Immediate impressions and ease of use

Hi everyone

I wanted to take a minute to familiarise myself with this environment and record my first impressions, so I can compare it to the blog Cara set up. Here I'm thinking specifically in terms of instant attractiveness and ease of use.

First of all, I'm not an MSN or other IM user, so it's quite unusual for me to be in an environment with emoticons. Yikes! But I really do like the environment, I like the pink background, the formatting buttons are familiar, and I can easily see what I'm meant to do.

This is a practice link to a site called 43 folders which I found yesterday, and which has some really helpful tips on managing online communication, information overload, and productivity problems. I'll also put it on delicious, but in the meantime, I'm seeing if I can make a link!

What do the rest of you think about this forum environment?

Kate

Amber, I also wanted to ask you: is it possible to reduce the screen size of the (great!) photo a little? I'm interested in the impact of having to scroll down to the content each time. What do you think?

Ooh yes, I thought the image was a little big but I was unable to resize it, so found this image of Mickey Mouse in his first ever movie instead.
It's a little smaller and therefore (on my screen anyway) makes scrolling down to view the forums unnecessary. Is that the case on everyone else's too?
I'm happy to change the image, also!

43 folders seems helpful! Once I'd got my head around it a bit (I have to say, it wasn't initally very user friendly - I was struggling to find information to tell me what the site was actually for) I found this article: http://www.43folders.com/izero which is quite helpful - particularly love the simile here used to describe "dead" emails: “...Give each message as much attention as it needs and not one iota more. Remember the contextuality of triage: if you keep trying to care for dead and doomed patients, you’ll end up losing a lot of the ones who could have actually used your help.”

Ok

take two: first of all a functionality problem - I just typed out a complete response only to have it completely disappear when i pressed 'send'...so that poses a problem!!

what i was saying was that I liked the site - I like how you don't have to sign up to use it like you do with other web2.0 sites and also the level of customisation available (incl. emoticons). It's also cool how you can post links, images and videos. YOu can't upload files though, as far as I can see?

Anyway I haven't had a chance to properly investigate it all as I have been super busy working on our project, tryinig to get it done earlyish so I can start on other assignments! Plus it is the most enjoyable assignment I have so I think that is why I am tending to work on it instead of other subject work!

Hope this works, and you all have a great week

Cara

The exact same thing happened to me also Cara, i'm actually glad it did it for you because i thought it was only me. Has anyone else had this problem on this site. perhaps it is like webct where there is a time limit to send your posts before they disappear. I'm going to send this right now just incase Fiona.