Share on Ovi and Share Online Not As Good At Sharing

Filed under: Services, nokia - 05 Oct 2008 17:12

While I was at a kid birthday party today, I took a video and wanted to share it with the people whose kid I was taking a video of. I figured I could email the video. Fat chance. Comcast puked it up saying it was too big.

Fair enough, Share on Ovi to the rescue! Or so I thought. Because I don’t necessarily want everyone to see this video, I used Share Online 3.0 to upload the media from my phone to my private channel. I then went to the website to see if I could share it:

Now, I don’t want to share the channel because this is a private channel for a reason. However, I know it’s possible to share to a specific email address because I saw the option on the mobile site!

So, what do I do? Clicking on Share This Channel actually shares the item, not the channel:

That works. Why is this not clear on the desktop web UI when it is crystal clear on the mobile web UI?

That’s rant #1. Now for Share Online 3.0, which also fails the sharing test. Consider that I go into Share Online to look at the recent stuff I posted on Share on Ovi (e.g. Ovi > my latest uploads):

I select the photo I want to share:

I then click on the Send link button, select Via message (to send as a text message), and then I see the URL that’s given:

Guess what? That URL can’t be viewed by anyone but me. It’s a private URL. Unless I remember to edit the aboev URL before sending it, people aren’t going to be able to view this link that I’m about to send them. That is a major usability failure in my book.

I want to be clear here, I use these service all the time. I think they’re pretty good, despite the flaws. However, these errors are the kinds of things that turn most normal users off of using a service. As Nokia strengthens it’s push into consumer services, these are the kinds of things that need to be gotten right.

Disclaimer: Until Nokia spins off its Security Appliances business, they still pay me. Obviously, this is my opinion, not theirs.

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Tags: Mobile phone, nokia, ovi, Services, share on ovi, Share Online 3.0 Fnord

2 Comments »

Comment by Renegade Fanboy

I very much agree with your view - and would like to stress the URL part. It seems like there is no “use case” and no testing of that use case. (The same goes for item count or megabytes limits - queuing the uploads would save a lot of head scratching

A service with a lot of potential, fails on usability issues.
Comment by PhoneBoy

Hopefully the powers that be can address these things.