Here are some practical remarks on the recent Delicious user interface changes. For now I’m addressing just the new “Bookmark on Delicious” bookmarklet and the (reduced) usability of the pop-up window, in particular what means having a smaller “Notes” field when adding (or editing) bookmarks.

Here’s a series of screenshots* of what can happen if you actually use the notes field (like me) and keep writing more than a few lines:

And here is the full text of my notes I tried (with some difficulty) to type in the tiny field:

This shorter notes field is nice looking and looks like the space it offers would cover most users’ needs. The problem is that Delicious’ users are mostly geeks, librarian,information freaks and other very nitpicky people with specific needs: one of the problems is that even tough the fields autoexpands, if you make the font just a tad bigger after 400 characters you already begin to lose the ability to see the first lines. This means that the “1000 characters” maximum length is a teoric one and it cannot be really exploited. Also: the non-resizable field makes it impossible to edit your excerpt and if you copy and paste you have to add an intermediate step in an editor…
Oh, ad if you have more than a dozen of tags you have to resize the pop-up window. :/

 

* the screenshots are small, aren’t they? And you can’t read properly, right? Well, that’s very similar to the effect of the Delicious redesign has on my (poor) eyesight by making the default font size smaller.
Let’s see what happens if we make the fonts bigger…