Some years ago, I wrote a presentation about how to recognise accessibility issues. To really make people understand the difficulties that some users face, I built a simulator. Since then, the simulator has been used in a handful of teaching sessions by various tutors around the world. Check it out for yourself and get a …
Temptation Bundling and Commitment Devices are rather like the carrot and the stick of personal motivation; Temptation Bundling is where you only allow yourself a particular treat when you’ve done something you don’t particularly like doing (like only watching your favourite trashy tv soap while working out at the gym). Whereas Commitment Devices are ways …
Apps, websites and other softwares should be available to everyone regardless of their abilities; a system should work equally well for a sighted person using a standard mouse and screen, as it should for a blind person using a Braille output or screen reader. There are other issues too; audio cues won’t work for deaf people, features that …
Whenever the subject of information flow in forms was raised I discovered conflicting evidence for vertical or horizontal flows, ordering and grouping. In trying to establish the definitive answer I carried out three different user tests: a sort test where users were asked to arrange data into a two-column structure, a flow direction test where users were asked to …
Humans have become extremely adept at recognising patterns. Long ago, it would have been a survival trait: those who could spot the tiger before it attacked would survive. Pattern recognition isn’t often needed in that capacity any more, but we still have the skill, and it’s so hard-wired into our system that most of the time we …
Back in the 1970’s, 3 friends clubbed together to buy themselves a TV for the house they shared. Each of them managed to save £10 for the TV so out they went. Eventually they came across a shop that had, in the window, an excellent model with 3 preset channel buttons plus 1 spare. It …
Caroline Jarrett has written a great piece over on the UX Matters site: http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2012/05/7-basic-best-practices-for-buttons.php For those of you with short attention spans here is Caroline’s own summary:
Here is a simple user test: “Where do we put the ‘Cancel’ button?” A form on a web page needs to have a way of clearing or submitting the data – traditionally, this is handled with two buttons. One says ‘Cancel’, and the other says ‘Submit’. Of the two buttons, one is on the left …
There is a now-infamous story of a famous rock band that demanded several bowls of M&Ms with all the brown ones removed and refused to perform if they found even one brown M&M. The story is true. The rock band was Van Halen, whose shows relied on extensive power requirements, intricate stage constructions and large …
I’ve been doing some accessibility testing recently and came across WebbIE 3 If you’re testing against visual impairments then it’s worth checking WebbIE 3 out. In their own words: “WebbIE re-presents the information from a web page in an accessible format suitable for a screen reader.” Basically, this browser will strip pages down to just the content …
We judge our past experiences almost entirely by their peaks (pleasant or unpleasant) and how they ended. A group of doctors were considering how to make colonoscopies less painful and uncomfortable but reached the conclusion that, while it was not actually possible to make it less uncomfortable because of the nature of the procedure and …
Forms are an integral part of the internet – they’re interesting things too. Forms can be used to help people engage more with your site/application ranging from requesting an email newsletter to signing up for your shiniest, most expensive membership deal. The problem is that so many people get it wrong when they design and …
The other day I was reading something that happened to mention Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes was a 17th-century English philosopher. He saw humans as ego-driven, power-hungry machines whose seeming good intentions all mask entirely self-serving motives. The impact of this idea was so strong that even today, more than 300 years later, we still find it …
Read more ““The ‘Free’ Issue” or “How 17th Century Philosophy Affects UX””
As with most mornings, this morning’s trawl through my Twitter feed, emails and blog subscription turned up lots of stuff about accessibility, UX, design and web development but there was one thing that caught my attention more than everything else. http://uxmag.com/strategy/why-we-need-storytellers-at-the-heart-of-product-development Having skim-read this article, one thing occurred to me – we don’t just need …
Similar to ‘Interference Effects’, this is a measure of how much relevant to irrelevant content you have on a page. More ‘signal’ and less ‘noise’ is better.
If you have more than one option and the choices are functionally the same then choose the simpler option.
Mental processing in your user is similar to processing in a computer – the more processor you devote to different processes, the slower and less responsive it will become. Try not to distract your user too much with flashing images and animations unless that’s exactly what they’ve come to see.
Hick’s Law states that the time is take to make a decision increases as the number of choices increases. If you give your user too many options then you site or application may become too time-consuming to be of use.
Be careful what you ask from your users – if you’re not specific enough, then you could easily end up with the wrong result. Try using two fields for ‘First name’ and ‘Surname’ instead of just one for ‘Name’ – the results you’d get from the second option would vary too wildly to be of …
Always remember that beauty in design is a direct result of simplified function.
You should be doing your best to help users avoid triggering errors on your site and, when they do eventually trigger an error, making sure that the result doesn’t leave them trapped or abandoned. Make sure that any data the user has added is easily recoverable, their ‘shopping basket’ isn’t deleted, they’re not left stranded …
This is fairly obvious; the simpler you make something, the easier it will be to use. If you think about a car remote locking control, it only has one button – to turn on and turn off the locking system. Simple = easy to use. Now picture one of those programmable universal TV/Hi-Fi/DVD/etc. remote controls …
A very important aspect of user experience design is simply making things work in the same way throughout your site – If you start by putting ‘submit’ buttons in the bottom right-hand corner of your forms, then you need to make sure that’s where they always are.
Accessibility shouldn’t be a concession. As you design your next site you should be trying to make sure that all content is available to all ranges of abilities without resorting to secondary content streams – you shouldn’t need alternate content for people with different abilities; the original content should be able to support all abilities