks in there. ma.g would do good to find a way to allow their users to import from del.
- n0s0ap on 01 August 2006
I’ve pretty much given up on ma.gnolia (which I have nicknamed la.gnolia). Cute concept, but I can’t bend my mind around using it intuitively. Also, it takes more resources than I care to use to bookmark and retrieve saved websites.
- j. brotherlove on 04 August 2006
I think that it’s just a case of “too obvious is not cool” where in my opinion you cannot be obvious enough… a web page (and especially a homepage) should TELL you what the site is about quickly and clearly.
- Erwin Heiser on 12 August 2006
The first comment here reads, in part, “While Ma.gnolia’s visuals are simply beautiful… the information design is lacking.” Stole my thunder, that did!
It really is a lovely site ... but, really, isn’t that just other words for “Lotsa sizzle!” ... I mean, really. If I was willing to be mean (which I am, regularly) I’d say that this sort of design is all about packaging.
Know what I did when I got to the site? I looked for the function to upload my bookmarks. I wudda become a loyal user on the spot ... heck, I can stand looking at that layout X*10 times a day. But nope. AOL does it. (Or is it Yahoo ... I’m lost in a swirl of inchoate services. Oh say, did you hear about NetVibe scoring another $15M?)
Elegance without function ... sounds symptomatic to me.
Try raising seed money in this atmosphere ... the situation is ridiculous; the aristocrats are wearing every more elegant luxuries. *shrug* Not a good sign.
cheers
- Ben Tremblay on 16 August 2006
ma.g would do good to find a way to allow their users to import from del.
They do have that. There is an import function. Had any of you taken a second to click on the “Support and Tools” button you would have found it in one second. It has several options, actually.
http://ma.gnolia.com/support
Sorry, but I disagree with this article. Ma.gnolia is much better than Del. IMHO.
- Davezilla on 23 August 2006
Sorry Dave, but no. I clicked on your link, figured if it’s that easy to make my delicious stuff magnolia stuff, why not give it a shot, Davezilla says it’s easy. One second it should take me.
Well, maybe if I go deeper into all the links, looking for the one with info on importing my bookmarks.
There’s 3 links there, “Tutorial”, “FAQ”, “Add-ons” that all ambiguously suggest that I may be able to find this piece of really crucial info. But I just don’t feel like looking.
- jlactose on 24 August 2006
From the FAQ, which I got to from the help and support page:
Can I import my bookmarks from Del.icio.us (or BlinkList, or Furl, or Simpy??)
Currently we only support importing from Del.icio.us, and you can find out how to do that under the Support & Tools section. Based on user requests, we will add support for importing from other online services as Ma.gnolia grows. If you want to import from a service we don’t support, tell us using the link at the bottom of the page.
Please note that you need to be logged in as registered member in order to access bookmark importing tools.
- jlactose on 24 August 2006
Seems a little silly to send me back to the page I started from to find something I left that page looking for.
- jlactose on 24 August 2006
While Ma.gnolia’s visuals are simply beautiful… the information design is lacking.
del.icio.us presents three bookmarks in the same space ma.gnolia takes to tell you about one. The ma.g folks took the weblog metaphor for posting and discussion of links and I personally feel it doesn’t work at that level. True, weblogs really were linklogs from the beginning but people are expecting these services to be more of a database than content presentation. The focus should have been on entering, storing, and browsing items. Instead it seems to heavily favor a one-focus-item at a time view of the web world.
ma.gnolia did implement the social networking aspects better than Del.icio.us did and those features could give them the edge with small teams and business looking for an online service for this type of knowledge management.
Like you said though, they had an all-star team design and implement this service ... the visuals really are top-notch but the user interface is harder to use than del.icio.us’s. (And that’s even with del.icio.us’s sometimes odd terminology and categorization of navigation options.)
- Shawn Medero on 01 August 2006