I imagine that right now, you're feeling a bit like Alice. Hmm? Tumbling down the rabbit hole? - Morpheus, The Matrix
This past Monday, I began my User Experience Design class at The Starter League, taught by Carolyn Chandler of Manifest Digital. In an attempt to help me remember all the stuff I'll be learning and all the new things I'll be experiencing, I plan to keep track of a few thoughts here in this blog. (I won't attempt to summarize each class; others are doing that and doing it much better than I could hope to. For example, check out Melissa's blog here and Becca's blog here.)
One of the things I learned in the first class and through this week's assignment is that my general dislike for certain websites is such an easy thing to have. It's simply a reaction to bad usability - a reflex - and it requires no effort. The real work is in figuring out why a website is bad and how to not just fix it but make it better. One method that can be used is a heuristic evaluation, which includes, in part, an analysis of the website's or app's or anything's ability to prevent user error (e.g. united.com's calendar widget which prevents the user from booking a flight for any time previous to today), it's ability to give the user with feedback so they know what the site or application is doing and how long that task might take (e.g. the "Listening" status bar in Shazaam) and it's simplicity (e.g. Apple product packaging). Of course, understanding your target audience's needs prior to building your website will probably help in avoiding some of these issues, and I suspect there will be more on that in the weeks to come.
Towards the end of class, Carolyn warned us that taking this UX class is a lot like taking the red pill Morpheus offers Neo in the Matrix. In other words: with the knowledge we'll gain from this class, we'll no longer be able to look at anything - digital or otherwise - without considering it's (poor) design. This seems to be true already. Here are some examples of things I've noticed this past week:
The keyhole on the front gate to my apartment turns to the left, the one on the back gate turns to the right. Consistency would be nice.
My cursor does not automatically go to the User ID field on the chase.com website, so logging in requires an extra, needless mouse-click.
All winter coats should have a double zipper.
So that's it for Week One. I'm looking forward to learning more about how to uncover the usability issues that might not be too obvious, how to elicit this information from users and, above all, how to fix them.
Oh, and looking forward to using this as well: