DeviantArt

I've had a profile on Deviant Art for a little while now at http://smolderingremains.deviantart.com. A while back they added a feature on their site that allows you to separate your gallery into categories or sections, which I thought was a nice addition because not all my art is in the same genre. Right now I've got a lot of comic strips or cartoons that I'm using to promote WooHooLigAN.com and those are considerably different in style than my older black and white inkings. It makes sense to me that someone viewing my gallery might like to see a section where they can view all my inkings together and by themselves rather than being forced to comb through my entire gallery. Or for that matter that someone looking at my gallery at first glance wouldn't even think that I did that kind of work, so the section allows them to see my "range".

What doesn't make sense is the interface for managing those sections.

The Deviant Art interface for managing the gallery is the kind of interface that really makes me think "why do we (programmers) do this to people?"

First of all, they've become really fond of drag & drop -- they use it all over the place. You drag thumbnails to change the order of the images in your "featured" section (everyone has a "featured" section), you drag pictures to add them to your favorites, etc, etc. But even though your own custom sections are sitting right there in the sidebar in your gallery page, you CAN'T drag thumbnails onto them from your featured section -- or from any section. Don't get me wrong, I actually like their drag & drop (even though I've stopped using Firefox to view the site because it crashes, so I end up using Internet Explorer because the site is more stable there). So I'm actually happy with some of their interface changes, I just wish they'd gone all the way with their D&D implementation.

To categorize your images you have to log in, go your gallery and press an "edit" button at the top, which places you in an edit "mode" (ahh modality... the good old days). Once you're in the edit mode, you still CAN'T drag images onto your sections. Instead it replaces the name of the image below the thumbnail with a small blue button graphic with a down-arrow on it. Clicking the down arrow produces a list of your sections (which are already sitting in the sidebar in front of you off to the left). Okay, great... in the list it says either "put in xxx section" or "remove from xxx section" -- indicating both whether or not it's in that section already and letting you perform the task of categorizing... at least, that's how it works in the "featured" section.

Once you've removed an item from the "featured" section then once you go into the section where you placed it before (I placed one in "cartoons"), the list changes -- it removes every item in the list except for "remove from xxx section" (the current section)... Presumably, the system still knows what your sections are -- they're still sitting right in front of you off to the left. But you can't add anything to them -- or add anything back to your "featured" section, even though everyone has that section. The only thing you can do is "remove"... And I thought to myself "well I wonder if I remove it from this section, if the system will automatically add it back to "featured" since it won't be in any of the other sections anymore?" Nope. If you remove it then it just doesn't show up in any of your sections...

So I contacted their tech support because I thought I'd "orphaned" one of my illustrations and I get a response back to inform me that once an item has been removed from the "featured" section, you have to find it in "browse". Uhuh... the "Browse" area essentially is the original gallery -- it shows all your work sorted by popularity or submission date (so in other words you can't order them here). And in "browse", suddenly, like magic, that pull-down menu below each of the thumbnails shows all the "put in xxx section" options again. You know, the ones that disappear when you enter a category. ... sigh ...