By: Siddiq

Siddiq — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 15:35:46 +0000

What I find really confusing about Riya is that nothing really seems as intuitive as it should be. The first butteon is search, despite that there is a text box at the top of hte page also labeled search, how are the two different do you need both? ALso when you click on the green search button you are presented with a page dominated by two big calendar months. What do the months have to do with searching? It took some playing with it to figure out that I was supposed to bound the date to search within a time frame (no I’m not terribly bright).

I could go on with each button, but the basic problem is that things seem all over the place. There is a page on the site that list address books like gmail etc… I got to it once while exploring the site and it took me 15 minutes to try and get back to it. In other words I knew a page existed on the site but was unable to find it.

What I would try to do is simplfy the interface and use all the ajax goodness your baking into the site to take the place of the buttons and reduce the brancing tree structure as much as possible. So if I click on search, I’m presented with (by date, relationship, time?, etc…).

I remember a time when OCR was the bleeding edge of computer imaging technology. I’ve been supprised by the OCR capabilities of Riya and I’m sure that the technical issues with tracking users across image collections is something that will be solved in short order. I’d love to see an option to “expunge data” from Riya, it would be a “nice to have” feature the “need to haves” are the UI improvements. Of course the the only thing that will ensure privacy is when companies like your are committed to it and are transparent. I’m glad to see you take it seriously.

Thanks so much for posting your thoughts.

By: Munjal Shah

Munjal Shah — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 04:54:48 +0000

Thanks for trying out Riya. I appreciate the detailed review. I have one question and one comment: What specific part of the app did you find hard to use … so I can fix it. BTW it doesn’t do global recognition. So it won’t find you in another person’s photos unless they already know you are (they train or have you in their address book). We don’t do this for privacy reasons and technical reasons. We can only find about 400 unique people in your photos or the accuracy starts to degrade dramatically.

Munjal Shah - Riya

Comments on: Riya See’s Ya

By: Siddiq

By: Munjal Shah