UX Crash Course: Fundamentals

http://thehipperelement.com/post/75476711614/ux-crash-course-31-fundamentals

by JoelMarsh • 12 years ago

231 28 12 years ago

weixiyen• 12 years ago

In my opinion, most designers’ weak spot is analysis. But we can fix that! Analysis is the main thing that separates UX from other types of design, and it makes you extremely valuable.

Agree with this. Most designers lose a lot of credibility trying to argue in favor of their design in the face of facts showing otherwise.

Although not everything needs to be objective like the shade of color of a button (See Doug Bowman and Google), but a lot of UX people ignore KPIs, or don't care to take the initiative measure them, hoping that their design performs well or depending on product managers to do it.

meerita• 12 years ago

The problem resides in the exposition: if you give your opinion, you're just telling the rest you're not sure, and that it's your viewpoint. If you instead give facts, you're telling the rest of the audience the data that drove you to that design.

I'm really tired hearing people at meeting talking and giving opinions. They're just that, they're never facts. Only facts shows the truth and facts don't need argumentation in most cases.

bduerst• 12 years ago

A/B testing seems to be the industry standard it seems, at least when making changes from in-house designers. It's becoming more a of a science, with the hypotheses based on art and design.

A good rule of thumb: If you can't give a definitive % increase in actions, conversions, etc., then you probably shouldn't be submitting the change.

seestheday• 12 years ago

Not the standard for a surprising number of very large companies or very large digital agencies.

It should be, but in my experience this is not the case.

sutterbomb4• 12 years ago

Sorry to be negative, but the UX of this guide is actually pretty bad. They're using target="_blank" to open links to the next day's lesson in a new tab instead of current window. Why?

Set aside the general argument that it's never really appropriate to do this - because it's certainly not appropriate in this context. The user just finished reading your article, and thought it was good enough to read another one. Why would you presume they need to keep the current one open indefinitely?

I have a hard time taking advice on a subject from someone who isn't practicing it well on their own projects.

k-mcgrady• 12 years ago

> "They're using target="_blank" to open links to the next day's lesson in a new tab instead of current window. Why?"

Looks like it's a tumblr blog. Maybe it's how Tumblr works, or they picked a theme and din't change the defaults.

syllogism• 12 years ago

It was very hard to read past the "design for different devices" because of this.

My Galaxy S3 has a limit of 16 open tabs, so I was constantly having to close tabs to keep reading.

towelrod• 12 years ago

The UX on this site would be better if every link did not open in a new window, especially since each article is so short.

keerthiko2• 12 years ago

For the people complaining about the 'target="_blank" thing,' I'm guessing the user has to do a little bit of UX for themselves to use this site.

What works for me to make this a reasonable experience is to keep the index page open, open a chapter, read it, close it, open the next one. Not entirely terrible. Just use Cmd/Ctrl+W instead of the back button. Not really that bad, especially considering that's how I've preferred to use sites I want to see more than one thing from anyway (like wc3.org, google results, shopping search results, etc).

sutterbomb4• 12 years ago

The guide is more akin to a book than to looking at disparate options and comparing (google results, shopping etc.)

Would you expect someone to read a book by looking at the table of contents, going to a chapter, going back to the TOC, going to the next chapter?

It's not that the site is impossible to use - it's that a fairly basic and fundamental part of the UX is broken, yet the entire thing is a guide about UX. It just makes it harder to believe that they have expertise in the field when they aren't practicing it on their own work.

B0Z• 12 years ago

Just my $0.02, but it seems to me that if the site is akin to a book as you say, wouldn't the behavior you're suggesting doesn't make sense (TOC, chapter, TOC, chapter) work for a technical reference? The successive pages are certainly quite brief but in a way, isn't it a technical reference?

Sharlin• 12 years ago

The real problem is that the "next chapter" links at the end of each chapter also open the next chapter in a new window - something that's certainly unwanted by almost everyone.

dirtyaura• 12 years ago

This seems to focus a lot on visual design and web layouts. Visual design is very important - more important than it's usually credited in traditional UI design circles - but user experience is still very much about how things WORK.

If there is a separate article for a layout concept like Axis of Interaction, I would cover with similar emphasis fundamental user interaction design concepts such as inplace editing, modality, overview by detail, details on demand, undo, etc.

JoelMarsh• 12 years ago

I am the author. Thank you for pointing out my mistake: I TOTALLY AGREE about the new tab/window issue, and I have now fixed it. That must have been brutal on a mobile device.

It was intended to open a new window when linking from the "directory" post, but going from post-to-post in sequence shouldn't open 31 new tabs. They were posted one-at-a-time, so I didn't realize what would happen when being viewed as a set of 31.

A rather cringe-worthy oversight, I would say. It was indeed a Tumblr theme setting, which I changed, and also 31 instances of hand-editing the html of the articles, which was super fun. ;)

Apologies to everyone who suffered and thank you for the feedback. I just wish I had noticed sooner!

hmsimha• 12 years ago

I found the Miss Teen USA comment in the 3rd article off-putting:

There are cases where it is more fun if something is hard — like a game — but for everything else, we want it to be so easy that even a Miss Teen USA contestant could use it.

I followed the reference to the video of Miss South Carolina 2007 answering a very simple question, and was able to find the humour in how bad her answer was. I didn't think it was appropriate to insinuate that she is representative of all Miss Teen USA contestants though.

digitalengineer• 12 years ago

Agreed. I suggest: "we want it to be so easy that even a USA vice-president could use it" and link to The Tomato Incident.

sutterbomb4• 12 years ago

It appears the author has updated the site to stop opening the "next article" links in a new window. Thank you! Responding to user wants/needs is one of the most important aspects of UX, and to the author's credit they responded in a very timely manner to this one.

gboudrias• 12 years ago

Regardless of usability, I appreciate this guide. I've long since needed an intro to UX, and this guide seems good enough for that. I hope/expect it will end with references to further reading.

Thanks for posting.

girvo• 12 years ago

Wow, this is awesome. Just dumped most of the links into my UX instapaper folder to read through on the train. Brilliant work, and what I've read so far is really interesting. Cheers for sharing.

mercnet• 12 years ago

Is there a reason why the text takes up 10% of my monitor width? So much wasted white space that could be filled with text.

afsina• 12 years ago

Bad UX as it does not allow moving along pages with arrow keys or links.

lucb1e2• 12 years ago

Works for me

lucb1e2• 12 years ago

Quick heads up: make Javascript listen for keystrokes of ctrl+0 and other zoom events, and submit them to some counter. Perhaps I'm not the only one trying to unzoom the website; the header and lead take up the whole screen on a full hd screen. The rest of the font size seems okay at first glance.

Edit: Then I realized this is a UX guide. Ironic.

Edit2: And then I read through it, it is actually pretty nice! Read a few pages and bookmarked where I left off, thanks for sharing :)

annnnd• 12 years ago

I have a nice little bookmarklet that works wonders:

    javascript:(function(){var%20newSS,%20styles='*%20{%20font-size:16px%20!important;%20}';%20if(document.createStyleSheet)%20{%20document.createStyleSheet("javascript:'"+styles+"'");%20}%20else%20{%20newSS=document.createElement('link');%20newSS.rel='stylesheet';%20newSS.href='data:text/css,'+escape(styles);%20document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(newSS);%20}%20})();

Basically it changes all font sizes to 16px, which I find suitable for my configuration. YMMV. I usually use it when the fonts are too small. And I have another one which colors the text black, background white and links blue - but in this case that was not necessary.

mathattack• 12 years ago

Thank you very much for sharing!

bkmartin• 12 years ago

A little pedantic here, but in Day 4 you say, "1 opinion could be completely wrong."

I was taught that you never start a sentence with a numeral, always spell it out. "One opinion could be completely wrong."

UX Crash Course: Fundamentals

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