Being of Jewish heritage, it’s not unusual for me to be around people who answer a question with another question. However, when a web site does it, it’s disconcerting. It’s even more disconcerting when the site answers a question with a whole bunch of questions.

Flickr does this. On left side of this page, the site asks a simple question:

This is great. I wanted to know why my pictures hadn’t shown up. Unfortunately, clicking on this link doesn’t answer my question. Instead, it brings up a page filled with more questions:

Click here to see the list of questions

This violates one of the key rules of the Scent of Information: users expect information to get more specific, not more general. The user, clicking on the question, expects the specific answer to the question, not a list of all the questions available for answers.

On the Flickr site, it gets worse: the question, “Why doesn’t my photos show up in the group?” isn’t in the list of questions. There’s two questions related to tags:

The first question is definitely not what we’re looking for. But is the second one? Could be, but it’s subtly different. Maybe it is, maybe it’s not.

Clicking on it yields an answer to the question, but is it the answer to my question?

How long do I remain pending? Days? Weeks? If I’m not pending, are there other reasons why my pictures wouldn’t show up?

As a result of trying to find the answer to the question, I’m left with are more questions…

This entry was posted on Monday, August 29th, 2005 at 8:00 am and is filed under Design . 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.