User Experience
Observe data collection at the moment of measurement
When engineers refuse to leave well enough alone
Most advanced yet acceptable
Customers will confer a favor on us
This is UX
Post-occupancy evaluation
Essential vs. nice to have
Good for the next man
What the problem is
You've got to do this with love
The notion of a thermal optimum persists
Finish designing as close to the end of a sprint as possible
I'm sorry, I love engineers
People are afraid to let design have time to actually figure out the right thing to make, because "whatever will the engineers do?" – fuck you, there's plenty for the engineers to do. Go fix some technical debt. Go fix those 700 bugs that you de-prioritized or marked as won't fix because you're an asshole.
I'm sorry, I love engineers. I don't know why I'm yelling at them. But you know, there's plenty for the engineers to do. There's all sorts of cleanup. They can work on dev-ops stuff! They can work on their build process! Make it faster! I'm not worried about keeping the engineers busy. If you think that the only thing that engineers can do is build yet another stupid feature that nobody is going to use, then you're a garbage designer and you should quit.
...Happy 2020 everybody!
Places, services, techniques
It is not enough for administrators in most fields to understand specific services and techniques. They must understand, and understand thoroughly, specific places.
205. Structure Follows Social Spaces
Problem
No building ever feels right to the people in it unless the physical spaces (defined by columns, walls, and ceilings) are congruent with the social spaces (defined by activities and human groups).
Solution
A first principle of construction: on no account allow the engineering to dictate the building’s form. Place the load bearing elements—the columns and the walls and floors—according to the social space of the building; never modify the social spaces to conform to the engineering structure of the building.
The curse of knowledge
The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn.
The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose. It simply doesn’t occur to the writer that her readers don’t know what she knows - that they haven’t mastered the patois of her guild, can’t divine the missing steps that seem too obvious to mention, have no way to visualize a scene that to her is as clear as day. And so she doesn’t bother to explain the jargon, or spell out the logic, or supply the necessary detail.
The quality of the day
It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
Feature factories
We use the term feature factory as a pejorative to designate companies addicted to adding features, while accumulating incalculable so-called technical debt. This situation is driven by management for the convenience of marketing, and I am skeptical that a more faithful application of Agile principles will correct it. Indeed, I suspect Agile processes are constitutionally vulnerable to this kind of compromise.
The presence of a feature can only indicate to a user if a goal is possible, behavior will determine how painful it will be to achieve it.
Architectural sequences
Noted designer and architectural theorist Bernard Tschumi would call the predictable repetition of events inside an architectural space a sequence: a linear series of actions and behaviors that are at least partially determined by the design of the space itself.
The observer effect
In biology, when researchers want to observe animals in their natural habitat, it is paramount that they find a way to do so without disturbing those animals. Otherwise, the behavior they see is unlikely to be natural, because most animals (including humans) change their behavior when they are being observed.
Seeing and feeling
Learning to design is, first of all, learning to see. Designers see more, and more precisely. This is a blessing and a curse—once we have learned to see design, both good and bad, we cannot un-see. The downside is that the more you learn to see, the more you lose your “common” eye, the eye you design for. This can be frustrating for us designers when we work for a customer with a bad eye and strong opinions. But this is no justification for designer arrogance or eye-rolling. Part of our job is to make the invisible visible, to clearly express what we see, feel and do. You can’t expect to sell what you can’t explain.
This is why excellent designers do not just develop a sharper eye. They try to keep their ability to see things as a customer would. You need a design eye to design, and a non-designer eye to feel what you designed.
Anthropological rapport
Accurately capturing how people spend their time is contingent not only on systematic data collection, but also on participants moving in a relaxed and normal manner through their daily activities. Just as primatologists habituate their subjects to their presence, anthropologists first must develop rapport and trust with the communities in which they live.
What is unspoken
Ethnographic studies are distinct from ethological research in other species because we can speak with our subjects and ask them questions. This has tremendous value, but much of what humans do is not spoken, and we also observe, count, and measure.
The source of delight
Design doesn’t need to be delightful for it to work, but that’s like saying food doesn’t need to be tasty to keep us alive. The pedigree of great design isn’t solely based on aesthetics or utility, but also the sensation it creates when it is seen or used. It’s a bit like food: plating a dish adds beauty to the experience, but the testament to the quality of the cooking is in its taste. It’s the same for design, in that the source of a delightful experience comes from the design’s use.
Cardinal sin
Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design.
The duty of industrial design is first and foremost to users and the users are, generally, human beings, with all their complexities, habits, ideas and idiosyncrasies.
The limits of language
The question of human limits was posed to Diderot the moment he, as it were, rose from his armchair. His method for finding out how people worked was, like a modern anthropologist, to ask them:
We addressed ourselves to the most skilled workers in Paris and the kingdom at large. We took the trouble to visit their workshops, to interrogate them, to write under dictation from them, to follow out their ideas, to define, to identify the terms peculiar to their profession.
The research soon ran into difficulty, because much of the knowledge craftsmen possess is tacit knowledge—people know how to do something but they cannot put what they know into words. Diderot remarked of his investigations: "Among a thousand one will be lucky to find a dozen who are capable of explaining the tools or machinery they use, and the things they produce with any clarity."
What we can say in words may be more limited than what we can do with things. Language is not an adequate 'mirror-tool' for the physical movements of the human body.
Equidistance
Once, in the Rijksmuseum, I brought in new speakers for my phonograph. What the directions told me to do was make certain that the two speakers were equidistant from each other.
One certainly had to wonder what the person who wrote the instructions could have believed he meant by that.The most seamless and wonderful way
I believe our job as designers is to give you what you need as quickly and elegantly as we can. Our job as designers is to take you away from technology. Our job as designers is to make you smile. To make a profit by providing you something that enhances your life in the most seamless and wonderful way possible.
Speaking people
Surely those who oversee and guide municipal transportation systems ought to use public transit during their work days. Why not put a clause to that effect in their job description or contract?
Requiring those whose work has a major impact on people's lives to experience some of the impact is really not too much ask. It means that they speak "people" rather than French, Cree, or Spanish.
Hopes and dreams
The very first thing we did was spend two weeks just talking to different teachers and students, to get a feeling for their hopes and dreams. These talks were one-on-one and often lasted about an hour, for any one interview, during which we asked questions, talked, probed, explored dreams of an ideal campus, and tried to understand each person's deepest visions as a teacher, or as a student. We asked people about their longings, and their practical needs. We asked them to close their eyes and imagine themselves walking about in the most wonderful campus they could imagine.
Eggs, Easter and poached
When a site is done with care and excitement you can tell. You feel it as you visit, the hum of intention. The craft, the cohesiveness, the attention to detail is obvious. And in turn, you meet them halfway. These are the sites with the low bounce rates, the best engagement metrics, the ones where they get questions like “can I contribute?” No gimmicks needed.
What if you don’t have the time? Of course, we all have to get things over the line. Perhaps a challenge: what small thing can you incorporate that someone might notice? Can you start with a single detail? I didn’t start with a poached egg in my breakfast, one day I made a goofy scrambled one. It went on from there. Can you challenge yourself to learn one small new technique? Can you outsource one graphic? Can you introduce a tiny easter egg? Say something just a little differently from the typical corporate lingo?
It can also be art
It is worth remembering a website does not have to be a product; it can also be art. The web is also a creative and cultural space that need not confine itself to the conventions defined by commercial product design and marketing.
A fly in the spider's web
We're very good at talking about immersive experiences, personalized content, growth hacking, responsive strategy, user centered design, social media activation, retargeting, CMS and user experience. But behind all this jargon lurks the uncomfortable idea that we might be accomplices in the destruction of a platform that was meant to empower and bring people together; the possibility that we are instead building a machine that surveils, subverts, manipulates, overwhelms and exploits people.
It all comes down a simple but very dangerous shift: the major websites of today's web are not built for the visitor, but as means of using her. Our visitor has become a data point, a customer profile, a potential lead — a proverbial fly in the spider's web. In the guise of user-centered design, we're building an increasingly user-hostile web.
Want, need, afford
- What the client wants.
- What the client thinks it wants.
- What the client needs.
- What the client can afford.
- What the planet can afford.
The Design of Everyday Things
A Book by Don NormanThe vanishing designer
An Article by Chuánqí SunVisionary designers have lost their conceptual integrity to an industrial complex optimized for consensus, predictability, and short-term business gain. The rise of customer-obsession mantra and data-driven culture cultivated a generation of designers who only take risk-free and success-guaranteed steps towards the inevitable local maxima of design monotony.
Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
An Article by Parimal SatyalWe are quietly replacing an open web that connects and empowers with one that restricts and commoditizes people. We need to stop it.
The Nature of Product
An Article by Marty CaganToo many product managers and product designers want to spend all their time in problem discovery, and not get their hands dirty in solution discovery – the whole nonsense of “product managers are responsible for the what and not the how.”
Undoing the Toxic Dogmatism of Digital Design
An Essay by Lisa Angela- Design educators and industry leaders have never reached a consensus about what comprises a “good enough” foundational education for digital design.
- We do not properly retire methods (or ways of conducting them) that have been shown to be ineffective.
- Design team seniority levels are meaningless.
- We’ve collectively lost the safety (and subsequently the desire) to explore and fail.
- We afford well-known design leaders too much power to dictate how design is discussed and conducted.
- We have no ethical standards.
- Inclusive design and accessibility are afterthoughts — both in design education and in practice.
Was Design Thinking Designed Not to Work?
An Article by Debbie LevittDesign thinking sells a fantasy. It sells you the fantasy that with some guidelines, templates, and sticky notes, you can do what IDEO does just like how they do it.
…if it were true that design thinking lets you do what the best designers do, IDEO could put themselves out of business. If they were really selling you the absolute guide on how they solve problems, innovate, and design, you wouldn’t need IDEO. Their idea to save their business from a slump hypothetically cannibalizes their business…Unless they knew that it wouldn’t.
On Design Thinking
An Essay by Maggie GramDesign means something even broader now. Sometime around World War II, it came to mean making things that “solve problems.” With the influence of mid-century global social movements and the rise of digital technology, it began to mean making things that are “human-centered.” And as of recently, design doesn’t have to involve making things at all. It can just mean a way of thinking.
Of all these developments, the idea of design as a broadly applicable way of thinking—the idea of “design thinking”—may end up being the most influential…At Stanford’s d.school, as cofounder Robert Sutton has said, “design thinking” is often treated “more like a religion than a set of practices for sparking creativity.”
An incoherent rant about design systems
An Article by Robin RendleNo matter how fancy your Figma file is or how beautiful and lovingly well organized that Storybook documentation is; the front-end is always your source of truth. You can hate it as much as you like—all those weird buttons, variables, inaccessible form inputs—but that right there is your design system.
...being honest about this is the first step to fixing it.
Spatial Interfaces
An Essay by John PalmerSoftware applications can utilize spatial interfaces to afford users powerful ways of thinking and interacting. Though often associated with gaming, spatial interfaces can be useful in any kind of software, even in less obvious domains like productivity tools or work applications. We will see spatial interfaces move into all verticals, starting with game-like interfaces for all kinds of social use-cases.
Spreadsheet Portfolios for UX Designers
An Article by Erica HeinzThe “case study?” column was the whole point of the spreadsheet — identifying which projects I still needed to write up for my portfolio — but at this point I looked at the sheet, and thought “This is honestly a better overview of the work I do than any ‘portfolio’ I’ve seen”.
So I tweeted a screenshot, joking/trolling that it WAS my portfolio (I didn’t include any winks or notes that I was still planning a “real” portfolio), but people didn’t respond with the lulz I expected — they got the idea, or took it at face value and said they were going to do their portfolio this way too!
When users never use the features they asked for
An Article by Austin Z. HenleyWe deployed our tool. Almost no one used it.
The handful that did use it, used it once or twice and barely interacted with it. After a few days, zero people were using it.
Why did they tell me they wanted these features?
The case against heatmaps
An Article by Oliver PalmerVisualised aggregations of click activity are a low effort, low signal waste of time and best avoided in favour of actual research.
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 experience the web today
A WebsiteLocus. (Appwalls)
An Article by Ethan MarcotteI’ve noticed a recent trend on the web — or at least, on the parts of it I’ve visited. Maybe you’ve noticed it too.
Here’s what happens: you’re on a website, and one of these little prompts pops up...[to] let you know that there’s an app, and that the website you’re on...well, it’s not quite the app, is it?
...Sometimes, the website wants me to install the app — no, it needs me to install the app. It’s like a paywall, but for apps. An appwall.
In recent years, these prompts have gotten more prominent, and occasionally impassable. And I think that trend’s interesting. Why would a company promote a native app over their perfectly usable website?
It feels like a glimpse into that company’s design priorities. And it’s possibly providing us with insight into the business value they place on the open web — a medium that’s meant to be accessible everywhere, on any screen, on any device.
And it really does feel like these glimpses are becoming more common.
In ways you didn't anticipate
A Quote by Patrick HebronI always have a hard time wrapping my mind around some of the classic user questions: What is this thing for, is it for novices or professionals, etc? I do my best to avoid these questions, because the best thing you can possibly accomplish as the maker of a tool is to build something that gets used in ways you didn’t anticipate. If you’re building a tool that gets used in exactly the ways that you wrote out on paper, you shot very low. You did something literal and obvious.
The Rise Of User-Hostile Software
An Essay by Den DelimarskyWe are truly living in an era of user-hostile software, and when I say “user-hostile” I mean it as “software that doesn’t really care about the needs of the user but rather about the needs of the developer.”
I personally do not know anyone who asked for an online account requirement before they can use a keyboard; however, some product lead somewhere decided that it’s important to better “understand the customer” and “maximize marketing reach” through some weekly “Hey, we have a new keyboard!” newsletter.
When Customer Journeys Don’t Work: Arcs, Loops, & Terrain
An Article by Stephen P. AndersonThinking [in terms of loops and arcs] allows us to let go of a specific journey or sequence, and imagine dozens of scenarios and possible sequences in which these skills can be learned. This doesn’t mean there aren’t more fundamental skills that other skills build upon, but we can let go the tyranny of how, precisely, a person will move through a system. We’re free to zoom in and obsess on these loops, which does two things for us:
- Approach the design of a system as the design of these as small but significant moments of learning.
- Consider the many ways these loops might be sequenced, with the exact order being less important.
Minimum Awesome Product
An Article by Carlos BeneytoUsers are accustomed to a minimum of quality, and they expect that of all new products.
If our product does not [meet basic expectations of quality], people will automatically believe that it is a bad product and they will not take it seriously. It is not what they expect.
Hence my suggestion that the MVP has died and the MAP: Minimum Awesome Product was born.
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.
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.
136 things every web developer should know before they burn out and turn to landscape painting or nude modelling
An Article by Baldur Bjarnason- The best way to improve software UX is regular direct observation, by everybody on the team, of the work done.
- Have some personality.
- Minimalism is garbage.
- Metaphors are fantastic.
- Naming things is fantastic.
- Try to write HTML that would make sense and be usable without the CSS.
- The buyer is quite often wrong. That fact never changes their mind.
- Working on a functioning app’s codebase does more to increase its quality than adding features.
- A good manager will debate you, and that’s awesome.
- The term ‘project’ is a poor metaphor for the horticultural activity that is software development.
Why we need to stop over-complicating UX
An Article by Hugo FroesMany have become so focused on the process and methodologies that they’ve forgotten the fundamentals of why we started focusing on the user and what we hope to achieve with that focus.
Fast Path to a Great UX – Increased Exposure Hours
An Article by Jared SpoolAs we’ve been researching what design teams need to do to create great user experiences, we’ve stumbled across an interesting finding. It’s the closest thing we’ve found to a silver bullet when it comes to reliably improving the designs teams produce.
The solution? Exposure hours. The number of hours each team member is exposed directly to real users interacting with the team’s designs or the team’s competitor’s designs. There is a direct correlation between this exposure and the improvements we see in the designs that team produces.
Metrics have a strange hold on the imagination
A Fragment by Shawn WangOnce in place, metrics have a strange hold on the imagination: I've seriously had a CTO carelessly reject my genuine idea out of hand because "it doesn't help OKRs", the same OKRs we previously agreed should not describe all that we do.
I agree with Amir Shevat that we should "do the right things over the easy to measure things."
How would you feel if you could no longer use the product?
An ArticleThe product/market fit definitions I had found were vivid and compelling, but they were lagging indicators — by the time investment bankers are staking out your house, you already have product/market fit. Instead, Ellis had found a leading indicator: just ask users “how would you feel if you could no longer use the product?” and measure the percent who answer “very disappointed.”
User Inyerface
A WebsiteA worst-practice UI experiment.
Apps Getting Worse
An Article by Tim BrayToo often, a popular consumer app unexpectedly gets worse: Some combination of harder to use, missing features, and slower. At a time in history where software is significantly eating the world, this is nonsensical. It’s also damaging to the lives of the people who depend on these products.
...Maybe we ought to start promoting PMs who are willing to stand pat for an occasional release or three. Maybe we ought to fire all the consumer-product PMs. Maybe we ought to start including realistic customer-retraining-cost estimates in our product planning process.
We need to stop breaking the software people use. Everyone deserves better.
Just-in-time Design
An Article by Matthew StrömThere is a disconnect between product design and product engineering.
The Nine States of Design
An Article by Vince Speelman- Nothing
- Loading
- None
- One
- Some
- Too Many
- Incorrect
- Correct
- Done
Against Canvas
An Article by Alan JacobsEven with all the features and plugins, Canvas presumes certain ways of organizing classes that might not be universal, just typical. And if (like me) you’re an atypical user, you have to choose between constantly fighting with the system or gradually doing more and more things the way Canvas wants you to do them. This, by the way, is why it’s never true to say that technologies are neutral and what matters is how you use them: every technology without exception has affordances, certain actions that it makes easy, and other actions that it makes difficult or impossible. A technology whose affordances run contrary to your convictions can rob you of your independence — and any technology deployed on the scale of Canvas will inevitably do that. It will turn every teacher into an obedient Canvas-user. I don’t want to be an obedient Canvas-user.
In Praise of Small Menus
An Article by Rachel SugarThe best way to experience a restaurant, I have always felt, is by eating exactly what it wants to feed you. I do not want choices. I want the best thing. A restaurant might have five or ten best things, but it cannot have 45. There are many infuriating things about the world, but one of the more fixable is the sensation of acute regret from having ordered wrong. Why are there possibly wrong orders? Recently, I was at a fancy restaurant with great pastas and bad pizzas. So cut the pizzas!
A kitchen that focuses on its strengths turns out consistently excellent things, even if that results in fewer total things.
On Design Engineering: I think I might be a design engineer...
An Article by Trys MudfordDesign engineering is the name for the discipline that finesses the overlap between design and engineering to speed delivery and idea validation. From prototyping to production-ready code, this function fast-tracks design decisions, mitigates risk, and establishes UI code quality. The design engineer’s work encapsulates the systems, workflows, and technology that empower designers and engineers to collaborate most effectively to optimise product development and innovation.
— Natalya ShelburneWaking up from the dream of UX
An Article by Peter MerholzIn no objective sense were things better for UX [in 2010]. Most companies didn’t know it existed. Most who did, drastically underinvested in it. Those who were willing to invest in it were savvy enough to listen to thought leaders, but that was a paltry percentage of the real work to be done.
What’s happened by 2021 is that UX is not interesting in and of itself anymore. UX is a given. As Joe Lamantia said in a mailing list I’m on, “it’s furniture.” And the challenges and frustrations people are expressing are largely due to this maturation.
We’re moving from “the dream of UX” to “the reality of UX.”
Why I'm losing faith in UX
An Article by Mark HurstIncreasingly, I think UX doesn't live up to its original meaning of "user experience." Instead, much of the discipline today, as it's practiced in Big Tech firms, is better described by a new name.
UX is now "user exploitation."
PM and UX Have Markedly Different Views of Their Job Responsibilities
A Research Paper by Kara Pernice & Raluca BudiuThe graph shows 3 research-related tasks and the percentage of PMs and UXers who agreed on whether PM or UX should be responsible for each.
A survey of people in user experience and product management shows that these professionals disagree on who should be responsible for many key tasks, like doing discoveries and early design.
Guidebook: Graphical User Interface Gallery
A WebsiteGuidebook is a website dedicated to preserving and showcasing Graphical User Interfaces, as well as various materials related to them.
Don't Serve Burnt Pizza
A Fragment by Jiaona ZhangSay you’re trying to test whether people like pizza. If you serve them burnt pizza, you’re not getting feedback on whether they like pizza. You only know that they don’t like burnt pizza. Similarly, when you’re only relying on the MVP, the fastest and cheapest functional prototype, you risk not actually testing your product, but rather a poor or flawed version of it.
Site performance is potentially the most important metric
A Fragment by Kealan ParrSite performance is potentially the most important metric. The better the performance, the better chance that users stay on a page, read content, make purchases, or just about whatever they need to do. A 2017 study by Akamai says as much when it found that even a 100ms delay in page load can decrease conversions by 7% and lose 1% of their sales for every 100ms it takes for their site to load which, at the time of the study, was equivalent to $1.6 billion if the site slowed down by just one second.
It's all just geek talk
A Fragment by Riccardo MoriI’m finding that many people not only have lowered their standards with regard to the user interface, but more and more often when I bring up the subject, they seem to consider it a somewhat secondary aspect, something that’s only good for ‘geek talk’. The same kind of amused reaction laymen have to wine or coffee connoisseurs when they describe flavours and characteristics using specific lingo. Something that makes sense only to wine or coffee geeks but has little to no meaning or impact for the regular person.
The problem is that if an increasing number of people start viewing user interface design as an afterthought, or something that isn’t fundamental to the design of a product or experience — it’s all just ‘geek talk’ — then there is a reduced incentive to care about it on the part of the maker of the product.
A Mindful Mobile OS
An Article by Clo S.I read and loved Potential's "iOS 15, Humane" proposition. Published earlier in June by co-founders Welf and Oliver, it tackles how iOS could help us better protect our attention.
As a designer who cares about and writes about digital wellness, I'm profoundly aligned with their suggestions.
- Persuasive design
- Disclosure requirement
- From infinite feeds to pages
- Was this time well spent?
- Regret tax
- Conditions of use
Weighing up UX
An Article by Jeremy KeithMetrics come up when we’re talking about A/B testing, growth design, and all of the practices that help designers get their seat at the table (to use the well-worn cliché). But while metrics are very useful for measuring design’s benefit to the business, they’re not really cut out for measuring user experience.
Website Response Times
An Article by Jakob NielsenUsers really care about speed in interaction design...A snappy user experience beats a glamorous one, for the simple reason that people engage more with a site when they can move freely and focus on the content instead of on their endless wait.
- 0.1 seconds gives the feeling of instantaneous response. This level of responsiveness is essential to support the feeling of direct manipulation.
- 1 second keeps the user's flow of thought seamless.
- 10 seconds keeps the user's attention. A 10-second delay will often make users leave a site immediately.
Adding is favoured over subtracting in problem solving
A Research PaperHow would you change this structure so that you could put a masonry brick on top of it without crushing the figurine, bearing in mind that each block added costs 10 cents? If you are like most participants in a study reported by Adams et al. in Nature, you would add pillars to better support the roof. But a simpler (and cheaper) solution would be to remove the existing pillar, and let the roof simply rest on the base.
A series of problem-solving experiments reveal that people are more likely to consider solutions that add features than solutions that remove them, even when removing features is more efficient.
Fast Software, the Best Software
An Essay by Craig ModI love fast software. That is, software speedy both in function and interface. Software with minimal to no lag between wanting to activate or manipulate something and the thing happening. Lightness.
Software that’s speedy usually means it’s focused. Like a good tool, it often means that it’s simple, but that’s not necessarily true. Speed in software is probably the most valuable, least valued asset. To me, speedy software is the difference between an application smoothly integrating into your life, and one called upon with great reluctance. Fastness in software is like great margins in a book — makes you smile without necessarily knowing why.
Making sense of MVP
An ArticleHenrik Kniberg:
The top scenario (delivering a front tire) sucks because we keep delivering stuff that the customer can’t use at all. If you know what you’re doing – your product has very little complexity and risk, perhaps you’ve built that type of thing hundreds of times before – then go ahead and just do big bang. Build the thing and deliver it when done.
Internal design teams and thought leadership
An Article by Jorge ArangoThe design industry is an ecosystem. External design teams provide critical functions beyond augmenting internal design resources. Thought leadership — pushing the field’s boundaries — is indeed one of them.
Many practices and tools we take for granted — journey maps, personas, conceptual frameworks — were pioneered and/or popularized by ‘outies.’ Most of the field’s foundational books and blogs are by people outside ‘client’ organizations.
This isn’t because internal designers aren’t as clever or dedicated as their external colleagues. (Many ‘innies’ are former ‘outies.’) It’s because internal design roles are structurally misaligned with public thought leadership.
Understanding the Kano Model
An Article by Jared SpoolThe horizontal axis represents the investment the organization makes. As investment increases, the organization spends more resources on improving the quality (remember, Noriaka was a quality guy at heart) or adding new capabilities.
The vertical dimension represents the satisfaction of the user, moving from an extreme negative of frustration to an extreme positive of delight. (Neutral satisfaction being neither frustrated nor delighted is in the middle of the axis.)
It’s against the backdrop of these two axes that we see how the Kano Model works. It shows us there are three forces at work, which we can use to predict our users’ satisfaction with the investment we make.
Monkeys testing random designs
A Tweet by Jared SpoolA/B testing is an effective approach to use science to design and deliver deeply-frustrating user experiences.
A/B testing without upfront research is just random monkeys testing random designs to see which of those designs do “best” against random criteria.
If drug testing was actually implemented like most A/B tests, you’d give 2 drugs to 2 groups of people and pick the “winner” by whichever group had fewer deaths.
Web History Chapter 6: Web Design
A Chapter by Jay HoffmannAfter the first websites demonstrate the commercial and aesthetic potential of the web, the media industry floods the web with a surge of new content. Amateur webzines — which define and voice and tone unique to the web — are soon joined by traditional publishers. By the mid to late 90’s, most major companies will have a website, and the popularity of the web will begin to explore. Search engines emerge as one solution to cataloging the expanding universe of websites, but even they struggle to keep up. Brands soon begin to look for a way to stand out.
A Dao of Web Design
An Essay by John AllsoppWhat I sense is a real tension between the web as we know it, and the web as it would be. It’s the tension between an existing medium, the printed page, and its child, the web. And it’s time to really understand the relationship between the parent and the child, and to let the child go its own way in the world.
Usability is not the most important thing on earth
A Quote by Joel SpolskyJakob Nielsen says that Flash is “99% bad.” I have to agree. Flash always reduces usability.
On the other hand, every time I read Jakob Nielsen, I get this feeling that he really doesn’t appreciate that usability is not the most important thing on earth. Sure, usability is important (I wrote a whole book about it). But it is simply not everyone’s number one priority, nor should it be. You get the feeling that if Mr Nielsen designed a singles bar, it would be well lit, clean, with giant menus printed in Arial 14 point, and you’d never have to wait to get a drink. But nobody would go there, they would all be at Coyote Ugly Saloon pouring beer on each other.
What happens next?
An Article by Laura KleinWhen you create an interaction for a product, you have to design more than what it looks like. You even have to design more than what happens during the interaction. You have to design what happens after the initial user interaction. And then you have to keep going.
Makespace.fun
An ApplicationIn today’s software, live video feeds are stuck inside static rectangles that can’t go anywhere. MakeSpace flips all that on its head. Your cursor is your live face, and you can roam free, controlling who and what you want to be close to.
Unobtrusive feedback
An Article by Jeremy KeithThe text 'added' and 'removed' drifts upwards from the toggle button and fades away.
So we all know Super Mario, right? And if you think about when you’re collecting coins in Super Mario, it doesn’t stop the game and pop up an alert dialogue and say, “You have just collected ten points, OK, Cancel”, right? It just does it. It does it in the background, but it does provide you with a feedback mechanism.
The feedback you get in Super Mario is about the number of points you’ve just gained. When you collect an item that gives you more points, the number of points you’ve gained appears where the item was …and then drifts upwards as it disappears. It’s unobtrusive enough that it won’t distract you from the gameplay you’re concentrating on but it gives you the reassurance that, yes, you have just gained points.
People expect technology to suck because it actually sucks
An Article by Nikita ProkopovI decided to record every broken interaction I had during one day.
If I decided to invest time into thinning this list down, I could theoretically...reduce this list from 27 down to 24. At least 24 annoyances per day I have to live with. That’s the world WE ALL are living in now. Welcome.
Performance and people
An Article by Jeremy KeithNot only is web performance a user experience issue, it may well be the user experience issue. Page speed has a proven demonstrable direct effect on user experience (and revenue and customer satisfaction and whatever other metrics you’re using).
Doing It Right
An Article by Brad FrostDoing it right requires a different pace of working and a much broader thought process than “ok, let’s get this thing out the door.” Which is super tough because most workplaces place a huge emphasis on getting things out the door, and fast. Little agile tickets that are expected to be completed in micro sprints to me seem to be antithetical to doing it right.
The life and death of an internet onion
In her piece "A drop of love in the cloud" (2018), artist Fei Liu writes about the like/heart button as a flattening affordance of giving affirmation and love. The text-editor provides a much more expressive input.
But even people who can't communicate well because of language barriers can express love through actions, like cooking food. Can we create other "love inputs" that might allow us to "reach across the chasm of a seamless signal"?
What is expressing "real" love or affirmation about? Is it about effort, thoughtfulness, generosity, something else? What might a thoughtful or generous interface feel or behave like?
Skeleton, Organs, Circulation, Sinew, Skin
An Article by Dorian TaylorI’m concerned with how I witness the work of user experience practitioners getting treated: like it’s just a set of motions toward a product’s all-important implementation, and one that we try to compress, due to its ostensible superfluity. Once the implementation is finished, the UX work appears to usually get discarded.
Now I get it
An Article by Ralph AmmerTo design a system means to orchestrate the interplay of its elements.
Such a system is considered “interactive” if it is open, which means that there are ways to engage with the processes that are happening inside of it. There is of course a range of interactivities which spans from very basic reactive behaviour to highly complex conversational interactions.
What makes a good design principle?
An Article by Matthew Ström- Good design principles are memorable.
- Good design principles help you say no.
- Good design principles aren't truisms.
- Good design principles are applicable.
The UX of Lego Interface Panels
An Article by George CaveTwo studs wide and angled at 45°, the ubiquitous “2x2 decorated slope” is a LEGO minifigure’s interface to the world. These iconic, low-resolution designs are the perfect tool to learn the basics of physical interface design.
Friction Logs
A DefinitionA friction log is a type of UX experiment where the subject journals their feelings, thoughts, struggles, joys, and any other type of emotion. The point is to surface anything that gives the user discomfort or joy so the product or feature can improve. That's what this site is all about.
20 Minutes in Manhattan
It begins with a trip down the stairs
The walk from my apartment in Greenwich Village to my studio in Tribeca takes about twenty minutes, depending on the route and on whether I stop for a coffee and the Times. Invariably, though, it begins with a trip down the stairs.
The building I live in is a so-called Old Law tenement and was built in 1892, a date inscribed on the metal cornice that also carries the building’s name: Annabel Lee. Like most such tenements, ours is five stories high (a few are six, even seven), and I live with my wife, Joan, on the top floor.
Thoughts on stairs
...There is something hypnotic about stair climbing, and as often as I find myself thinking I ought to be at the fourth floor when I am only at the third, I think I've only gotten to three when I'm actually arriving at four.
...To my eyes (and legs) the straight run is more elegant and enjoyable to ascend.
...The narrowing is both functional and artistic, acknowledging that a stair is likely to be used by a smaller number of people as it rises and forcing the perspective narrowing of the long view upward.
...The symbolic weight of stairs is embodied in both their form and their magnitude.
(an architectural stem cell that might transform itself into any organ for living)
The grid and its difficulties
Criticism of the grid and its difficulties was voiced from the start. Olmsted himself noted several problems that arose from the fixed dimensions of the city’s blocks: the impossibility of producing sites for very large buildings and campuses; issues of daylighting; the difficulty of creating systems of formal and symbolic hierarchy within the field of uniformity.
The relative homogeneity of building
The relative homogeneity of building—and city making—in different cultures is the result of their social organization (large buildings and enclosures are the product of the need for large gatherings), their economic possibilities (only a very rich and powerful Church could produce the cathedrals), their available material and technological resources (very little timber construction is to be seen in desert cultures), and their styles of living (portable tepees and tents are logical if you’re involved in seasonal migration). The same is true today. New York builds within an essentially narrow range of configurations, materials, and structural systems, its limits set by culture, technology, and economics: small apartments in high-rise buildings result from extremely high costs for land and construction, a growing predominance of non-nuclear-family living arrangements, and a legal framework that continuously negotiates the bar of bulk upward.
All-use environments
Until the nineteenth century, virtually all cities were “all use” environments. Craft-scale production was typically carried out in a workshop below the home of the craftsperson, which often also served as the site of exchange.
Sonorisms II
the symbolic weight of stairs
the regulation of obnoxious uses
a collector and transmitter of memory
Dubai is the world made Disney
people whose traditions and desires cannot be repressed by mere architecture
the annihilation of space by time (Marx)Zoning for diversity
As production becomes increasingly clean and knowledge-based, as our urban economies tip dramatically to service industries, as racism and ethnic animosities ebb, and as the model of mixed use becomes more and more persuasive and visible, cities are in a position to dramatically rethink zoning as a medium for leveraging and usefully complicating difference, rather than simply isolating it.
Cities designed to facilitate walking
It seems clear that for reasons of both sustainability and sociability, human power as a means of locomotion in the city should be optimized. Cities designed to facilitate walking will—because of their accessible dimensions—likely be more neighborhood-focused and compact as well as more mixed in use. To be reached by walking, a destination—whether a school, office, or shop—must be close at hand. A reasonable walking time (in this culture) for basic necessities is generally considered to be about ten minutes, which translates (at an average walking speed of three to four miles per hour) into six to eight short blocks (or three to four long ones). Using this dimension as a radius, we might begin to think of a comfortable scale for a neighborhood as ten to fifteen New York City blocks.
Obsessed with absolute numbers
Modernist planning was obsessed with absolute numbers, including the minimum dimensions of rooms, open space per capita, and the one-size-fits-all head counts of neighborhood units. This was often pegged at five to seven thousand and was used as a formula for determining the distribution of schools, shops, sports fields, and other facilities. The failure of such planning is not in its effort to be comprehensive or to equalize access to necessary facilities. It is, rather, the attempt to rationalize choice on the basis of a homogeneous set of subjects, a fixed grammar of opportunities, a remorseless segregation of uses, and a scientistic faith in technical analysis and organization that simply excludes diversity, eccentricity, nonconforming beauty, and choice. The utopian nightmare.
A collective right to the city
A collective right to the city was seminally articulated by the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, a right understood not simply as individual access to the goods, services, and spaces of the city but as the right to change the city in accordance with our deepest desires, to steer the very process of urbanization and the way in which the city nurtures the kinds of people we wish to become.
The axis of movement
Moving in the city means constantly changing the axis of movement. In general, lateral movement is confined to a single plane, what’s called grade, the ground level.
Because circulation in multistory buildings is fundamentally one way—which is to say from the bottom up—the condition at the top is invariably different from that at the bottom. Rooftop circulation is the domain of Fantômas, of cat burglars and fleeing criminals, of lovers, and of those acrobatic enough to negotiate the gaps between buildings.
Controlled environments
“Controlled environments” are another of modernism’s great obsessions. Extravagant amounts of energy are spent to keep buildings—as well as skyway systems, shopping malls, and domed stadia—at a constant temperature year-round via entirely mechanical means. The folly is not simply a touchy-feely isolation from the authenticities of nature, which can admittedly be cruel, but a larger disciplinary presumption that seeks to extend the centralized authority (central air, central government) of power ever more comprehensively. It is possible that this particular hubris may have pushed Gaia to the tipping point.
Ground displaced upward
Imagine that our rooftops were parkland, that the area of ground occupied by buildings was, in effect, simply displaced upward. Imagine that the city enacted legislation requiring that the equivalent of 100 percent of the surface area of New York were to be green. A 100 percent requirement would not simply oblige green roofs. It would also demand that compensatory greenery be added to make up for such ungreenable areas as roadways, runways, and other unplantable places. Perhaps the requirement would be satisfied with road narrowings, cantilevered gardens, or green floors in buildings (utilities on the order of the mechanical floors that occur in almost all tall buildings).
The stoop is a space of spectatorship
Along with being a meeting place, the stoop is a space of spectatorship. A street lined with stoops is a kind of lateral stadium, ideal for viewing the passing parade, whether formal ones like the giant Gay Pride and Halloween Parades (until their route was changed a few years ago) or the more informal quotidian version. Hanging out on the stoop allows the sitter to observe the dance (Jane Jacobs’s ballet) of daily activity, to notice what is out of the ordinary, to provide the kind of public presence that prompts neighborly behavior.
The Poop Press Project
(In the run-up to the law, I myself had undertaken the “Poop Press Project,” which had entailed fixing a star-shaped cookie mold to the end of a stick to transform the noisome waste into street art, an attempt only intermittently effective.)
Walking is a natural armature for thinking sequentially
Walking is a natural armature for thinking sequentially. It also has a historic relationship to mental organization that ranges from the Peripatetics, to the philosophers of Kyoto, to the clockwork circuit of Immanuel Kant, to the sublimities of the English Romantics and their passages through nature. It is not simply an occasion for observation but an analytic instrument.
The drift
The Situationists were also practitioners of a special urban-analytic walking style, the dérive—the “drift”—which Debord described as “a technique of transient passage through varied ambiences. The dérive entails playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects; which completely distinguishes it from the classical notions of the journey and the stroll.” “In a dérive,” Debord deadpans, “one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there."
The dérive joins the free association of surrealism, the LSD of hippiedom, and cinematic montage as tactics for overcoming the fixity of received ideas of order and logic.
By putting progress through the city into a state of constant indeterminacy, it represents a schooled “style” of being lost.
To disappear in the crowd
The modern city produces its own style of getting lost, rooted in its special form of alienation. Here, the crowd, while it can be protective, is also a medium for both erasing individuality and homogenizing experience, for making us disappear.
Daylight should not tyrannize architecture
Daylight should not tyrannize architecture. As with so many aspects of the design of the city, light is something that should be available in a variety of modulations and susceptible to a variety of controls. However, the prejudice must always be for access.
The 1916 Zoning Resolution
Architecturally, what is striking about the 1916 legislation is that it sought to articulate a logical formula for achieving a public good in the absence of a specific vision of exactly what would actually be produced.
The spatial dimension of democracy
Since the time of the Greeks, democracy has been understood to have a spatial dimension and so, by extension, an element of scale. Plato measured the polis, the unit of democratic citizenship, at five hundred citizens, an extremely tractable size for a community that seeks to express itself through direct engagement.
Induced demand
Every attempt to cul-de-sac city streets, to change traffic patterns in favor of pedestrians, or to narrow street ends is met with the same howl of protest from the authorities: this will increase congestion because urban traffic is a zero-sum game. Any reduction in volume in one place in the city will inevitably be accompanied by a rise in traffic somewhere else.
This claim is fallacious: the true corollary is the opposite. In case after case, a reduction of the space available for vehicular traffic has simply resulted in the reduction of traffic overall.
Greenfill
I have for years been engaged in a thought experiment, the product of which is the idea of a program of “greenfill” for the city streets. The idea is simple: if one lane of every block in the city were removed from the automotive system and returned to the pedestrian realm, an enormous range of urban problems could be solved.
Responsibility for the sidewalk
It is a bizarre anomaly that we freely spend countless billions on the construction and maintenance of our streets but leave the repair, and cleaning, of our sidewalks—and the crucial shading apparatus they support—to the tender mercies of private landlords who show no strong inclination to take proper responsibility for this vital duty and whose responsibility for but a fragmentary increment of the block creates conditions of uneven repair and character.
Surrealism has become the kitsch of postmodernity
A dialogue between homogeneity and exception
All cities can be described as a dialogue between homogeneity and exception, and each strikes a particular balance that is at the core of its character.
If you want to build an outrageous building
If you want to build a bad building, hire a good architect, and If you want to build an outrageous building, hire a distinguished one.
The informing idea of functionalism
The informing idea of functionalism is what is called elegance by engineers and scientists—the notion that the best solution to a problem (whether applied to a mathematical proof, a machine, or an organizational diagram) is the most succinct. This conceit collapses the technical, the ethical, and the aesthetic, which powers the idea exponentially.
The Radiant City
Le Corbusier’s advocacy of what he had come to call the “Radiant City” continued to his death, and in the 1960s he published his most complete vision, drawn with seductive elegance and insanely mesmerizing to the generation of architects teaching in my school days, for whom possession of a Corb drawing or painting was tantamount to owning a relic of the True Cross.
Tower blocks and slabs
The buildings of Washington Square Village and Silver Towers are museum-quality examples of the two great apartment typologies of modernity: the tower block and the slab. Both illustrate their strengths and disadvantages when introduced into the urban fabric in their pure state.
Genuinely sustainable architecture
The received version of modern architecture, with its social simplification and technical sophistication, has gotten it exactly backward. Genuinely sustainable architecture must begin with the simplest technical solutions (sunshades, cross ventilation, correct solar orientation) but conduce the most complex social relations (variety before uniformity). Invention will come not simply from the fevered acts of lonely imagination but from the constant reframing of questions raised at the intersection of climate, culture, technology, politics, and taste, by the understanding that architectural meanings are produced, not inherent.
New-urbanist projects
The overwhelming majority of new-urbanist projects retain the almost purely residential, exclusively middle-class character of suburbia, simply substituting one formal paradigm for another. Instead of curving streets, cul-de-sacs, and half-acre lots, these developments offer grids, tightly spaced houses with front porches, and a town center instead of a shopping center containing the very same shops.
Touring SoHo
SoHo has, however, become part of a tourist archipelago where the definition of place falls into a set of increasingly generic categories. The act of touring devolves less on the particulars of geography than on the consumption of a set of prepackaged lifestyles, defined by a fixed array of goods and services. Almost every city in America now boasts a SoHo equivalent.
The question of gentrification
The question of gentrification is made complex by the fact that the urban qualities it produces—lively street life, profuse commerce, preservation and upgrading of old buildings—are highly desirable, the substrate of urbanity. The problem with gentrification is with its particulars and with its effects.
Gentrification suppresses reciprocity by its narrowed scripting of formal and social behavior, by turning neighborhoods into Disneylands or Colonial Williamsburgs, where residents become cast members and the rituals of everyday life become spectacle or food for consumption.
Non-architects
In 1964, the historian Bernard Rudofsky curated a show at MoMA called Architecture Without Architects, celebrating the formal qualities of a range of traditional building practices drawn from around the world.
Setting aside the endlessly troubled implications of the Western gaze on “primitive” cultures, the show had the very constructive impacts of encouraging formal diversity at a time when mainstream architecture had grown desperately, myopically monochromatic and of suggesting that “non-architects” were capable not only of making good judgments about their environments but of actually taking the lead in creating them.
A sensitively tailored combination of modes
Efficiency is produced not by the sort of movement monoculture of cars-only American cities but by a sensitively tailored combination of modes sited to exploit the particular efficiencies of each and providing useful duplication and alternative.
Flying a kiwi
Flying a kiwi fruit from New Zealand to New York produces four times the weight of the kiwi in greenhouse gases; moving a head of lettuce to here from California requires ten times the calories the lettuce yields to the eater.
Ideas for linear cities
Arturo Soria y Mata, who proposed a linear streetcar suburb for Madrid in 1882 and managed to build something like three miles’ worth of an intended thirty. Likewise, the project by Edgar Chambless for Roadtown, published in 1910, depicted an infinitely long, two-room-wide building atop three levels of underground rail lines for express, local, and freight traffic. In the late 1920s, N. A. Miliutin proposed a Soviet Union–spanning linear plan that—following Soria y Mata’s rhetoric—would have solved the old Marxian chestnut of city/country contradiction at a stroke. Le Corbusier’s Algiers scheme of 1933—a highway-topped fourteen-story building meant to stretch miles along the Mediterranean and house 180,000 people—was surely the most immediate precursor of Rudolph’s “City Corridor.”
The final architectural embellishments
The final architectural embellishments for the neighborhood should be the most exceptional, a kind of punctuation by relief, the last bursts of creative potential as the scene shifts.
Those glowing domes and minarets
I began to have my doubts about those glowing domes and minarets. Finally, I felt that this modern celebration of history subtracted something: I felt gypped out of the dark.
Induced communication
I remain mystified by what seems like an exponential increase in the need to communicate induced by the availability of a ready new means to do so, just as new highway capacity produces increased traffic. Witness the cabdrivers who talk uninterrupted on the phone as they travel the city, or the truly huge numbers of people who speak on the phone as they walk down the street: the medium has clearly become the message, if the meaning of the message remains somewhat opaque.
Management and manipulation of fear
More and more of daily life is governed by the management and manipulation of fear.
A society can be judged by the risks to which it chooses to respond, the dangers it values, the targets it gives high priority.
If those striped bass need a place to fuck
The real deathblow to Westway proved to be a lawsuit filed on behalf of the striped-bass population—shepherded through the courts by the activist Marcy Benstock—that sought to protect their breeding grounds in the pilings beneath the piers that the fill would have eliminated. After this was decided in the federal courts, Mayor Ed Koch, a Westway supporter, reportedly uttered, in frustration, the most memorable line of the affair: “If those striped bass need a place to fuck, I will build them a motel in Poughkeepsie.”
High-priced good times
Once again, a neighborhood dedicated to production has been transformed into one for consumption. As someone who believes that an internal balance between these activities is vital to the health, character, and autonomy of the city, I find that the sight of yet another zone of high-priced good times gives me the willies, even as I tuck into my perfect branzino in the lovely back garden of the delightful Italian restaurant.