Crystal Williams

So basically, if I have ever emailed with you at all, you’re in my gmail address book. And if you are in my gmail address book, all 600ish of you, around the first of September, you got a message that looked something like this:

“cleverclevergirl” would like you to join them on Zannel

Zannel is a mobile community where you can meet people, send messages and share photos and videos on your mobile phone. Share your life in real time.

Click here to join and accept the invitation.

And then if you also follow me on twitter, you shortly after received a few frantic, apologetic tweets from me explaining that some UI had malfunctioned and to please ignore the bother. I try to be exceedingly careful with my contacts and tend to never invite people to things unless I’m positive they want to be invited. I hate email, I assume you hate email too, and I try to avoid sending any unless it’s necessary or just purely pleasant.

So I was pretty devastated that this happened, especially since I generally consider myself savvier than that, but figured I’d done what I could and it was done with.

Until I got a message on the site from Zannel’s CTO the next day.

Hey there – I’m with Zannel, and I’ve heard some buzz about our friend invite feature – r u open to discussing?

Uh oh.

Chris Messina was amongst the unintentionally-invited. Chris, thankfully, has a pretty low tolerance for bad UI, so he made some screenshots

This was noted by Tantek Çelik, who asked Chris to submit screenshots to the wiki he’s been working on, documenting Social Network Anti-Patterns, something expecially useful in the wake of the Quechup disaster. (Incidentally, Chris has a whole collection of these screenshots here)

Zannel’s PR folks had picked up on the grumblings, traced it back to me, and now wanted to chat.

So we chatted. First off, they were genuinely apologetic. This was really an unintentional effect of the common mobile design strategy of reducing page length by having many small pages of information, and definitely not a ‘strategy’ of any sort.

I explained that the problem had occurred while using their mobile interface. I had wanted to *check* if anyone I knew was already using this service, but only intended to invite one coworker. Unfortunately, the default state for “send invites to everyone” was set to TRUE, and that option was on a separate page than the main confirm screen. So by requesting and confirming to invite one friend, everyone else got dragged into it. They admitted that this was a problem and one that had been discussed internally.

They also agreed to fix it. Quickly.

And I’m very pleased to say that they did! The fix has been in place now for about a month and apparently now, users complain, if anything, that it is too difficult to add a bunch of friends at once. So far, though, everyone seems to agree that this is a better problem to have.

They were also kind enough to send me some screenshots of the new interface:

Congrats to Zannel for making this right, and a big thanks to Chris and Tantek for their zero-tolerance policies.

Go Check them out.They’re getting nods from the likes of TechCrunch, Mashable, and The LA Times.