10mo ago

This is painfully true

And no, I will not tell you what my company app is.

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128 comments

People at my company are like "why are we wasting screen real estate with white space?" and I imagine they see the last image is an ideal UX
- We're currently trying to convince our client, that 4 different levels "mandatory" fields in a form are about two too many.
  The UI they sketched looks like shit, but they think it's absolutely necessary.
  
  But there was this one customer, where it was so helpful to know he's left handed. So now this is a necessary information /s
  
  And then the logging shows that nobody uses half the fields, but the business won't let you remove any.
- For the first two you need hoops and tricks for it to do what you want, the last one has bad UX. I choose the later.
  
  I would argue that the first two require you to jump through hoops for edge cases, while the last one requires you to jump through hoops for every case.
  
  Without knowing what the user is actually doing, that's impossible to know. If the user has to input all those fields on a regular basis, then that one screen is the superior UX.
  
  You're right, but:
  I beginner friendly UX is a safer bet. Besides, if a user has to manually enter all those fields (assuming it continues off screen) then that's a job for a machine, not a human. Large data input jobs are dehumanizing.
  
  Unless you've actually done the user research, you have no idea if a "beginner friendly UX is a safer bet" . It's just a guess. Sometimes it's a good guess. Sometimes it's not. The correct answer is always "it depends".
  Hell, whether or not a form full of fields is or isn't "beginner" friendly is even debatable given the world "beginner" is context-specific. Without knowing who that user is, their background, their training, and the work context, you have no way of knowing for sure. You just have a bunch of assumptions you're making.
  As for the rest, human data entry that cannot be automated is incredibly common, regardless of your personal feelings about it. If you've walked into a government office, healthcare setting, legal setting, etc, and had someone ask you a bunch of questions, you might be surprised to hear that the odds are very good that human was punching your answers into a computer.
  
  There are more beginners then there are experts, so in the absence of research a beginner UI is a safer bet.
  And yes, if you definite "beginner" to be someone with expert training and experience, then yes an expert UI would be better for that "beginner". What a strange way to define "beginner" though.
  
  There are more beginners then there are experts, so in the absence of research a beginner UI is a safer bet.
  If you're in the business of creating high quality UX, and you're building a UI without even the most basic research--understanding your target user--you've already failed.
  And yes, if you definite "beginner" to be someone with expert training and experience, then yes an expert UI would be better for that "beginner". What a strange way to define "beginner" though.
  If I'm building a product that's targeting software developers, a "beginner" has a very different definition than if I'm targeting grade school children, and the UX considerations will be vastly different.
  This is, like, first principles of product development stuff, here.
  
  Right, but clearly this is a funny post using hyperbole. These aren't real UIs. They're comical exaggerations, and likewise we're making generalizations based on them.
  Nobody actually makes UIs like this, but they're springboards for talking about actual problems.
  This isn't a case of "well actually the last example was well researched and the others weren't".
  
  If I'm going to jump through hoops anyway I'd like some degree of control over the experience.
  
  What control do you have in either experience?
  
  yeah. usability > UX
  
  The last example has neither.
- The flipside is that all of the stuff you actually use is buried five levels deep.
  
  And the flip side of that is that the stuff you actually use is spread over 5 pages worth of scrolling and requires you to read like 100 labels until you find the text boxes you want
- Apple/Google/Other Companies way, way over-do this. Clean, modern design is one thing, but avoiding all text, making things too small to see, and being unable to tell which option is highlighted, etc, all at the expense of the actual UX is such an annoying trend and I'll never like it.
  I'm a Millennial so of course I don't have a lawn, but get off it anyway...
  
  I don't necessarily agree that they way overdo it, but I do agree those are all examples of bad UX design.
- They're right

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