Intuitive, schmintuitive. Normal is relative.
User Experience design is a process, and these lessons roughly follow that process, but you should always keep these five things in mind: Psychology, Usability, Design, Copywriting, and Analysis.
A good design communicates three things:
What is this?
What is the benefit for the user?
What should they do next?
Ask yourself:
-What is the user’s motivation to be here in the first place?
-How does this make them feel?
-How much work does the user have to do to get what they want?
-What habits are created if they do this over and over?
-What do they expect when they click this?
-Are you assuming they know something that they haven’t learned yet?
-Is this something they want to do again? Why? How often?
-Are you thinking of the user’s wants and needs, or your own?
-How are you rewarding good behavior?
Ask yourself:
-Could you get the job done with less input from the user?
-Are there any user mistakes you could prevent? (Hint: Yes, there are.)
-Are you being clear and direct, or is this a little too clever?
-Is it easy to find (good), hard to miss (better), or subconsciously expected (best)?
-Are you working with the user’s assumptions or against them?
-Have you provided everything the user needs to know?
-Could you solve this just as well by doing something more common?
-Are you basing your decisions on your own logic or categories, or the user’s intuition? How do you know?
-If the user doesn’t read the fine print, does it still work/make sense?
Ask yourself:
-Do users think it looks good? Do they trust it immediately?
-Does it communicate the purpose and function without words?
-Does it represent the brand? Does it all feel like the same site?
-Does the design lead the user’s eyes to the right places? How do you know?
-Do the colors, shapes, and typography help people find what they want and improve the usability of the details?
-Do clickable things look different than unclickable things?
-Does it sound confident and tell the user what to do?
-Does it motivate the user to complete their goal? Is that what we want?
-Is the biggest text the most important text? Why not?
-Does it inform the user or does it assume that they already understand?
-Does it reduce anxiety?
-Is it clear, direct, simple, and functional?
-Are you using data to prove that you are right, or to learn the truth?
-Are you looking for subjective opinions or objective facts?
-Have you collected information that can give you those types of answers?
-Do you know why users do that, or are you interpreting their behavior?
-Are you looking at absolute numbers or relative improvements?
-How will you measure this? Are you measuring the right things?
-Are you looking for bad results, too? Why not?
-How can you use this analysis to make improvements?
If you’re not solving problems, you’re not doing UX.
Solutions are ideas that can be wrong.
I give you the simplest practical model of emotions known to mankind:
There are two categories of emotions: gain and loss.
Emotions are reactions, not goals. Time makes emotions more complicated.
There are two main types of information that you can get from research that involves people: subjective (opinion, memory) and objective (fact).
User research is not a way to confirm your beliefs; it’s a way to discover them.
In theory, choosing nothing is always an option.
When something doesn’t match what we expect, we notice.
If users don’t know, users don’t care. And sometimes even when they do know, they don’t care!
Whatever is happening to you now (or soon) seems more important than what will happen to you later (or in the future). - Hyperbolic Discounting
THE BASIC FORMULA
Action from User A = Feedback for User B = Content for User C
For example:
You share a friend’s photo on Facebook. That’s your action, which gives feedback to your friend. When you share it, the rest of your friends see the photo in their feed, with a note saying you shared it.
If you want millions of happy users, design for the distracted idiots, not the obsessed geniuses.
Before you can break a pattern, you have to make one.
You can follow this formula for text on anything you want people to click:
Verb + Benefit + Urgent Time/Place
Just because you like it, doesn’t mean it’s good.
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If God were a UX designer, you would be sitting in a small, dark, sound-proof room, in a comfortable chair, with no clock, using a device that could only display his website or app.
Who knows, maybe you are.