191–200 of 217 posts
"Make the most important thing stand out" I'd be careful with this one and be sure you understand what you are doing on a case-by-case basis. I have noticed a thing which I'm not sure there's a name for, but I call it Emphasis Blindness. Similar to Banner Blindness, I think users today are often trained by habit to ignore things that stand out as some kind of obvious promotional item. For example, you have 5 items in…
The 3rd law is just wrong. Yes, we spend more time on other sites and therefore, we are used to the UX patterns used on other sites, but that doesn't mean that all other pages are doing good. Actually, we do not choose the sites we are on purely based on UX patterns. Instead we choose the sites by the service/functionality they are offering. So assuming that other pages are doing good UX and inventing new patterns wi…
For years we were seeing the burger icon (3 horizontal bars) as an icon for menus. It took quite a while until it became a well known standard to add some 'Menu' text next to it (as you can see it on the Laws of UX page).
So for years we had a pattern on most sites which was not optimal. Just using it because everybody else was using it, didn't solve the problem that a majority of users did not understand or knew the icon.
I don't have the references right in front of me but I'm pretty sure the 7 +/- 2 in Law six is now thought to be 5 +/- 2. Wiki puts it at 4 +/- 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-term_memory
"Make the most important thing stand out" I'd be careful with this one and be sure you understand what you are doing on a case-by-case basis. I have noticed a thing which I'm not sure there's a name for, but I call it Emphasis Blindness. Similar to Banner Blindness, I think users today are often trained by habit to ignore things that stand out as some kind of obvious promotional item. For example, you have 5 items in…
That doesn't really apply to enterprise software. There are no ads there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was undecided until middle-click opened in current tab. That's not what I asked for. Let my browser do its job. Edit: And right-click behaves like left-click! Non-standard and annoying. So much for "Jakob's Law".
That is an unforgivable sin of web design: do not highjack the open-in-new-tab/new-window keystrokes.
The navigation on this site is so bad I created an account on HN just to mention it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regular users are not interested in computers. They're interested in getting shit done, and getting on with their lives. Which is precisely what modern UX makes harder . You see, regular users aren't "neanderthal users". They have a brain and some amount of focus, and if they have to use an application/website more than few times, they'll figure out and appreciate any feature that lets them do their work more efficie…
This is just giving UX a bad name. There cannot exist the best UX for regular users. There are things that are used once or very rarely and have to be designed to rely on people's prior experience with other things, like most websites. And there are other things that are used often and have to be designed to be learned. Every case is different and not simple. As for trends, maybe you are thinking about UI trends. Peo…
It's a question if UX already isn't an orwellian term for "be cheap on UI" or "target lowest common denominator of users". I don't know, but you should ask that question yourself.
If you're more interested in name than substance, it might be an indicator.
> There cannot exist the best UX for regular users.
Categorical claims of non-existence require extraordinary amount of evidence.
> Every case is different and not simple.
That might be the thing. UIs (and usability) in the 90s focused on consistency. But then interactive websites ("applications") became a thing and the consistency (for example in the looks) was thrown out the window.
So everybody has to target the lowest common denominator (aka "regular users") now, because of the mess that this artistic explosion created. (There are other factors, too, such as that touch screens by definition lead to worse UIs.)
I don't entirely lament the mess (the artistic explosion is nice). But please, don't claim that we made progress in usability.
> But you can't really say there are UX trends.
I would say UX itself is a trend. As someone already noted, it had a name before - ergonomics. It's really similar to "data scientist", which is largely a modern trend of how to call a statistician.
https://mobile.twitter.com/UXColumbo/status/5978387232633651...