Saturday, September 19, 2009

Vox.com / How does one add a photo to a group?




Yes, it's a general question, but looking in the help center, I found nothing very helpful, and I've already burned away more than an hour on this nonsense. Honestly, I'm starting to get a little angry. This should be a straightforward function on Vox, and it isn't. Should I post this to ... where?

I'm in a group I've just created, and see a notice that the group has no photos, as one would expect. Would I like to add one? Sure. Go to your library and add one, I'm told, being given a link to my own library. I go there, find an image, click on "share" and find absolutely no option for sharing the photo to a group.





Share Image Screenshot, Vox




Fine. Is there some other option? I go back, and look at the page I was on before I went to that remarkably useless share page, which seems designed more to help promote Vox than to help the user - note that all of the options given involve the posting of content outside of Vox. Is there anything useful there?





Back One Screen




Apparently not. As I watch a morning that I had intended to walk out into start to turn into an afternoon, I finally get around to trying the edit screen





Edit Screen





and find what I'm looking for at last. What I've found is that the Yelp system won't provide us with an option to add photos to a group if one clicks on "photos" instead of on "edit", on one's main screen - and I was supposed to know this, how? I was just supposed to know it, that was all. OH! – and look at all of the beautiful red x’s (exes?) that posting these screenshots have left on my main blog page on Vox, where those last two links are to be found.





Party of One Screenshot




Though an easy solution to this problem could be found ...





photostream




... at which point everything return to normal, or at least to what passed for normality.





Vox Blog, After I deleted the screenshots




The customary act of a user, at this point, is to post some self-deprecating remark about how the service needs to understand how stupid its users are, and work with that, but I'm not going to write anything like that, because this is simply absurd. There is a difference between being intelligent and being psychic.



How, precisely, was the user supposed to know that Vox would set its system in such a way as to disable the sending of photos to groups, unless one reached the photo using just the right path, and how would one know which path to take? Once one is there, one should be there, and free to do what needs doing, whether one has found the right sequence of hoops to jump through or not.

This is what Vox really needs to work on - making its system more intuitive, more user friendly, and better documented. Creating a help group, instead of sending users to wade through a mass of documents, and having an employee watch that group, might not be a bad idea, either.





Mirrored: Here, on "Party of One"