Laws of UX • Hacker News Board

Re: Laws of UX

#71

Post by MaxBarraclough » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 3:03 PM UTC

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…

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".

Re: Laws of UX

#72

Post by crb002 » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 3:15 PM UTC

tomgp wrote: post #2

Is there a law of UX related to making a user scroll thousands of pixels to read 10 sentences?

Fitts law.

Re: Laws of UX

#73

Post by radiorental » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 3:18 PM UTC

boomlinde wrote: post #69

radiorental wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you mean to say 'Usability' Ergonomics was and still is it's own thing. It very much relates to the physical world exclusively.

You interact with websites using physical means, so it's an important aspect of how users experience them. If a website has tiny buttons and icons, it might be hard to use with a phone. On a large screen computer with a precision pointing tool it might be preferable that they are small. If the information density is ten words per 2000 vertical pixels, it's going to be a pain in the ass with a scroll wheel, not so muc…

My point (as a UXer) is that up to around 7 years ago we were generally known as practitioners in the field.of usability / user interface design / etc.

The people in the field of Human factors and ergonomics pretty much still have those titles.

There is a lot of overlap but my point is UXers were known as Usability folks on the whole

Re: Laws of UX

#74

Post by wingerlang » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 3:29 PM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #60

wingerlang wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target. If you need to move the cursor far and to a small target, it will take a long time to hone in on it. The shorter you have to move it, and the larger the target - the easier it is to click. For example the menu on macOS is always at the top of the screen, making its target HUGE and is therefore basically O(1) to hit.

For touch that is true, for mouse and pen you still have to consider travel time.

That's the distance

Re: Laws of UX

#75

Post by kleff » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 3:37 PM UTC

Tesler's law really rings true in non-UX environments too. I have worked with several people insisting that you can somehow remove complexity by wrapping it in more levels of abstraction, which is utterly infuriating. Sometimes you really just have to accept that certain things are complex, and deal with it.

Re: Laws of UX

#76

Post by yoz-y » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 3:40 PM UTC

After all the criticism here I took a shot of paraphrasing the website in a page length post: https://yozy.net/2018/01/10-laws-of-ux-digested/

A kind of an opinionated tl;dr

Re: Laws of UX

#77

Post by GordonS » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 3:47 PM UTC

What font is this using? That weird mark on all the "st" pairs is irritating!

Maybe we need a number 11, "don't use weird fonts"

Re: Laws of UX

#78

Post by oblio » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 3:59 PM UTC

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.

Re: Laws of UX

#79

Post by AltCtrl » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 4:02 PM UTC

dozzie wrote: post #14

You do realize that this "UX" thing was for decades called "ergonomics" and had a large body of research behind, do you?

People misunderstand UX; ergonomics, usability, UI are parts of a full UX process

Re: Laws of UX

#80

Post by reaperducer » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 4:16 PM UTC

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…

331K transferred. Less than 1K of actual readable text.

In the about section, the author brags about using Sketch, Gulp, SASS, Nunjucks, and a third-party font. Seriously? He couldn't have just envisioned that thing in his head and put it straight to code?