I don’t know when this update was rolled out, but I do know that it sucks.  It’s amazing how something that seems so trivial can be shitted up with only a few tweaks.

1. Chat-based Audio Notifications – Every time anyone (yourself included) posts a message in the chat, a little blip noise sounds.  This is fine if you want it, but if you are trying to enjoy someone performing music, every time someone sends a message in a chat, it becomes littered with annoying blips. No one in their right mind offers Audio Notifications without a way to disable them, and yet, Stickam decided they would.
2. Can We Use Your Camera? – It used to be that only when you went “Live” that Stickam would prompt you for access to your camera.  Now, as soon as the chat player loads, it asks you for access to your camera.  So what?  This means that technically, even if you never go “Live”, they could be looking at you.  They say otherwise, and I don’t have any reason not to trust them, but why bother prompting the users for something they aren’t going to do?  Seems like they had it perfect before, one less click for every user, every time they load the chat window.
3. Losing Focus on Input Field – Some users that were in the chat room with I (there were only a dozen or so at any given time) were experiencing a problem when other users sent a message in the chat, they would no longer be focused on the input field.  This means that anytime someone sent a chat message, they’d have to re-click on the textbox to send a reply.  This amounts to a lot of clicks, lots of wasted human labor.

Bottom-line: Stickam, don’t be idiots.  Don’t prompt users for something they may not ever use, give your users a way to disable audio notifications from chat, and stop making it more difficult for your users to use your service.  You are a service provider, all you have to offer is your service, and if you make that service more bothersome and more difficult, where will that leave you? On my shit list, that’s for sure.

Tags: Stickam, The Killers, Usability

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 27th, 2008 at 9:48 am and is filed under Shit List. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.