Feedly
A closer look at the usability of the popular rss reader
The first assignment for #chikul14 was to evaluate the usability of the recently booming rss reader Feedly. We choose to evaluate the web application at feedly.com but the mobile application(s) were also a possibility. We had a to take a quick look in the first session and discuss our findings with the entire class. With this as starting point we took a second look and came up with the following results.
To evaluate the usability we will primarily be looking at the bold terms in the following iso definition:
The effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which specified users achieve specified goals in particular environments.
@JDevlieghere had some experience with Feedly (mostly on the mobile platform) but neither @StefanPante nor I (@DieterCastel) did. Since two members of our group didn't have any experience with Feedly, we first of all looked at how it interacts with new users.
On our first exploration of Feedly, we thought you could test all the functionality without signing up for the service. But when we tried to add a feed, Feedly prompted to sign up. This led to some discussion in our group.
From one point of view you could argue that a user might want to try out Feedly without signing up and only sign up when the user finds it pleasant. The technology to allow this exists and could improve the satisfaction of new users.
On the other hand, this approach allows the user to experiment with the way articles are displayed though limited to a single feed. One might argue that the moment the user wants to subscribe, he or she is willing to use Feedly and therefore should be captured by the service and create an account.
After adding a couple of feeds we found out about the different views. By default feeds are shown in the magazine view but when we switched to the title only view we found some strange behaviour. If you expand a story on the top right an X mark appears which gives you the possibility to close the story.
Down below the situation when you close the story.
When you do that however right where your mouse pointer is is another X mark which removes the story. We think this can cause people to delete stories by accident.
Initially we tested the application on our laptops. All of these have fairly small screens. When we took a second look at home (with the comfort of our desktops) we were surprised to notice a different behaviour regarding the sidebar. On smaller screens the sidebar auto-hides but this is not the case on bigger screens. Great adaptation to the situation there Feedly! This is really a feature that adds to the overall usability spanning all three factors.
A minor detail that caught our eye is the layout of the sidebar. The first block contains 3 links, namely Home, Saved For Later and Organize. The last one, Organize which allows the user to assign feeds to categories, bothered us a little. Being that the first two are supposedly heavily used items, the last one seems a little out of place. We would expect it to be somewhere close to preference related stuff rather than part of the highlighted top three.
Lastly another negative point that harms the efficiency. Did you notice the word “Logout” in the previous picture? It blends in so well in the background that we had a hard time spotting it. Agreed not the first feature you are looking for but it’s so simple to improve it’s a pity it is still around.
Mobile (addendum Saturday 22/02 16:30)
Some teams tested the mobile application of Feedly. Rather than doing that, we wanted to see how Feedly performed in the browser of a smart phone. Since the website didn't appear very responsive, we assumed that it had to be located at m.feedly.com. All we found there was a test page from the web server. A bit unprofessional for a service with millions of users and hardly effective on the mobile platform.
Returning to the website learned that it is displayed exactly the same as on a regular computer and is in no way optimized for viewing on a mobile device. As we had seen on computers with smaller screens, the sidebar automatically hid when not hovering it with your mouse. As you can imagine this was a real hassle with a touchscreen. After a fair amount of tries we just gave up. Without the Android, iOS or a third party application, using Feedly on a mobile device is almost impossible.
Conclusion
While we pointed out mainly negative features, our overall idea of Feedly is quite good. These itchy points are arguably details that don't disturb the user too much. But since most of the points we made seem fairly easy to notice it still is remarkable that an application with such a large user-base still has plenty of them.
