User Experience Critique of Path 2 | Hacker News Reader

User Experience Critique of Path 2

startingup.me

36 pointsbmull12 comments

The glaring usability issue for me was deleting a post.

Swiping doesn't work, nor are clues provided in detail view. The answer is that the delete button is hidden inside the Smiley Face/Like button, which was not intuitive to me. After all, if I want to delete a post I obviously don't like it and won't think to look there. As a caveat to what this article says, it would be better for swipe to be reappropriated to the expected behavior. This is going to be more of an issue if more apps adopt under-tableview navigation.

Thanks. I didn't know you could delete things. I tried the same swipe to no avail.

Wow .. I didn't think you could delete a post either. Figured they were just adding that. I'll update the post.

I've never heard of Path before today - why use Path instead of Facebook/Google Plus?

It seems like an instance of "Yet Another Photosharing app", which is getting tiresome. Sometimes reading mobile development news makes it seem like photo/status sharing, and todo lists are the only things people do on mobile phones.

1) Great design, especially with the latest iteration.

2) Friend limit. This changes the game quite a bit. You have to be conscious about choosing whom to add, which will most likely lead to adding people you only wish to share with.

3) Taking this into account, you will be more inclined to share things with people that would care to interact with it. On Facebook it would be stupid to say you are awake, or asleep, but on Path it makes more sense, because you are sharing with the people you care to share with.

P.S. Anyone have an HTC Wildfire? I've tried installing it, but it doesn't work although the minimum is specified as 2.1 on the market?

I'm not a big fan of the friend limit. If your concern is that you share too much with people you don't like than a simpler solution than resorting to another service would be to unfriend those people or make a list with people you care about

There's absolutely no reason what so ever to use Path. It's like... well... this looks good on a superficial basis, but what is it for?

And that's why they're not going anywhere.

I've never used Path, but recently I've clicked a few links on Twitter to path.com URLs from my phone. The salient features were:

- A photo of the user confusingly filled up the top third of the screen and was momentarily distracting until I realized what I was supposed to be looking at.

- Scrolling the page felt weirdly jerky.

Not auspicious for the app itself.

One thing I expected to be able to do in Path was share a link. It seems that posting a URL as part of a post doesn't render that URL clickable ... so either it's an oversight, or a feature they don't support right now.

Here's a UX critique, I don't always want to be on my phone. Especially since the "Blah wants to be your friend" opens in the Android browser rather than the Path app. I'm not logged in in my mobile browser, and I don't want to because my password is a huge random set of characters. I'd login from my desktop since I have LastPass, and I can't accept the friend request from the Path app natively. Thus, I have friend requests piling up and I've yet to return to the app.

Don't worry, the emails are ridiculous anyways:

http://imageshar.es/4ed7bbc343641e6c1e000dc1

Why even include a link in the email if it brings me to a page that just lets me know I can't do anything from there?

Right, that's my point. I assume if I open it on my mobile, it will let me accept their friend request. Unfortunately, I'm not logged into my mobile browser.

The "right thing to do" in Android, is to register those URLs with the app. So that they open in the app.

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