I'll be posting more regularly here from now on, covering nice ideas I see which would have gone in to the book if I was still writing it. Today's example is a small aspect of the new Flickr People in Photos service. On top of building an easy to use interface for adding people there are lots of clever user interface details that enrich the experience.
The ability to add multiple people on a photo is good, if straight forward use of the XMLHTTPRequest Ajax functionality. Where it becomes more elegant is that you can simply drag to mark out someone's face and choose between note or a person and name that person in the same simple interaction. What prompted me to write this post was the delighter that is hidden on the pictures of your contacts page, when you have a photo containing more than one of your contacts.
This image shows two of my friends in the same picture, the use of and&ellip; rather than repeating the A photo of reflect natural human speech. Lovely, this image shows what happens if you have four or more. You get yay and wow comments too. Functionality like this only comes from spending time testing and exploring the user interface beyond the merely functional. It is worth the extra effort to make your own features as shiny.
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