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Laws of UX

lawsofux.com

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Re: Laws of UX

#111

Post by badsectoracula »

oblio wrote: post #78
js8 wrote: post #26

The desktop apps of the 90s was the heyday of UX. There are many positive things that could be said, but in the interest of brevity, I'll mention just two. Customizability. Users could set up their own hot keys, and even their own tool bars. Discoverability. Every UI widget (knob) had a tooltip, which explained its function. When a menu item was being browsed, there was a help line on the bottom that explained its fu…

> The desktop apps of the 90s was the heyday of UX for power users . Regular users didn't set up their own hotkeys or their toolbars. And they definitely didn't read the help or tool tips. The best UX for regular users, not interested in computers, is somewhere between websites and mobile apps.

Every time i hear about "Regular users" being the reason why modern UIs suck so much i get the feeling that regular users tend to be the enemy of actual users.

Re: Laws of UX

#112

Post by Jemmeh »

platz wrote: post #105
cptskippy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different doesn't equal better.

how are measuring "better"? If it wins you a contract, then the market has judged your fancy-checkboxes as "better"

Not necessarily. There's a good chance there was just someone who knows nothing about UX and is never going to actually use the software approved it for others to use. Or it might be that despite a poor UX, it's still the only product to do what you need. Despite a poor UX, it's better than the other guy's even worse UX, at least for now.

There's been loads of software that has been successful just by taking the idea from already existing software and making it more user friendly.

Re: Laws of UX

#113

Post by fasteddie »

kbenson wrote: post #108
ComputerGuru wrote: post #44

For a website all about UX, the site is almost impossible to use (at least on mobile), both from an intuitiveness perspective and from a technical one. I am entirely unsure what I’m supposed to click on, if what I’m seeing is an animation or a loading progress bar, the back button gave me a blank, black page, and everything on the site would be better if it were simply static html without all this JavaScript garbage…

> the site is almost impossible to use (at least on mobile) > I am entirely unsure what I’m supposed to click on As a tangent, I wonder if we'll be stuck with "click" being a very common word to use to refer to following links when it makes no sense when in the context of a touch screen. English is littered with words like that, so it's possible it's here to stay, but occasionally (rarely, I admit), it jumps out at m…

4 or so years ago, I remember a frustrated Dev printed out signs on our floor at Zynga that was focused on the then early-mobile efforts that said “It’s a tap not a click!”

Re: Laws of UX

#114

Post by daemonk »

raister wrote: post #38

what a load... Conservation, momentum, trying to force people to use physics concepts for UX, for crying out loud, is anybody taking this seriously?

Yeah seriously. Are people really that insecure with their job titles that they need to invent bullshit to make UX seem more scientific?

Re: Laws of UX

#115

Post by madez »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #44

For a website all about UX, the site is almost impossible to use (at least on mobile), both from an intuitiveness perspective and from a technical one. I am entirely unsure what I’m supposed to click on, if what I’m seeing is an animation or a loading progress bar, the back button gave me a blank, black page, and everything on the site would be better if it were simply static html without all this JavaScript garbage…

The site works fine without JavaScript.

Re: Laws of UX

#116

Post by adambmedia »

I find the layout of poster downloads on the detail pages of the individual laws, with the text of the law and lawofux.com tag on the right side, unfortunate. The layout of the posters on the top-level page are 100x more evocative and elegant. They are the posters I want.

Re: Laws of UX

#117

Post by platz »

Jemmeh wrote: post #112
platz wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how are measuring "better"? If it wins you a contract, then the market has judged your fancy-checkboxes as "better"

Not necessarily. There's a good chance there was just someone who knows nothing about UX and is never going to actually use the software approved it for others to use. Or it might be that despite a poor UX, it's still the only product to do what you need. Despite a poor UX, it's better than the other guy's even worse UX, at least for now. There's been loads of software that has been successful just by taking the idea…

You seem to be confused about better in the objective sense. I am saying that designers make things fancy to get attention, especially from product managers. No claims about what is better need arise. From the perspective of the ux designer, they are doing what the market is selecting for and rewarding them for.

By analogy, You don't get to claim what is better in evoulution and natural selection. There is only what is selected for, which might not have any preference for what you consider good or not

Re: Laws of UX

#118

Post by reaperducer »

kbenson wrote: post #108
ComputerGuru wrote: post #44

For a website all about UX, the site is almost impossible to use (at least on mobile), both from an intuitiveness perspective and from a technical one. I am entirely unsure what I’m supposed to click on, if what I’m seeing is an animation or a loading progress bar, the back button gave me a blank, black page, and everything on the site would be better if it were simply static html without all this JavaScript garbage…

> the site is almost impossible to use (at least on mobile) > I am entirely unsure what I’m supposed to click on As a tangent, I wonder if we'll be stuck with "click" being a very common word to use to refer to following links when it makes no sense when in the context of a touch screen. English is littered with words like that, so it's possible it's here to stay, but occasionally (rarely, I admit), it jumps out at m…

I've built sites before where the term "click" was automatically changed to "tap" on the mobile version.

It was just a function embedded in the multi-language routines.

Re: Laws of UX

#119

Post by neogodless »

anthonyshort wrote: post #106

The reaction on Hacker News compared to the reaction on Designer News is great. I think the problem people are struggling with is that it's a site created mostly for fun and delight, but the message is about "UX", which people generally think of as a way to maximize efficiency. Products don't always need to be relentlessly efficient to be considered useful or "good". Some products are created for you to just enjoy.

[0] https://www.designernews.co/stories/90954-laws-of-ux

Super positive. We love it.

Blows my mind. But that's the point - it's really like two very, very different ways of thinking about, approaching/creating and evaluating projects (in this case, a web site.) On one side, they have "an eye for design" that really appreciates this novel UI design, but on this other side, we have that eye for efficiency and... ahem... user experience. (Rather than how a designer might experience something.)

Re: Laws of UX

#120

Post by longerthoughts »

culot wrote: post #82
boomlinde wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I clicked on one of the book covers and ended up with an abstract full screen animation that ran for five seconds before I figured out it was a full screen page header. I'm confident that web design is the way it is mostly as a means to keep the people that work with it employed. A simple, straight forward implementation with a little color and layout to make it stand out would have been much easier to navigate and d…

Even on the desktop site it hides the navigation. It could use an index on the left -- not to mention that the entire law page is so brief that it does not need its own page. Which one of those laws tackle UX bloat and ornament for ornaments sake? The site is pretty, that's true, but it's not made to be a useful source of information, it's made to be pretty above all else. The entire site is a great example of what t…

The irony is that they're perfectly demonstrating the importance of Jakob's law (03): "Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know."
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