There4 Development » UX

Heft – Is there a corollary in UX?

Craig Davis — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 06:05:10 +0000

There has been some really good discussion lately about the ways that we as consumers judge a product. I do believe that quality is fractal. The quality of a product can be felt almost immediately – we can all tell the difference in leather and vinyl, if not immediately by sight, certainly by touch. What elements in an user interface are like this? What can we change in a UX that gives an application a better feel?

I believe that one of the things that affects the way that we feel about a product is it’s heft – the apparent density of a product. Some small electronics devices have extra weight added to them. We’ve all purchased something that looked great, but felt flimsy once it was in our hands. That added heft in this case is not entirely fake – without the added heft it wouldn’t sit on a table correctly, the cables running into it could hold it aloft or twist it around. But beyond that, it’s psychological.

So, with that in mind, what in UX is might be the corollary to heft?

AJAX interaction indications and timers

Craig Davis — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 17:51:34 +0000

I believe that AJAX interactions are still new enough that customers can have a difficult time knowing what to expect from them. I recently completed an interface where we were using jQuery to create and manage lists. In this list interface, we ran into some interesting assumptions that people were making about the way that the application worked based on the interface.

When the user added a new item to the list, the app displayed a spinner, and then faded in the new item from the input box to the list. On the development machines, it was moderately fast. But once it was on the production machines, the ajax was extremely fast – it returned in less than a tenth of a second. This meant that the spinner was displayed for such a short period of time that the users simply didn’t see it. It was never visible to the user.

Because of this, the users didn’t seem to be understanding that the item had become permanent – testing showed that they were actually looking for a “save” button after they had added their items to the app. After some discussion, it became apparent that the speed was confusing them. They believed that web applications have to process for a moment and communicate with a server. Because the process was so snappy, they believed that there was no way it could have been saved on the server, and so they were looking for a submit button to save their items. Because of the speed of the interface, they thought that the changes were only happening locally.

The solution? We added a timer to the application so that the spinner would never show less than three tenths of a second. It was long enough that they felt that the new item had been saved.

Inconsistent Menu Extras

Craig Davis — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 23:50:22 +0000

I am surprised that the Google Notifiers for OSX are inconsistent with the system icons in the menu extras. Here’s a screenshot:

Inconsistent colors in the menu extras

I’m usually very impressed with the consistency that Google presents with their UI design, and this bothers me every time that I look at this. I would hate for the icon designers to begin to ignore the simplicity that the monochrome icons present in the menu extras. I believe that the extras icons should only use color for an application that is in an alert state, such as a low battery.