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UX Crash Course: User Psychology

thehipperelement.com

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Re: UX Crash Course: User Psychology

#21

Post by protonfish »

digitalengineer wrote: post #10
thejosh wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Designers, if you call yourself a “UX Designer”, you’d be the dev who called themselves a “Variable Declarer”."[0] Anyone who thinks they are a UX Designer who wants to make the cancellation process as hard as possible obviously has a very shitty product if the only way to retain your users is to try and make them fill out forms with minimum values. Really, 100 characters? "aksfwejfjwefjwewefj" will be all you get,…

I think there is a difference between a designer and a UX designer. I meet both kind regularly. The designer is still print-focused and can't wrap his/her head around the fact it's no longer possible to force how something should look. They think 'the look' is what design is about. Often they work from their ivory tower and their idea of communicating is 'sending the PSD'. This kind of designer (and agency) is going…

I call those people "graphic designers" to their faces to be clear they are not UX designers, but make pretty pictures. Behind their backs I call them "web decorators."

Re: UX Crash Course: User Psychology

#22

Post by toddkaufmann »

tl;dr (but I may revisit in the future).

I used to think UX meant a wider "systems" approach to the man-machine interface, incorporating findings from CHI, cognitive science, user studies, etc.

Now it seems like it is becoming a name for the design of marketing your product in the experience economy, not helping perform a task more efficiently (unless the "task" is selling to the user).

I'd like to see some discriminating term separating this from the UI-to-the-machine (UIttM ?) where streamlined presentation of the right info just-in-time is important, versus the "create more clicks for A/B testing" sales growth-hacking / I can make a web page with fonts.

I dunno, maybe this is a false dichotomy and reflects some kind of design thinking that UX is a term to apply to everything. Did a UX person design the pattern on my toilet paper?

Re: UX Crash Course: User Psychology

#23

Post by thejosh »

JoelMarsh wrote: post #9
thejosh wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Designers, if you call yourself a “UX Designer”, you’d be the dev who called themselves a “Variable Declarer”."[0] Anyone who thinks they are a UX Designer who wants to make the cancellation process as hard as possible obviously has a very shitty product if the only way to retain your users is to try and make them fill out forms with minimum values. Really, 100 characters? "aksfwejfjwefjwewefj" will be all you get,…

On second thought, I might agree with you. I have added a note to that article to clarify.

Sorry, the tone may have come across overly crass, but this is a topic that really irks me when people can't unsubscribe without a whole lot of BS.

Re: UX Crash Course: User Psychology

#24

Post by thejosh »

digitalengineer wrote: post #10
thejosh wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Designers, if you call yourself a “UX Designer”, you’d be the dev who called themselves a “Variable Declarer”."[0] Anyone who thinks they are a UX Designer who wants to make the cancellation process as hard as possible obviously has a very shitty product if the only way to retain your users is to try and make them fill out forms with minimum values. Really, 100 characters? "aksfwejfjwefjwewefj" will be all you get,…

I think there is a difference between a designer and a UX designer. I meet both kind regularly. The designer is still print-focused and can't wrap his/her head around the fact it's no longer possible to force how something should look. They think 'the look' is what design is about. Often they work from their ivory tower and their idea of communicating is 'sending the PSD'. This kind of designer (and agency) is going…

Yep, I feel very lucky to work with a designer who actually cares about UX, has a very good knowledge of how HTML/CSS actually works and everything that goes a long with that.

Made hiring a frontend person much much easier.

Re: UX Crash Course: User Psychology

#25

Post by Yetanfou »

fat0wl wrote: post #18

I did end up skimming a few more sections to see if it picked up & it was still all hollow, common sense stuff eventually descending into predatory gamification/addiction tactics. I know there are a lot of burgeoning startup types on here but PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE understand that responsible developers should strive to make a product that serves a real need for users. I want to make software that retains customers thr…

We seem to be in a phase where there are many solutions being developed in search for problems which either are so trivial as not to be worth solving or which don't exist in the first place. The PC and the 'net were the incubators for this phenomenon which really took flight when the 'net became small enough to fit in the average pocket. Now there are 'apps' for everyone and everything, all vying for your limited attention.

Alls you need to do is go back in time a bit, say 150 years, to see some parallels with the way that newfangled electricity thing was seen as the solution for all life's problems. Doctors waving Geissler tubes over their patients to cure, electrical beds to improve women's sex drive, electrical hairbrushes because, well, it's electrical and thus cures rheumatism and constipation, electrical baths - both dry and wet - to improve health and stamina, electric underwear to 'cure any ailment'.

And now? Electricity has certainly revolutionised society, but not by using it to cure constipation or zap innocent bathtubs. The web also revolutionised society, and the mobile 'net is poised to extend that revolution even further - but not by creating dating apps or yet another calendar-planner-todo-list-organiser.

Re: UX Crash Course: User Psychology

#26

Post by joeyspn »

digitalengineer wrote: post #10
thejosh wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Designers, if you call yourself a “UX Designer”, you’d be the dev who called themselves a “Variable Declarer”."[0] Anyone who thinks they are a UX Designer who wants to make the cancellation process as hard as possible obviously has a very shitty product if the only way to retain your users is to try and make them fill out forms with minimum values. Really, 100 characters? "aksfwejfjwefjwewefj" will be all you get,…

I think there is a difference between a designer and a UX designer. I meet both kind regularly. The designer is still print-focused and can't wrap his/her head around the fact it's no longer possible to force how something should look. They think 'the look' is what design is about. Often they work from their ivory tower and their idea of communicating is 'sending the PSD'. This kind of designer (and agency) is going…

> I think there is a difference between a designer and a UX designer.

Then your vision of the design world is quite simplistic. Having studied both CompSci and Design Engineering at college, I can tell you that design can be very complex, and the term “Designer” is as abstract as “Computer Scientist”, where you have distributed systems researchers, back-end devs, Ops, database administrators, release engineers, QA Engineers, and thousands of specialities.

The design field is HUGE (go and visit IDEO), ranging from mere Graphic Designers (what you've reflected as "PSD Designer"), to UX/UI Designers (those building human-computer interfaces ), to Design Engineers and Industrial Designers that have a solid base of engineering (physics, maths, materials, CAD/CAE, ergonomy, etc) and are able to shape tangible as well as non-tangible products.

Leading Designers [0] usually belong to the latest group... Pininfarina (Ferrari's Designer), Philippe Stark (who worked closely with Steve Jobs crafting his Yatch but also does graphic design and a lot of other design specialities [1]), Jony Ive (leading the iDevices industrial design but also the UI), Dieter Rams, etc.

[0] http://images.businessweek.com/ss/10/02/0201_worlds_most_inf...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Starck

Re: UX Crash Course: User Psychology

#28

Post by silverbax88 »

Aardwolf wrote: post #3

My psychology is unfortunately different than most users, which means UI's suck for me nowadays. I want more information on screen, more settings, more logic. The UI trend however seems to be less information on screen, less settings, and more "The UI knows better what you want than you do" :(

I think this actually represents a massive gap between what UI or UX designers believe and what users actually prefer.

Consider this: Microsoft Windows (prior to Windows 8) was by all accounts a clunky, poorly conceived UI...that allowed users to modify it to look just about any way they wanted.

Now we have applications like Twitter and Facebook constantly re-arranging their users layout, and the most recent changes have been to increase font size, reduce the information on the screen, all of the things that many users (such as myself) do not want.

I find this perplexing...how did we as a UI culture going from having bad design that I could control to having bad design that I can't control?

Re: UX Crash Course: User Psychology

#29

Post by silverbax88 »

tommi wrote: post #8
Aardwolf wrote: post #3

My psychology is unfortunately different than most users, which means UI's suck for me nowadays. I want more information on screen, more settings, more logic. The UI trend however seems to be less information on screen, less settings, and more "The UI knows better what you want than you do" :(

Can you give an example of an case where you want more settings instead of more suitable UI for your needs?

One example that sums up most: Twitter. I just want to see/display the feed, not have the UI decide which ones to deem 'important'. I'd like for the app to allow the power of CSS to let me choose a layout as opposed to just picking one that doesn't really work for me.

The overall problem is that what UI designers think 'a more suitable UI' is, probably won't be for many users. Think of it like the open-office plan. It's horrible for employees, most people absolutely hate it, it lowers productivity, and yet corporations have people on staff who are implementing it as fast as they possibly can because it's more "suitable".

Re: UX Crash Course: User Psychology

#30

Post by silverbax88 »

JonoBB wrote: post #4

I'm really not quite sure what to make of this advice: http://thehipperelement.com/post/86991518680/daily-ux-crash-... > If your marketing department wants to know anything about why the user is cancelling, put it in the form. Two pages of boring questions is a great way to reduce conversion. > Break the form into many pages so it takes longer. Include links to FAQ pages. And avoid using defaults; it maximizes the nu…

Cancelling a service should ALWAYS be easy and painless. I make sure all apps/services I have are just as easy to cancel as they were to sign up.

I actually find that about 50% of people who cancel end up coming back. I also have NEVER had a user contact me about how to cancel their account. They just do it. No problem, no interaction, no bullshit 'let me talk to you first' run around.

If you are trying to keep people from cancelling by making it difficult to do so, YOU ARE BAD AT BUSINESS.

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