As sort of a sidenote: websites about UX seem to have the worst UX. Clicking the link, I'm not only met by a social sharing bar that uses 1/6th of the screen and screws scrolling up (because for some reason it should follow through my scrolling but somehow only be visible when scrolling upwards), but a faux-chat window overlaying the content where a Tom is asking me how he can help me. Not at all, thank you. At least being so up-front about how absolutely terrible your website is means I didn't stay long enough for a modal asking me to subscribe to their newsletter to pop up.
Does anyone actually believe that this crap leads to a better user experience? Are UX concepts and standards so inbred that the people involved just can't separate chocolate pudding from excrement anymore?
As a UX designer I have seen a lot of this stuff over the years and I always find it funny. DesignerNews.com, which is an imitation of this site, is chock full of articles like this.
The big thing to understand is a lot of people in The Blogosphere(TM) who post articles about UX don't really give a rip about anything other than the pageviews whether it's for ad revenue, establishing themselves as a thought leader, or trying to market their company. Even worse, there are some people who don't even ACTUALLY know much about UX, they just want to post an article about it to spread around LinkedIn and seem relevant by harping about the importance of UX, etc.
Having said all that, if you sift through all the garbage there are some great resources. Some of the big players in the space tend to do it well. InVision's blog, for example. UXPin are pretty good. There are lots of little ones like UXPowerTools' content marketing emails that are starting to do a good job as well.
At this point as someone who is always trying to improve as a UX designer, I have become accustomed to vetting the 100:1 ratio of garbage articles to bad ones.
I literally know nothing about UX, but I have to say a visit to UXPin's website instantly turned me off. First, they put this great big demand for my email front and center when I barely even know what their site is (and a single line explaining it is not enough to get me to sign up). The entire website is covered over with "modal grey" with no X box or anything else showing me I can close it, just some links at the top that are not obviously clickable because of the grey modal. Turns out it isn't a modal at all you can just scroll down (no indication of that) and that the small links are clickable. Once I was past that, it was fine and dandy, but if I were actually interested in being a customer rather than a curious person trying to figure out what I was missing, I probably would have just left.
I saw it was like designernews.co and I was about to ask how it's that imitation of this site. I agree about these "UX Sites" doesn't present good UX. NNGroup website[1] does its job great since they are pioneer on user experience and usability. They frequently publish articles about how all these pop-ups, modals etc effects the usability.
This should have been obvious, I guess, but when I read your comment it felt like a revelation. Suddenly, so many articles make sense. It reminds me of the inconsistency inherent in most books about how to beat the market.
> As sort of a sidenote: websites about UX seem to have the worst UX. Clicking the link, I'm not only met by a social sharing bar that uses 1/6th of the screen
This comment anecdotally reinforces my impression that UX people today (I assume you're either a UX people, or a people interested in UX) have a bias for full-width sites and browsers.
I rarely run my browser full-width (and I think many UX/UI designers rarely do anything else but full-width).
When I opened the page under discussion, I didn't see any social sharing bar at all, just editorial content. And when I read your comment I went "huh?" And then "oh."
So I full-widthed my browser, and saw what you're complaining about. (I didn't notice any scrolling problems. And I didn't notice a popup; that may be because of my adblocking addons.)
As far as I'm concerned, this site exhibits very good UX for this particular aspect of the site. If the browser isn't wide enough to display the sidebar, it gets moved to below the editorial content. That's so refreshingly respectful!
Most often I see "beautiful" sites that have to be sidescrolled if the browser isn't full-width. I do two things in that situation:
1. I turn off styles, which then makes everything flow within the viewport (It's 1990 again!) and moves all the blocks to the order that they appear in the html. Because all I care about are words and pictures, not features. Again, in this site's case that works fabulously, because the site makers ordered their blocks so that editorial content is first; abcnews.com is a good example where, if you turn off styles, the content of interest doesn't appear until you scroll way down the page.
Good UX, in my book, would be omitting the information in the sidebar altogether, because it somehow manages to be less relevant to the content than the pointless stock photos that illustrate it. I don't care that the article was shared 59 times, and the fact that I can share it on social networks is not mind blowing enough to me that I have to be reminded of it by a bar popping in and out of view like a mole throughout the whole article. Neither are the cool icons or Tom's helpful tone. What would I even need your help with, Tom?
It's also important to note that the bar of social network icons are not below the editorial content shere they would dwell on any remotely useful website, but on top of it. The design feels almost contemptful of its audience. My experience as a user is that I am disrespected and hated.
> This comment anecdotally reinforces my impression that UX people today (I assume you're either a UX people, or a people interested in UX) have a bias for full-width sites and browsers.
I used it on a cell phone. My choices there are limited to landscape or portrait mode, both of which behave awfully in subtly different ways. They obviously went out of their way to make a mobile version of the layout, though. They just didn't think it through, because they suck at UX.
And yes, since I am a user, I am interested in my experience. I can't say that I have a bias for full-width sites and browsers, but even if I did, why should my experience be worse in full screen than in a smaller window? Why should it be worse on a phone? The content is text. You read it from left to right, from the top to the bottom. Laying it out in a way that doesn't inspire self harm is not rocket science. Despite these vapid UX blogs making their snake oil salesmanship out to be valuable and insightful, they've failed to find a solution for the most basic problem. They can't even lay text out without having useless crap hovering over it. It's like calling yourself a plumber when you can't even flush your toilet.
Frankly, I'd rather side scroll, because at least then I'd have to make a conscious effort to see all the non-content.
>As sort of a sidenote: websites about UX seem to have the worst UX.
That reminds me of my numerical methods professor who gave talks on how to present things - and his lecture was literally the worst at the entire uni and this is not just my opinion, this fact was established by anonymous student vote. He had power point presentation slides stuffed full of formulas - literally 10-20 lines of mathematical theorems and proofs, and he just clicked through the pages, leaving no more than a few minutes for such complex slides.
Now if only the Google maps (mobile version) devs would read this. On Android anyway, no matter how much you zoom the text labels on things like street and highway numbers will not enlarge.
5 years ago that wasn't the case.
Type `ho`, stop there, and it will suggest your home location (if you have it set). Continue typing and it will serve up results that have `home` somewhere in the name.
Its typical Google, I can imagine an engineer going 'hmm, this way if they want to go to their actual home location, they can just tap on it, and if they continue typing, they can quickly find home depot!" not realizing this blatantly violates the Principle of Least Astonishment.
You see the same with Android 7.0 in the pulldown quicksettings: if you haven't fully pulled down the quicksettings, a tap on Wi-Fi turns it off. But if you pull it down completely, a tap suddenly opens a network selection menu, despite the icon giving no indication it will do something different. This again, violates POLA. Its purely a power user feature (how often is a normal person gonna be on a Wi-Fi network that isn't already set..?). Even worse is that some icons (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth) act in this 'dual' way, yet some others keep working the same (Torch, Orientation Lock).
Obviously Torch and Orientation Lock don't really have any options beside on/off so they shouldn't have a menu.. its just that, from an UX perspective, its better if all your buttons act in a homogenous way, especially if they look the same!
These are all typical examples of Google being a company with engineering in its DNA, whereas Apple is a company that breathes design.
Off topic but does anyone else feel that Google Maps (and in general Maps) have just regressed in quality? In particular, while using directions. The most common problem I face on my iPhone (and I've heard the same from people using Android) is - compass orientation. It's so predictably bad that I have now started moving the opposite direction which the compass suggests. I'm more right than wrong when I do so. This wasn't the case 5 years ago on my iPhone4 when Google and Apple worked together to create the Maps application. I wonder if it has got to do with the same event.
I've used multiple phones across continents but yet tend to suffer from the exact same problem. Strange!
This is not the app's fault. The compass sometimes needs to be re-calibrated and that involves waving your phone around. The app should prompt you to do so if it thinks the calibration is off though...
Sure, but I think the font should be (to some extent) scaled proportionally to the map area or perhaps some other way of making the text larger. A typical use case for me is zooming in on a highway to see what exit number a particular ramp is. Today that info is basically unreadable on either platform.
Noted is the distraction from automatically changing carousels. I've found this a major area of concern -- not just carousels but any autoplay content, automatic slides, and text marquees. And beyond distraction, these elements assume a specific pace of reading and require the user to build UI understanding to get back to interesting content they glimpsed in passing. If the content is compelling enough to display, it's compelling enough to present well.
Today's really broken web site - Bank of America online banking. I'm running Firefox 53 (latest version), with Ghostery and Privacy Badger, on Ubuntu Linux. BofA's site had worked well for years. Then they added some new features. Not good ones.
BofA's site now complains I'm using an "unsupported browser", even though they claim to support Firefox. About half the time, login just hangs. Refreshing the page shows a logged-in state.
When transferring funds from one account to another, sometimes the transfer process hangs. The "Approve transfer" button darkens, but the page is not refreshed. Sometimes the transfer has taken place, and sometimes it hasn't.
Yesterday, I did a transfer between accounts, and reached this situation. I looked at the account status and didn't see the outgoing transfer listed. So I re-did the transfer, and then saw the outgoing transfer listed. I printed the account transaction history.
Today I get a warning that an account is overdrawn. Checking account status, I find that there are now two identical transfers between the accounts, resulting in one being overdrawn and the other being overpaid. An hour of phone calls, mostly on hold, was required to fix this mess.
BofA's web site is using TouchCommerce ("Engage with your customers the way they want to engage") Adobe Audience Manager ("Build audience profiles that you can use anywhere"), and Tealium ("a single approach to connecting data across teams, vendors, and touchpoints in real time"). They've added ads for "special offers". They use these even on live transaction pages, which is a possible security flaw. Code from those sources produces huge numbers of browser errors (the obsolete "star property hack" for IE6 causes many of them) indicating sloppy code.
"Congratulations, here's your first set of glasses" - the present I got when I turned 50.
While the site focuses on seniors, a lot of the suggestions are good ones in any case - fonts larger than legalese and with good contrast will make your page more easily approachable and less likely to lose viewers who get frustrated because they can't read what you're trying to say.
There's a limit, though. I end up browsing most modern websites at ~60% zoom, because the text is so huge I find it distracting. Luckily the browser zoom feature is pretty great these days, so users can view at any size they like.
There's a limit, though. I end up browsing most modern websites at ~120% zoom when I'm tired, because it's more comfortable. Lay back in chair, still read comfortably. There's so much wasted whitespace it usually doesn't even break the layout.
I'm 29 and my eyesight with glasses is ok. Been wearing 'em for 22 years.
But really the worst offenders are gray text on lighter gray background websites. Whyyyy designers why?
About half the devs in my team have their font rendering cranked up on their desktops, and they're all in their 20s, so it's not just old people who benefit from this.
First change I make on any Windows box is to bump up the desktop rendering to 125% or 150%, depending on the monitor size and resolution. I also set a minimum font size in Firefox of 14.
Honestly, I've worn glasses all my life, and it's never occurred to me that, when I'm not wearing my glasses, the websites are the one's at fault for not making themselves more readable.
I think "web developers should make things more readable" is addressing the symptom and not the problem. The solution is simple when it comes to readability: wear corrective lenses.
First, as your eyes lose the ability to focus (which is a gradual process, not a step change), you find that over time you need more and more lenses: one for objects at 18 inches (your laptop), one for objects at 24 inches (your monitor), etc. You don't always have the proper lenses at hand when you need them.
Second, all the transparent bits of the eyes slowly become less transparent with time. Some problems (cataracts for instance) can be fixed with surgery; others would require replacing the entire eyeball.
Third, a number of unlucky people develop problems with their retinas, which may or may not be fixable, and the fixes rarely leave the retina in as good a shape as it was when it was younger.
So "wear corrective lenses" is not a bad suggestion, but if web designers are targeting older people, they need to assume the the reader's eyes are not what they once were, and that there may not be much that the reader can do about it.
I think something mentioned in the article that's usually not mentioned is the loss of motor skills as you age. I find that for myself, a 20-something year old web developer, it's easy to fall into the 'Everyone on the internet is like me' mindset. However I try to maintain perspective by observing my grandparents as they browse the internet on their iPads. The loss of motor skills is easily one of the most frustrating parts of web browsing for them. If they have to try more than twice to click your small hamburger menu that you put conveniently right next to the 'Log out' button, they'll simply give up and move on to the next thing.
An example of what I feel is an elegant solution - They used to have the hardest time playing/pausing YouTube videos when they would rely only on the buttons. However, once I showed them how to play/pause by clicking the entire video, they were relieved and much more appreciative of the technology. I think that this approach is more sound; instead of simply making everything larger, or having larger clickboxes, simply create multiple ways to interact with the content that doesn't interfere with other users. Nobody is upset that you can play/pause videos by clicking on them, but I imagine they would be if the play/pause buttons were 5x larger than they are now.
Here I foolishly hoped for some evidence of true understanding of the aged. Unfortunately the tl;dr is:
1) News flash, old people are out there, they have money, and some of them even know how to go online.
2) We need a term for this new species... I know, how about 'digiboomers!'
3) An old person is basically a collection of disabilities you need to plan around.
4) In light of 3) when an old person abandons a task it's probably because they're bewildered, not because your game is weak. (Not a word on how to address deficiencies in your content, that their lifetime of experience will enable them to pick up instantly. Or their experience and subsequent impatience with scams, marketing and bullshit. Or the higher level of quality and depth they're seeking in all arenas. Or for that matter, what they're like or what's important to them.)
Readit News
Does anyone actually believe that this crap leads to a better user experience? Are UX concepts and standards so inbred that the people involved just can't separate chocolate pudding from excrement anymore?
The big thing to understand is a lot of people in The Blogosphere(TM) who post articles about UX don't really give a rip about anything other than the pageviews whether it's for ad revenue, establishing themselves as a thought leader, or trying to market their company. Even worse, there are some people who don't even ACTUALLY know much about UX, they just want to post an article about it to spread around LinkedIn and seem relevant by harping about the importance of UX, etc.
Having said all that, if you sift through all the garbage there are some great resources. Some of the big players in the space tend to do it well. InVision's blog, for example. UXPin are pretty good. There are lots of little ones like UXPowerTools' content marketing emails that are starting to do a good job as well.
At this point as someone who is always trying to improve as a UX designer, I have become accustomed to vetting the 100:1 ratio of garbage articles to bad ones.
https://www.nngroup.com/
I would definitely subscribe.
This comment anecdotally reinforces my impression that UX people today (I assume you're either a UX people, or a people interested in UX) have a bias for full-width sites and browsers.
I rarely run my browser full-width (and I think many UX/UI designers rarely do anything else but full-width).
When I opened the page under discussion, I didn't see any social sharing bar at all, just editorial content. And when I read your comment I went "huh?" And then "oh."
So I full-widthed my browser, and saw what you're complaining about. (I didn't notice any scrolling problems. And I didn't notice a popup; that may be because of my adblocking addons.)
As far as I'm concerned, this site exhibits very good UX for this particular aspect of the site. If the browser isn't wide enough to display the sidebar, it gets moved to below the editorial content. That's so refreshingly respectful!
Most often I see "beautiful" sites that have to be sidescrolled if the browser isn't full-width. I do two things in that situation:
1. I turn off styles, which then makes everything flow within the viewport (It's 1990 again!) and moves all the blocks to the order that they appear in the html. Because all I care about are words and pictures, not features. Again, in this site's case that works fabulously, because the site makers ordered their blocks so that editorial content is first; abcnews.com is a good example where, if you turn off styles, the content of interest doesn't appear until you scroll way down the page.
2. Or I leave.
It's also important to note that the bar of social network icons are not below the editorial content shere they would dwell on any remotely useful website, but on top of it. The design feels almost contemptful of its audience. My experience as a user is that I am disrespected and hated.
I used it on a cell phone. My choices there are limited to landscape or portrait mode, both of which behave awfully in subtly different ways. They obviously went out of their way to make a mobile version of the layout, though. They just didn't think it through, because they suck at UX.
And yes, since I am a user, I am interested in my experience. I can't say that I have a bias for full-width sites and browsers, but even if I did, why should my experience be worse in full screen than in a smaller window? Why should it be worse on a phone? The content is text. You read it from left to right, from the top to the bottom. Laying it out in a way that doesn't inspire self harm is not rocket science. Despite these vapid UX blogs making their snake oil salesmanship out to be valuable and insightful, they've failed to find a solution for the most basic problem. They can't even lay text out without having useless crap hovering over it. It's like calling yourself a plumber when you can't even flush your toilet.
Frankly, I'd rather side scroll, because at least then I'd have to make a conscious effort to see all the non-content.
Ah, of course. He's using it wrong!
That reminds me of my numerical methods professor who gave talks on how to present things - and his lecture was literally the worst at the entire uni and this is not just my opinion, this fact was established by anonymous student vote. He had power point presentation slides stuffed full of formulas - literally 10-20 lines of mathematical theorems and proofs, and he just clicked through the pages, leaving no more than a few minutes for such complex slides.
Additionally the mid blue for the route obscures the street name.
Also 'Home' works on some GMaps but will take you to Home hardware, the Home Office etc in other versions.
Basically Google Maps is a summary of Google itself: the best data and pretty damn poor UX.
I've used multiple phones across continents but yet tend to suffer from the exact same problem. Strange!
The inverse problem exists on the browser, though - there's no way to resize the viewport on mobile.
I'm convinced 9 times out of 10 carousels are installed because the customer got sick of looking at their own site.
BofA's site now complains I'm using an "unsupported browser", even though they claim to support Firefox. About half the time, login just hangs. Refreshing the page shows a logged-in state.
When transferring funds from one account to another, sometimes the transfer process hangs. The "Approve transfer" button darkens, but the page is not refreshed. Sometimes the transfer has taken place, and sometimes it hasn't.
Yesterday, I did a transfer between accounts, and reached this situation. I looked at the account status and didn't see the outgoing transfer listed. So I re-did the transfer, and then saw the outgoing transfer listed. I printed the account transaction history.
Today I get a warning that an account is overdrawn. Checking account status, I find that there are now two identical transfers between the accounts, resulting in one being overdrawn and the other being overpaid. An hour of phone calls, mostly on hold, was required to fix this mess.
BofA's web site is using TouchCommerce ("Engage with your customers the way they want to engage") Adobe Audience Manager ("Build audience profiles that you can use anywhere"), and Tealium ("a single approach to connecting data across teams, vendors, and touchpoints in real time"). They've added ads for "special offers". They use these even on live transaction pages, which is a possible security flaw. Code from those sources produces huge numbers of browser errors (the obsolete "star property hack" for IE6 causes many of them) indicating sloppy code.
Sigh. May be time to change banks.
While the site focuses on seniors, a lot of the suggestions are good ones in any case - fonts larger than legalese and with good contrast will make your page more easily approachable and less likely to lose viewers who get frustrated because they can't read what you're trying to say.
I'm 29 and my eyesight with glasses is ok. Been wearing 'em for 22 years.
But really the worst offenders are gray text on lighter gray background websites. Whyyyy designers why?
I think "web developers should make things more readable" is addressing the symptom and not the problem. The solution is simple when it comes to readability: wear corrective lenses.
First, as your eyes lose the ability to focus (which is a gradual process, not a step change), you find that over time you need more and more lenses: one for objects at 18 inches (your laptop), one for objects at 24 inches (your monitor), etc. You don't always have the proper lenses at hand when you need them.
Second, all the transparent bits of the eyes slowly become less transparent with time. Some problems (cataracts for instance) can be fixed with surgery; others would require replacing the entire eyeball.
Third, a number of unlucky people develop problems with their retinas, which may or may not be fixable, and the fixes rarely leave the retina in as good a shape as it was when it was younger.
So "wear corrective lenses" is not a bad suggestion, but if web designers are targeting older people, they need to assume the the reader's eyes are not what they once were, and that there may not be much that the reader can do about it.
Make your font bigger (14 please), choose the font face for clear character distinction, and increase the contrast.
An example of what I feel is an elegant solution - They used to have the hardest time playing/pausing YouTube videos when they would rely only on the buttons. However, once I showed them how to play/pause by clicking the entire video, they were relieved and much more appreciative of the technology. I think that this approach is more sound; instead of simply making everything larger, or having larger clickboxes, simply create multiple ways to interact with the content that doesn't interfere with other users. Nobody is upset that you can play/pause videos by clicking on them, but I imagine they would be if the play/pause buttons were 5x larger than they are now.
I like an attractive web site, but only as long as I can read it instantly.