Ryan Singer
Two kinds of usability
An Article by Ryan SingerI divide usability problems into two kinds:
- Perceptual: "They couldn't figure out what to do next", "they couldn't find the feature", "they didn't know they could click that button..." etc.
- Domain-specific: "We need a way to jump back here because in their workflow this happens..."
In general, usability testing only catches type 1 perceptual problems. Because in those tests you take people out of the real world and assign them tasks. Usability testing doesn't catch domain-specific problems because they only come up in real life use.
How I Wrote Shape Up
An Article by Ryan SingerHere’s a little behind-the-scenes look at the development of our newest book, Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters.
Keep digging
An Article by Ryan SingerThe hardest thing about customer interviews is knowing where to dig. An effective interview is more like a friendly interrogation. We don’t want to learn what customers think about the product, or what they like or dislike — we want to know what happened and how they chose... To get those answers we can’t just ask surface questions, we have to keep digging back behind the answers to find out what really happened.
Domain-specific vs. Domain-independent UX
An Article by Ryan SingerDomain specific UX means understanding how the supply should fit the demand considering a specific situation and use case.
On the other hand, many aspects of UX don’t require knowledge about a particular situation. They‘re based on the common constraints of human sense faculties, memory and cognition or the net of ergonomic factors around the device and the setting where it’s used. These domain independent elements of the UX are important too.
Domain independent UX should absolutely pervade the organization. It belongs to the general skill and knowledge of each supplier at their link in the chain. It’s part of learning to be a good designer, programmer, marketer, salesperson etc.
The Fidelity Curve
An Article by Ryan SingerHow do we choose which level of fidelity is appropriate for a project?
I think about it like this: The purpose of making sketches and mockups before coding is to gain confidence in what we plan to do. I’m trying to remove risk from the decision to build something by somehow “previewing” it in a cheaper form. There’s a trade-off here. The higher the fidelity of the mockup, the more confidence it gives me. But the longer it takes to create that mockup, the more time I’ve wasted on an intermediate step before building the real thing.
I like to look at that trade-off economically. Each method reduces risk by letting me preview the outcome at lower fidelity, at the cost of time spent on it. The cost/benefit of each type of mockup is going to vary depending on the fidelity of the simulation and the work involved in building the real thing.
Time-based analytics
An Article by Ryan SingerAnalytics apps don't tell you much about usage behavior. You might be able to see how many users performed an event, or how many times they did it. But none of the analytics packages out there are good at showing you how often people do things. Are they using to-dos once a week? Every day? Only signing into the app once a month but happily paying for years?
Time matters. You can't understand usage without time.
UI and Capability
An Article by Ryan SingerI’m very conscious of whether I am affording a feature or styling it. It’s important to distinguish because they look the same from a distance.
...Affording a capability and styling it are both important. But it’s essential to know which one you are doing at a given time. Style is a matter of taste. Capability and clarity are not. They are more objective. That person standing at the edge of the chasm cares more about accomplishing their task than the details of the decor.
What happens to user experience in a minimum viable product?
An Article by Ryan Singer"Feature complexity is like surface area and quality of execution is like height. I want a base level of quality execution across all features. Whenever I commit to building or expanding a feature, I'm committing to a baseline of effort on the user experience."
There’s a distinction to make: The set of features you choose to build is one thing. The level you choose to execute at is another. You can decide whether or not to include a feature like ‘reset password’. But if you decide to do it, you should live up to a basic standard of execution on the experience side.
Features can be different sizes with more or less complexity, but quality of experience should be constant across all features. That constant quality of experience is what gives your customers trust. It demonstrates to them that whatever you build, you build well.
What UI really is (and how UX confuses matters)
An Article by Ryan SingerPeople mix the terms UI and UX together. UX is tricky because it doesn’t refer to any one thing. Interface design, visual styling, code performance, uptime, and feature set all contribute to the user’s “experience.” Books on UX further complicate matters by including research methods and development methodologies. All of this makes the field confusing for people who want to understand the fundamentals.
That’s why I avoid teaching the term ’UX.’ It means too many things to too many different people. Instead I focus on individual skills. Once you understand the individual skills, you can assemble them into a composite system without blurring them together. For software design, the core skill among all user-facing concerns is user interface design.
The Architecture of Happiness
A few millimeters apart
Aesthetes force us to consider whether happiness may not sometimes turn on the presence or absence of a fingerprint, whether in certain situations beauty and ugliness may not lie only a few millimeters apart, whether a single mark might not wreck a wall or an errant brush stroke undo a landscape painting.
Tragic colors
Life may have to show itself to us in some of its authentically tragic colors before we can begin to grow properly visually responsive to its subtler offerings.
Classical absurdity
Corbusier observed that the requirements of flight of necessity rid airplanes of all superfluous decoration and so unwittingly transformed them into successful pieces of architecture. To place a Classical statue atop a house was as absurd as to add one to a plane, he noted, but at least by crashing in response to this addition, the plane had the advantage of rendering its absurdity starkly manifest.
Ideas of a good life
In essence, what works of design and architecture talk to us about is the kind of life that would most appropriately unfold within and around them. They tell us of certain moods that they seek to encourage and sustain in their inhabitants. While keeping us warm and helping us in mechanical ways, they simultaneously hold out an invitation for us to be specific sorts of people. They speak of visions of happiness.
To describe a building as beautiful therefore suggests more than a mere aesthetic fondness; it implies an attraction to the particular way of life this structure is promoting through its roof, door handles, window frames, staircase, and furnishings. A feeling of beauty is a sign that we have come upon a material articulation of certain of our ideas of a good life.
The people we love
The objects we describe as beautiful are versions of the people we love.
The search for happiness
If the search for happiness is the underlying quest of our lives, it seems only natural that it should simultaneously be the essential theme to which beauty alludes.
An equivalence
In both early Christianity and Islam, theologians made a claim about architecture likely to sound so peculiar to modern ears as to be worth of sustained examination: they proposed that beautiful buildings had the power to improve us morally and spiritually. They believed that, rather than corrupting us, rather than being an idle indulgence for the decadent, exquisite surroundings could edge us towards perfection. A beautiful building could reinforce our resolve to be good.
Behind this distinctive claim lay another astonishing belief: that of an equivalence between the visual and ethical realms.
Inwardly to resemble
What we want, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.
We can conclude from this that we are drawn to call something beautiful whenever we detect that it contains in a concentrated form those qualities which we personally, or our societies more generally, are deficient.
The gathering darkness of a Sunday evening
Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
What we don't like
A grasp of the psychological mechanism behind taste may not change our sense of what we find beautiful, but it can prevent us from reacting to what we don’t like with simple disbelief.
Our understanding of the psychology of taste can in turn help us to escape from the two great dogmas of aesthetics: the view that there is only one acceptable visual style or (even more implausibly) that all styles are equally valid.
Over-imagination
An architect intent on being different may in the end prove as troubling as an over-imaginative pilot or doctor. However important originality may be in some fields, restraint and adherence to procedure emerge as the more significant virtues in a great many others.
We rarely wish to be surprised by novelty as we round street corners. We require consistency in our buildings, for we are ourselves frequently close to disorientation and frenzy.
The extremes of order and complexity
Such works emphasize the truth of the ancient maxim that beauty lies between the extremes of order and complexity.
It follows that the balance we approve of in architecture, and which we anoint with the word ‘beautiful’, alludes to a state that, on a psychological level, we can describe as mental health or happiness. Like buildings, we, too, contain opposites which can be more or less successfully handled.
Beauty and strength
Yet the bridge testifies to how closely a certain kind of beauty is bound up with our admiration for strength, for man-made objects which can withstand the life-destroying forces of heat, cold, gravity or wind.
We respond with emotion to creations which transport us across distances we could never walk, which shelter us during storms we could not weather, which pick up signals we could never hear with our own ears and which hang daintily off cliffs from which we would fall instantly to our deaths.
With grace and economy
Both bridges accomplish daring feats, but Maillart’s possesses the added virtue of making its achievement look effortless - and because we sense it isn’t, we wonder at it and admire it all the more. The bridge is endowed with a subcategory of beauty we can refer to as elegance, a quality present whenever a work of architecture succeeds in carrying out an act of resistance - holding, spanning, sheltering - with grace and economy as well as strength; when it has the modesty not to draw attention to the difficulties it has surmounted.
The dignity of age
Wood and stone, and now concrete and wood, age slowly and with dignity. They do not shatter hysterically like glass, or tear like paper, but discolor with a melancholy, noble air.
Apportioning value
Contrary to the Romantic belief that we each settle naturally on a fitting idea of beauty, it seems that our visual and emotional faculties in fact need constant external guidance to help them decide what they should take note of and appreciate. ‘Culture’ is the word we have assigned to the force that assists us in identifying which of our many sensations we should focus on and apportion value to.
There was no fog in London
It is books, poems and paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge. Oscar Wilde referred to this phenomenon when he quipped that there was no fog in London before Whistler started painting the Thames. Likewise, there must have been little beauty in old stones before Japanese priests and poets began writing about them.
To the worms and the trees
We owe it to the fields that our houses will not be the inferiors of the virgin land they have replaced. We owe it to the worms and the trees that the buildings we cover them with will stand as promises of the highest and most intelligent kinds of happiness.