61–70 of 127 posts
Give your program to a real user. Ask them to do a task. Shut up, look, and watch 'm squirm. Keep up for an hour. If you start assuming this particular user must be braindead and failed basic logic, repeat with a new real user until the lesson sinks in. Realize your crystal-clear design has in fact plenty of holes, and user will curse your name if you release now. Bang head against wall for therapeutic value (your he…
I consider usability to be a critical component of "UX." I started by reading The Design of Everyday Things . It's a book that changed my life. There was just a thread, hereabouts, about the book[0]. I also took a few classes with the company that Don Norman co-owns (NNG)[1]. These are useful, but not a "philosopher's stone." They tend to push user group testing a lot, and I'm not a huge fan of UG testing. I tend to…
Give your program to a real user. Ask them to do a task. Shut up, look, and watch 'm squirm. Keep up for an hour. If you start assuming this particular user must be braindead and failed basic logic, repeat with a new real user until the lesson sinks in. Realize your crystal-clear design has in fact plenty of holes, and user will curse your name if you release now. Bang head against wall for therapeutic value (your he…
One day, I manage to acquire an actual form as provided by the state. It turns out to be organically grown and the resulting field order made no sense at all. The first field was a phone number, for some reason. Name and surname were actually on 2 different pages, with lots of stuff in between. No idea how it got so messed up.
So I ordered the fields in my form in the same bad order as the state form. Users loved it. The could just tab-tab-tab quickly fill it in.
Some light theory and heavy practice is the best way to improve. Credentials: been doing UX work for 25 years and I run https://www.TrialToPaid.com where I'm well paid to improve UX to grow trial conversion revenue. Here are three steps you can take: 1. Read Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug, User Interface Design for Programmers by Joel Spolsky, Refactoring UI, and (optionally) The Design of Everyday Things (this wi…
Your site is down buddy
It's an instant redirect to another domain.
Ooh, I’ve been doing nothing but this for 30 years. There’s other good advice in this thread, but my main advice is to pay close attention to people. UX is just applied psychology. If you understand humans well enough then you can create good solutions for them. It’s not surprising — you won’t create a good cat toy if you don’t understand cats. 1. Keep learning how humans use software. This is rooted in our physiolog…
Give your program to a real user. Ask them to do a task. Shut up, look, and watch 'm squirm. Keep up for an hour. If you start assuming this particular user must be braindead and failed basic logic, repeat with a new real user until the lesson sinks in. Realize your crystal-clear design has in fact plenty of holes, and user will curse your name if you release now. Bang head against wall for therapeutic value (your he…
If you're a designer working with some web folks... don't be too proud to take their feedback as well. I've lost count of how many times I was given a set of mockups that were confusing. When I raised the point of "this is confusing to me - I don't understand X"... sometimes it's taken to heart and we converse and iterate. Sometimes it's not, and I'm pushed to "just do it like this", which almost always leads to ... a big delay in getting the exact same "this is confusing" feedback from people weeks or months later.
To be fair, this hasn't happened to me as much in the last... 3-5 years. And there are times I really do not know the domain very well. What's confusing to me is 'industry standard' (labels/names/workflow/etc) - sometimes there's even regulatory reasons for doing things a certain way. I learn from that.
The other side of that is... I've worked on systems for 6-12-18+ months, and know how the system is currently providing value. "Designer X" coming in and making radical changes without any ability to give them feedback - at any stage of the game - is just really bad.
If someone has more experience in X, and tells you "this is confusing/wrong", they might just be correct, and everyone can save a lot of time by addressing the confusion earlier rather than later.
> Even if they called it a calender, they wanted a task list.
I've hit this exact one a few times, from both angles. Wanting a task list, but calling it 'calendar', and wanting a calendar view, but using "schedule". Takes some digging and sometimes side by side comparisons of 2 or 3 different visualizations, but eventually we get there :)
To get your started, I recommend this short summary about universal design, inclusive design, and accessibility:
https://sayyeah.com/digital-insights/universal-design-access...