UX Myths

Myth #34: Simple = minimal

Tue, 07 Apr 2015 15:43:03 -0400

Simplicity is key to great and innovative product design. But simplicity (reduction of complexity) is way often confused with minimalist style (reduction of elements). In fact, simple looking, minimal product UIs often carry hidden complexity.

Design decisions aiming for reduction can easily introduce more friction and cognitive load, leading to a more complex user experience. Icons without text labels are difficult to understand, non-standard gestures provide no obvious affordance, the minimalist hamburger menu was proven many times to perform poorly.

We should all strive for simplicity, but we must make sure not to oversimplify for the sake of minimalism. As Albert Einstein put it, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

Minimalist style doesn’t always lead to product simplicity

Julie Zhuo, product design director at Facebook, says that one of the most common design mistakes is “overvaluing simplicity and style at the cost of clarity.” – The 5 Most Common Design Mistakes
Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, makes a clear distinction between minimalism and simplicity: minimalism is a style, “a reaction to complexity whereas simplicity relies on an understanding of the complex.” Minimalism is only skin deep. Simplicity comes from the understanding of the whole experience. – Simple or minimal?
In a similar vein, Steven Sinofsky contrasts minimalist design (reducing the surface area of an experience) to frictionless design (reducing the energy required by an experience), saying that “The minimalism is wonderful, but the ability to get going comes with high friction. The Unix philosophy of small cooperating tools is wonderfully minimal (every tool does a small number of things and does them well), but the learning and skills required are high friction.” – Frictionless Design Choices
“Less buttons, switches, and options do not make something simple.” says Jason Stirman – Simple and Clean
Dan Saffer argues for visible design. He says that “not only are visible designs potentially more valuable, they are potentially more usable as well.” – The Myth of Invisible Design
John Maeda writes in his book, The Laws of Simplicity: “On the one hand, you want a product or service to be easy to use; on the other hand you want it to do everything that a person might want it to do. […] The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction. When in doubt, just remove. But be careful of what you remove.”
More is often…more: “In some cases designs actually need more of something to become simple.[…] Prevailing wisdom suggests that simplicity is about less…removal and reductionism. But simplicity is really about comprehension and clarity of purpose…can we design such that people instantly understand what’s going on and make a confident decision about what to do next?” – What does it mean to be simple?
Frank de Jong explains that a minimal UI is only one way to simplicity, and often not the best way: “by forcing a minimalistic design on the provided functionality, an interface feels less simplistic. The reduction of meaningful information leads to confusion, and in the end: a flawed user experience.” – We want more by seeing less
Frank Chimero writes: “I am tired of simple things. Simple things are weak. They are limited. They are boring. What I truly want is clarity. Give me clear and evident things over simple things.” – Only Openings
Jonas Downey asks why some cluttered, complex products become wildly successful, like Facebook, Craigslist or Photoshop. “The answer is that these products do an incredible job of solving their users’ problems, and their complex interfaces are a key reason for their success.” – Why I love ugly, messy interfaces — and you probably do too

Minimalist UIs that led to complex UX

BMW iDrive: The iDrive in-car infotainment control system started with a minimal approach: in the first version, the only control was a turn knob. Later on, due to extensive consumer feedback, 2 extra buttons were added. Now it features 8 dedicated buttons, greatly improving the user experience and driving safety. – iDrive
Fitbit Flex: Jesse Weaver examines how the minimalist UI of the Fitbit Flex can put the user experience at risk – When Simplicity Becomes Complexity: 3 Design Lessons From Using a Fitbit
The hamburger menu: In the name of minimalism and clean design, moving a mobile app’s navigation into an off-screen menu, called the hamburger menu, can easily cost a good chunk of engagement, as the examples of Zeebox or Facebook show.
The overflow menu: it is very similar to the hamburger menu with the added benefit that multiple can be placed on a screen. But “The trouble with overflow menus is that you didn’t actually take anything away, you just obnoxiously obfuscated it.” – Stop the overuse of overflow menus

Zoltan Gocza

Myth #33: Mobile users are distracted

Mon, 06 Oct 2014 03:18:00 -0400

When thinking of mobile users, many have a stereotypical image of people on the go, people with the attention span of a goat and suffering from Mobile User Attention Deficit Disorder.

But are mobile users distracted? Of course they are. But we are just as much distracted when sitting in front of our computers, watching TV or driving a car. Distractions are everywhere, it’s not a mobile-only phenomenon.

First of all, mobile is not on-the-go

Google’s multi-screen study found that 60% of smartphone usage takes place at home. In comparison, computers are used 69% and tablets 79% of the time at home.
InsightsNow found that 68% of mobile usage (excluding calls, text and email) is at home.
In their search study, Google also found that 77% of mobile searches take place at home or at work (where you quite likely have a desktop or notebook available to you, too).
Fun fact: mobile is most definitely in-the-bathroom.
So instead of picturing mobile users as people running to catch the bus with their smartphones in their hand, we should imagine people mostly at home or work ‒ where we spend most of our time ‒, using their phones to get various things done because it’s the nearest device in reach.

Distractions are everywhere, not only on mobile

Mobile users can receive incoming calls and text messages at any time ‒ but that’s given even when we sit in front of our notebook or TV.
Computer users and TV watchers are just as much distracted: a Google study showed that 67% of the time we use a PC, we simultaneously use another device (75% for tablets, 77% for TV). In comparison, 57% of the time when using smartphones are we using another device.
Drivers are also distracted. 86% of us eat or drink, 41% of us meddle with the GPS, 14% even apply make-up, according to Most U.S. Drivers Engage in ‘Distracting’ Behaviors: Poll (see also Crash Test: 5 Things People Do While Driving). Oh, and kids distract us more than our phones.
Students are distracted too: in a study, Larry Rosen showed that students “were only able to focus and stay on task for an average of three minutes at a time and nearly all of their distractions came from technology.”
And the list goes on. Distractions are everywhere.

Mobile engagement is now higher than desktop

We now spend more time online on our mobile than on desktop - US smartphone engagement has overtaken desktop: stats and Mobile apps overtake PC Internet usage in U.S.
A comScore study shows that for many activities, we use our mobile almost exclusively now. Radio (96% mobile now), photos (96%), maps (90%), instant messaging (90%) are among the many categories to see a huge shift to mobile.
Mobile-only usage is on a steady rise. 30% of Facebook’s active users, for example, access Facebook exclusively from their phones.

Zoltán Gócza

Myth #32: Success happens overnight

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 09:47:00 -0400

The Apple iPod instantly turned the MP3 player market upside down, right? Amazon changed the book selling business like a shot, didn’t it? Well, in fact they didn’t. No matter how it may seem from the outside.

The fact is that it takes many years to be an overnight success even for internet entrepreneurs. Years of hard work, endurance, learning, experimenting, and many failures along the way. And sometimes pursuing a project almost everybody dislikes, like developing Gmail with its “crazy Javascript stuff”.

Seemingly swift successes that took a long time to achieve:

Twitter: Twitter founder Biz Stone had been creating blogging, mobile and social products for 8 years before founding Twitter. He says: “Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success.” - Timing Lessons
Another account on Twitter: The Non-Overnight Success: How Twitter Became Twitter
Apple iPod: It took 3 years for the iPod to become an overnight success. “The first iPod was released in 2001. Within a year, Apple had revised it to improve ergonomics in a second version. But it wasn’t until the fourth version in 2004 that sales started to take off.” - Apple’s “Overnight” Success!, originally discussed in Bill Buxtons’s brilliant book Sketching User Experiences.
37signals: “When we launched Basecamp five years ago, I think we had less than 2,000 people subscribed to our RSS feed. Add a few thousand more who were just checking the site manually and it’s probably reasonable to guess that our initial audience was below 5,000 people.
By today’s standards, that’s tiny! And that audience had even taken a few years to build.” - Overnight success takes years
Gmail: “We starting working on Gmail in August 2001. For a long time, almost everyone disliked it. […] Quite a few people thought that we should kill the project, or perhaps "reboot” it as an enterprise product with native client software, not this crazy Javascript stuff. Even when we got to the point of launching it on April 1, 2004 – two and a half years after starting work on it – many people inside of Google were predicting doom.“ - Overnight success takes a long time
Amazon: It launched in 1994, but only added book reviews in 1996 and CDs in 1998. And let’s not forget that they weren’t profitable in the first seven years.
Many startups: despite all the "you can also do it” blogposts, many-startups tell you how long it took them to get the first 100 customers and how much endurance you need to become profitable. There’s No Myth, Only Years Of Hard Work, Bootsrapping a Company, Lessons Learned from 5 Years of SaaS
Angry Birds: The mobile game Angry Birds was a huge success. But Rovio had been through 50 mobile games up to that point and almost went bankrupt (tl;dr version)
FedEx: Frederick W. Smith’s idea for an express delivery service was born in 1965, FedEx launched in 1973 (with only 7 packages on the first day), in the first 26 months in business, it made a loss of $29 million, and only by the late 1970s did it become a success. - Frederick W. Smith: No Overnight Success and FedEx Corporation: The Creation of Overnight Air-express Industry
The Beatles: “The Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene with a string of #1 hits and an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. But they had been playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg since 1957, and while they had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success, Sgt. Peppers, was released in 1967.” - Overnight Success: It Takes Years, see also Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers with a detailed account.
… or take Tiger Woods: Although he was the youngest golfer who won the Masters, he’d been practicing golf practically his whole life, “he was a child prodigy, introduced to golf before the age of two.” - Tiger Woods (Wikipedia)

More on the idea of instant success:

“The notion of overnight success is very misleading and actually rather harmful to any hope for long term and sustainable growth in this industry. […] whatever the business, big success takes years to build and there are very few counter examples.” says Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek. “Overnight success takes a long time. To quote Daft Punk - work it harder, make it better, do it faster, makes us stronger, more than ever, hour after hour, our work is never over.”
Seth Godin argues that “Along the way, some people have trained themselves to believe that the only kind of success worth having is overnight success. That if you don’t hit #1 the first week, you’ve failed. That if your interface isn’t perfect out of the box, or if you don’t get 5,000 people standing in line at the opening of your new store, you’ve failed.”
Barrie Bergman writes in his ChangeThis manifesto that “Personally, I’ve never met an overnight success. I’ve met people who’ve done something well for a long time and were suddenly discovered. Then everyone assumed they came out of nowhere, that their fame happened overnight.”
“Overnight success is really overnight exposure.” says Jonathan Fields.

Oh, and yes, YouTube is quite an exception. Though it did take 5 years even for them to turn profitable.

Zoltán Gócza

Myth #31: UX design is a step in a project

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 08:02:00 -0400

Many think that user experience design is confined to sketching the interfaces. However, UX design is a much broader process that - ideally - starts at the strategy level and affects the whole lifecycle of a project or a business.

UX design begins by learning about the business model, doing user research and understanding how a service can fit into the users’ lives in a meaningful way. Thus UX design has a crucial part in defining the business strategy, providing baselines for business decisions with such design deliverables as personas or user stories. A UX-driven process doesn’t end with the UIs either, it’s also about testing with people, supporting development, making ongoing adjustments even after the launch.

How UX design is way more than user interface design:

“Interface is a component of user experience, but there’s much more.” - Peter Merholz
“I’ve had clients tell me not to worry about what their strategy is, because why would a designer care about that? UX is more than just skin deep.” - Dan Saffer
“User experience design isn’t a checkbox, you don’t do it and then move on. It needs to be integrated into everything you do.” - Liz Danzico
… from 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design.
In Design Is a Process, Not a Methodology at UXmatters, Pabini Gabriel-Petit shows the steps of a complete product design process, chunked to three phases: discovery, design and development support. UI design / wireframing is only a step in the 8-step process.
The many different activities of user-centered design is well demonstrated by the Generic Work Process, listing 100+ techniques and methods that can be used in UX design.
Jesse James Garrett defines five planes of UX design starting from strategy-level to the concrete UI - The Elements of User Experience: simple version (PDF), detailed version (PDF)
That Squiggle of the Design Process visually shows how research and prototyping are essential and move the design process from the abstract to the final design.
The book A Project Guide to UX Design details the steps of UX design from defining the user experience (i.e. project objectives, business requirements, research, personas) to designing for the user experience (site maps, wireframes, usability testing, post-launch activities).

Some UX design process examples:

Typical UX process by the Usability Professionals’ Association on a poster (PDF)
Todd R. Warfel’s process diagram (JPG)
ZURB’s design process
Userfocus’s UX model
SCM’s User-Centered Design Process (PDF)
Huge’s design process (presentation)
The design process of Boxee Beta by Whitney Hess
…but don’t forget, “Great design does not come from great processes; it comes from great designers.” - Fred Brooks

Zoltán Gócza

Myth #30: If you are an expert, you don't need to test your design

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 09:53:00 -0500

When it comes to evaluating the usability of an interface, user testing is often considered unnecessary if an expert has already reviewed it. Since people rarely behave the way you expect, an expert can find major usability problems, but usability tests always reveal surprising issues.

Usability testing and expert reviews are both useful and tend to have different findings, therefore it’s usually recommended to combine the two in order to get the most comprehensive analysis of the interface.

Why an expert review can’t substitute usability testing

Users’ behavior is often hard to predict, even for professionals. According to Stephanie Rosenbaum, “real users always surprise us. They often have problems we don’t expect, and they sometimes breeze through where we expect them to bog down.”
Since experts are rarely members of the target group, they sometimes “miss the real problems that cause users to fail tasks. This can be especially true when the target audience has a particular skill set.” See a comprehensive comparison of the two methods.
A usability test can reveal much more than how usable a site is - it can also demonstrate the “users’ emotional response to the brand, statement of business purpose, graphics, long- and short-term messaging, competitive position, sales path, and more”, Tedd Follansbee explains at UX Matters.
They have different purposes: expert reviews focus on general usability standards while a usability test is better at finding issues related to special domain knowledge and actual user tasks. Often expert reviews should come before usability tests.
Empirical data is always better than guessing, Jakob Nielsen says. He believes that any empirical fact “improves the probability of making correct UI design decisions.” His article Guesses vs. Data highlights a few case studies showing that even experts are very inefficient when it comes to predicting how users will react to a given interface.
Plasq co-founder Keith Lang says that thinking that experienced designers do not have to test their products is one of the greatest misconceptions in web design. According to him, even the most successful and experienced designers confirm that “user testing is the absolute key”.
When a design decision has to be accepted by many stakeholders, an expert review might seem another disputable opinion while data based on usability test results - often including metrics - is seldom questioned.

Expert reviews have their benefits and purposes, too:

When a quick overview of the interface is required, “expert reviews are especially useful for finding violations of usability standards and best practices”, Jim Ross advises.
Expert reviews are a common usability method because they’re relatively cheap and quick. Inspecting a site and writing a report might only take a few days and, in addition, many still think that a usability test needs a big budget.
It’s always recommended to do an expert review before usability testing an interface, not only to avoid exposing the users to obvious usability mistakes, but also to “determine what to focus on during testing. You can do an expert review to find the obvious problems, allowing usability testing to find and validate the more important problems”, a UXmatters article suggests.
The scope of a review can sometimes be wider than that of a test. According to Jim Ross, “an expert review can be more thorough and evaluate more parts of a user interface than in usability testing, finding a greater number of problems, because testing is usually limited in time and scope, focusing on certain tasks and parts of an interface.”

Why is it hard (even for experts) to predict how users will react?

…because people are not rational,
…because people are not like you,
…because people sometimes will not use your product the way you imagine,
…and because even people themselves cannot tell you what they’ll like.

Zoltán Kollin - Let’s connect

Myth #29: People are rational

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 06:09:00 -0500

People don’t make purely rational decisions based on careful analysis of cost and expected utility, despite what classical economics taught us. Research findings confirm that our decisions are driven more by our emotions than logical and conscious thinking.

However, our irrationality is predictable. Good designers, therefore, can learn about human decision making and go beyond usability to create products that effectively influence our behavior.

Neuroscientist Jonah Lehrer argues that people are irrational because our logic is slow and our rational brain is still new and very limited in capacity. It is, as he puts it, “a computer operating system that was rushed to market.” The emotional brain, on the other hand, is really powerful and makes good decisions. That’s why most decisions are made on the emotional level.

8 experiments to prove our irrationality from the books Predictably Irrational and How We Decide:

People are bad at comparing things in an absolute way
In an experiment, participants were asked to choose from differently priced offers. The experimenters found that they can double the “sales” of an expensive offer by simply adding another similarly priced offer that was inferior in quality. This offer was a so called decoy whose only purpose was to influence people to buy the original item.
People think in relative terms
Another experiment shows that people would spend 15 minutes walking to save $7 on an $18 item but wouldn’t take the same 15-minute trip to save the same amount on a $455 item. If people were rational, the price of the item wouldn’t matter to them, only that seven dollars can be saved with a 15-minute walk.
Our first experiences become imprinted in our brain
In an experiment, participants were asked whether they would pay a given price for a specific item. Then the participants were asked to make their own bids on the same item. The experiment found that the participants’ own bids were heavily influenced by the price they first saw: people made higher bids when they saw higher initial prices.
This is called the anchoring effect.
People prefer free offers to better bargains
People rather take a $10 Amazon gift certificate for free than buy a $20 gift certificate for seven dollars. When Amazon’s French division moved from charging a negligible shipping fee of 20 cents to free shipping, their sales dramatically increased.
Read more on the power of free.
People irrationally overvalue what they own
We value more what we already own. An experiment showed that basketball fans who owned a ticket to a given game would sell it for about $2,400, though those who didn’t own a ticket would only pay an average of $170 for one.
Our prior expectations greatly influence our experiences
Coke fans like Coke better mainly because of Coke’s brand, not because its taste. Experiments show that more expensive painkillers are more effective than cheaper or discounted ones (because of the placebo effect).
We respond differently to a question if it’s worded differently
People make different choices depending on what the default answer is, or whether the description emphasizes what one can gain or what one can lose.
This is the effect of framing.
We’re impatient
Analyzing a promotion of actual credit card companies, Lawrence Ausubel found that the majority of people fall for low teaser rates even if the lifetime rate is significantly higher. Another experiment shows that people prefer getting an Amazon gift certificate immediately over waiting 2-4 weeks to get a bigger gift certificate.

Resources every designer should read:

Predictably Irrational - book by Dan Ariely
How We Decide - book by Jonah Lehrer
Influence - book by Robert Cialdini
Sway - book by Ori and Rom Brafman
Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive - book by Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin and Robert Cialdini
Neuro Web Design - book by Susan Weinschenk
You Are Not So Smart - a brilliant blog dedicated to debunk the misconception that people are rational.

Zoltán Gócza

Myth #28: White space is wasted space

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 09:23:00 -0500

White space or “negative space”, referring to the empty space between and around elements of a design or page layout, is often overlooked and neglected.

Although many may consider it a waste of valuable screen estate, white space is an essential element in web design and “is to be regarded as an active element, not a passive background,” Jan Tschichold wrote in 1930.

Not only is white space responsible for readability and content prioritization, it also plays an important role in the visual layout and brand positioning.

The importance of white space in web design

Allows for easier readability and scannability
Web Design Tuts’ tutorial on using white space effectively points out that the basic role of white space is to „reduce the amount of text visitors see all at once and makes reading much easier.” A cluttered page is unattractive and doesn’t make users want to read the content, especially when there’s no visual hierarchy within the text. A lab research (PDF) conducted by Wichita State University showed that white space actually improves reading comprehension, although it may decrease reading speed.
Prioritizes user interface elements
Luke Wroblewski claims in Developing the Invisible that “for designers, white space is often as important as the content itself,” as such invisible elements of the interface help communicate „what’s most important, what’s related, and what needs attention.”
Guides users on a page
As white space can bring elements of the content into focus, it can “actually guide your eye from one point to another,” Carla Rose argues. A very important role of white space is to lead „the viewer around the page by the designer’s intent,” Jason Santa Maria discusses in his article on white space design.
Can create the feeling of sophistication and elegance
The generous use of white space can even contribute to the desired brand positioning. A List Apart has written a comprehensive article about white space which claims that it can “create a feeling of sophistication and elegance for upscale brands.” Cosmetics, for example, use usually extensive white space in their marketing material to tell they’re high quality products.
Is essential for a balanced, harmonious layout
“The empty space on a page can be every bit as important as the space occupied by imagery, because even empty space serves a purpose and supports the visual integrity of a layout,” according to Jason Santa Maria.

Elements of white space

Space around graphics and images
Margins, paddings and gutters
Line-spacing and letter-spacing within text content
Space between columns

Some beautiful websites with generous white space

apple.com/
squarespace.com
shopify.com
mailchimp.com
You can find more great examples here and here
…or check how we are doing with white space :)

What the world would look like without white space

Check out the White Space Eliminator!

Zoltán Kollin - Let’s connect

Myth #27: UX design is about usability

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 08:44:00 -0500

Designing for the user experience has a lot more to it than making a product usable. Usability allows people to easily accomplish their goals. UX design covers more than that, it’s about giving people a delightful and meaningful experience.

A good design is pleasurable, thoughtfully crafted, makes you happy, and gets you immersed. Think of games, they usually have these characteristics. Or think of the iPhone that makes even failing more enjoyable than succeeding on a Blackberry.

Good design is pleasurable and seductive:

“At this point in experience design’s evolution, satisfaction ought to be the norm, and delight ought to be the goal” - says Stephen Anderson. See his brilliant presentations: Seductive Interactions and Creating Pleasurable Interfaces
“User-experience is not like usability - it is about feelings. The aim here is to create happiness. You want people to feel happy before, during and after they have used your product. […] Focus on making it easy to be happy, and usability, user-experience and greatness will come all by itself.” - The Battle Between Usability and User-Experience
“Showing personality in your app, website, or brand can be a very powerful way for your audience to identify and empathize with you. People want to connect with real people and too often we forget that businesses are just collections of people.” - Emotional Interface Design: The Gateway to Passionate Users
Andy Budd shows many examples on how to seduce users on the web (i.e. showing testimonials and your popularity, being funny, mysterious, etc.) - Seductive Design presentation slides or video or the takeaways for the hurried
Though it became popular only recently, the term “seductive interface” was first coined in 1994 by Microsoft and even discussed by usability guru Jakob Nielsen in 1996 - Seductive User Interfaces

Good design is playful:

Good experiences are engaging. Sometimes it means making things hard and sacrifying ease of use. “We all talk about user-friendliness and usability, but is it possible to go too far? The answer really depends on the context, but yes, it is possible to make something so easy that it loses value.” - Can you have too much ease-of-use?
“Brains love play. Find a way to bring more play (or at least a sense of playfulness) into someone’s life, and you might just end up with a fan.” - Creating playful users…

Good design gets you in the flow:

In the flow state “people often experience intense concentration and feelings of enjoyment, coupled with peak performance. Hours pass by in what seems like minutes.” Trevor van Gorp discusses how to design for the flow. - Design for Emotion and Flow, see also his presentation
Usability expert Dana Chisnell says that good design isn’t just eliminating frustration, products must evoke positive emotions, be thoughtful, and get users absorbed in the experience (like on Netflix or TripIt.com). - Beyond Frustration: Three levels of happy design

A well designed product has a meaning to the user:

Meaningful products have personal significance and resonates with people’s needs, match their values. Few companies are able to reach this level, “products can be beautiful & usable but still lacking in meaning” - Stephen P. Anderson
“Meaning is the deepest connection that you can make with your audience/user/customer. Meaning is established between people, between people and objects, people and places, etc., and it is the deepest part of those invisible connections.” - Designing for Meaningful Experience – Nathan Shedroff
What types of meaningful experiences do people value? Accomplishment, beauty, community, creation, duty, enlightment, freedom, harmony, justice, oneness, redemption, security, truth, validation, wonder, etc. - See the 15 most frequent meanings— collected by the author of the book Making Meaning based on thousands of interviews.

… the difference between UX and usability is illustrated in:

The User Experience Pyramid from Stephen P. Anderson
The User Experience Honeycomb from Peter Morville

Zoltán Gócza

Myth #26: Usability testing = focus groups

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 08:47:00 -0400

When it comes to collecting feedback from users, usability tests and focus groups are often confused although their goals are completely different.

Focus groups assess what users say: a number of people gather in order to discuss their feelings, attitudes and thoughts on a given topic to reveal their motivations and preferences.

Usability testing, on the other hand, is about observing how people actually use a product, by assigning key tasks to users and analyzing their performance and experience.

How the two research methods are different:

They have different goals. As Chris Gieger summarizes in his article: „focus groups are about understanding people’s feelings and opinions about something whereas usability tests are about learning how people use things”. A focus groups tell you what people want; user studies tell you whether something works.
The research processes are entirely different. Focus group research implies discussions with members of your target audience, while usability testing is about observing users performing given tasks. A focus group research, in addition, is typically performed with a group of participants while a usability test is typically performed one-on-one.
What people say is not what they do. According to Jakob Nielsen, the most important difference between the two methods is that focus groups can only reveal what “customers say they do and not the way customers actually operate the product”. Cardinal Path has written a great comparison between the two methods. (For more sources, see Myth #21: People can tell you what they want.)
They should be performed in different phases of the development. Focus groups should be performed early in the project to discover your target audience, while usability testing should be used to measure the performance of your site after it has been finished or is in a test phase, as a Webcredible article points out.
So “focus groups are not usability tests”, as Steve Krug debunks this myth in the briefest form possible in Don’t Make Me Think.
“Focus groups are worthless… A focus group is an artificial construct that is so much about the group dynamic.”, says Erika Hall.

Zoltán Kollin - Let’s connect

Myth #25: Aesthetics are not important if you have good usability

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 08:42:00 -0400

There are usability practitioners who completely dismiss the importance of aesthetics, often citing unattractive but popular websites such as Craigslist.

However, aesthetics do have a function. Attractive things work better. Studies show that emotions play an important role in the users’ experience. If a website has a pleasant visual design, users are more relaxed, tend to find the website more credible and easier to use. A positive first impression — usually based on looks rather than interaction — determines the value of the website on the user’s behalf.

Aesthetics also tell a good many about your brand, product or service. They show that you care.

In defense of aesthetics:

Human centered design expert Don Norman goes into details about the importance of aesthetics and its function to enhance usability in Emotion & Design: Attractive things work better. His book, Emotion design is devoted to the matter.
A study on the role of aesthetics concludes that, though attractive things may not score higher in performance, people perceive attractive things as more usable - Do “Attractive Things Work Better”? An Exploration of Search Tool Visualisations (pdf)
Stanford University conducted a study with 2500+ participants on how people assess the credibility of a website. The findings prove the importance of visual design: “Nearly half of all consumers (or 46.1%) in the study assessed the credibility of sites based in part on the appeal of the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font size and color schemes. (…) Beautiful graphic design will not salvage a poorly functioning Web site. Yet, the study shows a clear link between solid design and site credibility.” - from the Stanford Credibility Project
The developers of the Macintosh user interface made serious efforts to create rounded rectangles, as they are much easier on the eye. - Realizations of Rounded Rectangles
Stephen P. Anderson’s In defense of Eye Candy discusses the critical role of aesthetics and how our rational thinking is closely connected to how we feel.
Web designer Dimitry Fadeyev argues how good design is a competitive advantage and that it possibly played a great role in certain huge successes in the internet industry (Facebook, Digg). In his words: “Good design at the front-end suggests that everything is in order at the back-end, whether or not that is the case.” - The Value of Good Design
“Problems with visual design can turn users off so quickly that they never discover all the smart choices you made with navigation or interaction design.” says UX designer Jesse James Garrett.
Joel Spolsky argues that “Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.”
Max Steenbergen writes in Eye Candy vs. Bare-Bones in UI Design that “Eye candy distracts, whereas bare-bones fails to attract. […] If the application doesn’t have some kind of aesthetic value, it will not only fail to attract the user’s attention, it will also fail to hold the user’s attention.”
“Who ever said that pleasure wasn’t functional?” said Charles Eames.

Zoltán Gócza

Myth #24: People always use your product the way you imagined they would

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 12:17:00 -0400

Even if a product was designed to fulfill specific and known user needs, customers don’t always use it the way and for the purpose the product was originally intended.

In many cases, users don’t care or don’t understand how a product works, and once they find a way to use it, they’ll stick to it. Many people, for example, type URLs into the Google search bar instead of the browser’s address bar.

You should, therefore, never take your design for granted and always collect feedback on how your product is actually used to reveal the real user needs and to get ideas of innovation.

Examples of how unorthodox product use can contribute to innovation:

The original purpose of Twitter was that users could simply post what they were doing. Users, however, soon found out that it makes more sense to share links and ideas. As the developers recognized this, they changed the question ‘What are you doing?’ to ‘What’s happening?’ on the interface. The same thing happened to Facebook where the original status update question has been changed from ‘What are you doing right now?’ to ‘What’s on your mind?’
SMS messaging was originally developed by mobile operators to notify customers about network issues and nobody predicted that customers would ever use it to send messages to others. People, however, discovered this communication tool for themselves and started texting to each other. The sudden popularity of SMS was such a surprise for the mobile industry that most service providers were unable at first to set up a charging system for texting.
Kleenex, introduced in 1924, was originally marketed as a disposable face towel to remove make-up. Two years later the manufacturer conducted a research based on customer feedback and found that the majority of the people were using the product as a disposable handkerchief to blow their noses. At that point they started advertising Kleenex as handkerchief, doubling the sales figures.
Mac Mini was originally introduced by Apple to provide an affordable option to customers to switch to Mac. Although the company also offered Apple TV as a home media center device, many customers bought Mac Minis to use as media centers rather than as desktop computers. The company recognized this, and Mac Mini is now equipped with a HDMI port so that it can be more easily connected to flat screen TVs.
Reports of web analytics often show that a lot of users enter complete URLs into search engines instead of typing them into the address bar, usually because their cursor is already in a search box. Since websites can be reached this way, too, such users consider it effective. Google acknowledged that such user behavior existed and in Google Chrome they combined search and address bar into Omnibox.
Twitter hashtags were invented by an individual user who suggested that tweets should contain tags indicated by the # character. Since the concept of the service did not allow any classification, hashtags became popular among users, making the tweets more meaningful and findable.
The hazard flasher was originally designed so that drivers could indicate emergency situations. In many countries, however, drivers often use the hazard flasher to say thank you to other vehicles for their courtesy, and the switch is nowadays in most models easily accessible on the dashboard while driving.

What makes people use products in unorthodox ways:

When people have a need or task to fulfill, they automatically try to use the device they have at hand, even if it isn’t suitable for the given task.
Unorthodox product use takes place more often when users have insufficient information on how to use a given device or the instructions are not easily accessible.
Once something has worked for a purpose, people will insist on it, even if it implies using it in a wrong way.
And it is good, because “If every customer is using your product "correctly”, you’ll never learn anything interesting about what to do next.“

Zoltán Kollin - Let’s connect

Myth #23: Choices should always be limited to 7+/-2

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 09:33:00 -0400

Limiting the number of menu tabs or the number of items in a dropdown list to the George Miller’s magic number 7 is a false constraint. Miller’s original theory argues that people can keep no more than 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their short-term memory. On a webpage, however, the information is visually present, people don’t have to memorize anything and therefore can easily manage broader choices.

For example, research shows that broad and shallow menu structures may even work better than deeper menus. Also, link-rich e-commerce homepages, like that of Amazon with 90+ product category links, are found to be more usable than homepages with only a few links.

Articles debunking the myth of 7+/-2:

The Wikipedia article on Miller’s Law makes it already clear that the law only applies to humans’ working memory, not to information that is readily available to be read. – The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two
Even George Miller was shocked to see how badly his original concept was misinterpreted, saying that “The point was that 7 was a limit for the discrimination of unidimensional stimuli (pitches, loudness, brightness, etc.) and also a limit for immediate recall, neither of which has anything to do with a person’s capacity to comprehend printed text.”
Jakob Nielsen says that, although short-term memory is indeed very important when designing web pages (ie. indicating visited links, showing help content without leaving the page), it’s misleading to use it for menu design. - Short-Term Memory and Web Usability
Anoter Nielsen Normann Group article, while underlying the importance of chunking, states that “confused designers will sometimes misuse this finding (ie. the Mythical Number Seven) to justify unnecessary design limitations.” – How Chunking Helps Content Processing
Edward Tufte says that “These studies on memorizing nonsense then led some interface designers to conclude that only 7 items belong on a list or a slide, a conclusion which can be sustained only by not reading the paper. In fact Miller’s paper neither states nor implies rules for the amount of information to be shown in a presentation.” – The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Not relevant for design
Research suggests that the broad top-level menus work best since they’re the most efficient and least error prone. – Breadth vs. Depth
A GUUUI article details why apparent simplicity can sometimes result in higher complexity. The article also debunks the 7+/-2 myth. – Balancing visual and structural complexity in interaction design
A ClickZ article explains why 7 might be magical but isn’t based on science, Human Factor also discusses it in Reducing reliance on superstition.
So if you have many options, you don’t have to limit their number to seven on a user interface. However, you should still think about every option, consider whether you need it or not, as more choices don’t always lead to higher satisfaction.

Zoltán Gócza

Myth #22: Usability testing is expensive

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 05:35:00 -0400

Many organizations still believe usability testing is a luxury that requires an expensively equipped lab and takes weeks to conduct.

In fact, usability tests can be both fast and relatively cheap. You don’t need expensive prototypes; low-tech paper prototype tests can also bring valuable results. You don’t need a lot of participants either, even 5 users can be enough to test for specific tasks, and the recruiting can also be done guerilla-style. For many projects, you can even use remote and unmoderated tests.

How can you fit usability testing into a low budget?

Dana Chisnell, author of The Handbook of Usability Testing, recommends cheap and lab-less testing for quick insights. - Quick and Dirty Usability Testing: Step Away from the Book
Jared Spool argues that there’s no need for usability labs most of the times. Moreover, labs can even distract participants. - Streamlining Usability Testing by Avoiding the Lab
Jakob Nielsen discusses how usability projects can be inexpensive and fast saying that “The methods are incredibly flexible and scale up or down according to circumstance.” - Misconceptions About Usability and How Many Test Users in a Usability Study?
In Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users, Jakob Nielsen says that it’s normally enough to test a design with 5 users. He argues that by adding “more and more users, you learn less and less”. Keep in mind though that a more thorough test of a complete product will still require larger numbers.
In his book Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug also states that 3-4 participants are usually sufficient for finding the biggest usability issues.
In Usability Testing on a Budget, several UX experts tell their experiences on fitting usability testing into a low budget - skipping the extras and the lab, going informal, etc.
UXmatters discusses the pros and cons of unmoderated usability testing, stating that unmoderated testing “is most effective when you have very specific questions about how people use an interface for relatively simple and straightforward tasks.” - Unmoderated, Remote Usability Testing: Good or Evil?
It must be noted though that remote tests are not always more economic, another article on UXmatters states that, in the authors’ experience, face-to-face usability testing is more economical.
Nate Bolt collected many quick-and-dirty remote usability testing methods and web applications. - Quick and Dirty Remote User Testing
… and see a list of remote research tools.

How to get stakeholder buy-in for testing?

Proven techniques from Christine Perfetti to convince clients: Five Techniques for Getting Buy-In for Usability Testing
In an interview, Dana Chisnell advises to pitch usability testing in a company by examining what the company bases its design decisions on: “Look hard at how you’re making design decisions. Without doing some kind of user research or usability testing, how do you know you’re basing your design decisions on good information?”
Arguments to combat usability testing avoidance like “Our product is already perfect” or “It’ll slow us down.” - 4 ways to combat usability testing avoidance

Zoltán Gócza

Myth #21: People can tell you what they want

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 15:27:00 -0400

Many organizations still rely on asking people what changes they’d like to see in their website or service, neglecting historical research failures like the New Coke or the Aeron chair.

When asking people, you have to be aware that people make confident but false predictions about their future behavior, especially when presented with a new and unfamiliar design. There’s a huge difference between imagining using something and actually using it. In addition, human preferences are rather unstable.

That’s not to say you should quit listening to your customers. But make sure you know what to ask and how to interpret the answers.

Research failures from Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink:

The New Coke is one of the most famous research failures. Despite thousands of sip tests and countless efforts to fine-tune the taste based on the customer feedback, the New Coke was a huge disaster. “Gladwell contends that what people say they like in these tests may not reflect what they will actually buy to sit at home and drink over a week or so.” See the full story on Wikipedia.
The now acclaimed Aeron office chair received very low ratings in early tests. Despite the ratings, the company decided to go on with manufacturing. The rest is history: Aeron became one of the most iconic and best selling chairs in the history of office furniture. And the irony: once the chair became famous, people started rating it much favorably.
The TV shows “All in the Family” and the “Mary Tyler Moore Show” received poor ratings during pre-air tests. Fortunately, the producers stuck to their ideas and both shows became grand successes.
In his TED Talk on spaghetti sauces, Malcolm Gladwell argues that the food industry made a big mistake asking people about their preferences and conducting focus groups. Gladwell says that “The mind knows not what the tongue wants. […] If I asked all of you, for example, in this room, what you want in a coffee, you know what you’d say? Every one of you would say ‘I want a dark, rich, hearty roast.’ It’s what people always say when you ask them what they want in a coffee. What do you like? Dark, rich, hearty roast! What percentage of you actually like a dark, rich, hearty roast? According to Howard, somewhere between 25 and 27 percent of you. Most of you like milky, weak coffee. But you will never, ever say to someone who asks you what you want – that 'I want a milky, weak coffee.’”

Further insights on how to interpret what people tell you:

It cost Walmart $1.85 billion to listen to what their customers say. “This is the peril of listening to what your customers say instead of what they actually did.” - Walmart Declutters Aisles Per Customers’ Request, Then Loses $1.85 Billion In Sales and Ignore the customer experience, lose a billion dollars (Walmart case study)
Philip Hodgson from Userfocus shows many examples where focus groups failed researchers - Is Consumer Research Losing Its Focus?
“Now, my experience is that most of the time, people have no idea why they’re doing what they’re doing. They have no idea, so they’re going to try to make up something that makes sense.” says Clotaire Rapaille.
In the book Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, the authors argue that “people’s ability to understand the factors that affect their behavior is surprisingly poor.”
Gerry McGovern writes in It’s not what people say, it’s what they do that “The worst way to design a website is to get five smart people in a room drinking lattes and posting post-it notes. […] The next worst way is to get 10 customers in a room drinking lattes and giving their opinions on the new design. That model is really, truly broken.”
The article on Wikipedia about introspection illusion cites several studies on how bad people are at explaining their own behavior or at predicting their future attitudes.
In his book How we decide, Jonah Lehrer shows a brilliant experiment on how your decision gets warped when you have to explain it. In the experiment, one group of students was asked to rank strawberry jams. They ranked the jams more or less the same as the Consumer Reports experts did. Another group, however, was asked to not only rank the jams but also explain their preference. This group did much worse, and actually preferred the worst jam.
Neuropsychologist Susan Weinschenk argues that you shouldn’t believe people when they say they’d prefer certain changes in your product. They probably overestimate their future reactions.
Joshua Porter says that “when you ask people 'What would it take for you to use or pay for this?’ the answer you get is not reliable. Do not trust it. Don’t go implementing all the things they say because you think that’s the way to success. It’s not. It’s simply theater.”
“There’s a lot of research out there suggesting you have no idea why you act or think the way you do. It feels awful to accept such things, so you create narratives to explain your own feelings and behavior.” - from the blog devoted to self delusion and irrational thinking, You Are Not So Smart
Jakob Nielsen says that the “critical failing of user interviews is that you’re asking people to either remember past use or speculate on future use of a system.” - Interviewing Users
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” is something Henry Ford most probably never said, but he was definitely thinking along those lines. However, on the long term, not responding to customers’ needs didn’t help the company. - Henry Ford, Innovation, and That “Faster Horse” Quote

Zoltán Gócza

Myth #20: If it works for Amazon, it will work for you

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 08:27:00 -0400

Although Amazon (or Apple, Google you name it) has features that are both excellent and well-proven, they won’t necessarily work for others.

Let’s take their widely used customer reviews for example. Jared Spool demonstrates that, despite using the exact same software and interface, Target.com receives way less reviews than Amazon: in the first month after Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out, Amazon got 1 805 reviews, whereas Target received only three (both retailers sold about 2 million copies).

Emulation is mostly not a smart strategy. It doesn’t mean, though, that you shouldn’t copy the design of others — by all means do. But make sure you also understand why it worked for them and how it will work for your company and your users.

Why copying Amazon can be dangerous?

Jared Spool discusses the aforementioned Target customer review fiasco in his presentation Revealing Design Treasures from the Amazon (the Target example starts on slide 26).
Christian Holst summarizes the different reasons why copying Amazon might be harmful - The “Just Copy Amazon” Fallacy
Jakob Nielsen writes that “copying successful designs is not a foolproof way to improve your own site’s business value […] and has many pitfalls” in Should You Copy a Famous Site’s Design?
In another article, he shows the weak points of Amazon’s design and why most sites shouldn’t copy it. – Amazon: No Longer the Role Model for E-Commerce Design
The Nielsen Norman Group has a video on the topic: Risk of Copying Famous Companies’ Designs
Linda Bustos explains the top reasons why your website cannot compare to Amazon: Amazon is one of the biggest websites in terms of traffic and user base. It can afford to sell some items below cost and even allows third-party ads and items on its product pages (cannibalizing its own sales). It also has enough users for features like reviews or Listmania. – 10 Reasons Not to Copy Amazon, a brilliant read.
A study found that Amazon.com “was perceived in the usability testing to have the slowest home page loading speeds of the 20 websites studied, and to have one of the most confusing home pages. But users said before and after the website testing that they were likely to use and/or recommend Amazon to a friend.
‘Amazon had already been visited by 71% of the usability testers,’ notes Ms. Frank, 'so the familiarity with the site and the strong brand recognition were able to overcome flaws that would have been the kiss of death to lesser known websites.’”
Adrian Roselli lists quite a few further examples of how Google, Apple and others make ordinary mistakes, just like any other company – I Don’t Care What Google or Apple or Whoever Did
Jesse Weaver dissects YouTube’s strategy built “around what everyone else was doing” and how it failed with their subscription platform, Premium — Emulation Is Not a Product Strategy
Joshua Porter argues that mindlessly copying a design – that of Amazon or Facebook for example – is a horrible idea. When you copy, you don’t know the reasons behind a design, you’re not responding directly to your customer needs, you’re devaluing your own data. – Copycat Design
Rob Sutcliffe writes that “We could argue back that Amazon is surviving on past success and that larger company are often hard to innovate so shouldn’t be used as a design influence. We could point out that Jeff Bezos has a reputation for micro-managing and ignoring the evidence provided by usability experts he has hired. As a result, we could point out that Amazon is possibly successful in spite of its design not because of it. But the words ‘often’, ‘reputation’ and ‘possibly’ make all these arguments equally week and full of fallacies.” – Logical Fallacies In Design Critiques
All that said, copying or stealing a design cleverly is what designers should do. As Pablo Picasso put it: “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” – Don’t Copy a Design – Steal It, also quoted in Great designers steal by Jeff Veen.

Zoltán Gócza

Myth #19: You don't need the content to design a website

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 08:13:00 -0400

Many designers create wireframes and comps with “lorem ipsum” filler text. Using dummy text often results in an aesthetically pleasing but unrealistic design. What’s worse, it creates the illusion that content is secondary.

The fact is that users come for the content, not the design. Content is by far the most important element in user interface design. A webpage with a simple structure but quality content performs much better on usability tests than a nice layout with subpar text.

Why base your design on actual content?

Designer Luke Wroblewski argues that “using dummy content or fake information in the Web design process can result in products with unrealistic assumptions and potentially serious design flaws.” He also explains how these designs usually fail when real content is added. - Death to Lorem Ipsum
In her talk, content specialist Kristina Halvorson argues that design decisions should be driven by the content; and the entire layout is to be created to support the content.
In their book Getting Real, web experts at 37signals explain how dangerous dummy text can be and that “lorem ipsum changes the way copy is viewed. It reduces text-based content to a visual design element — a shape of text — instead of what it should be: valuable information someone is going to have to enter and/or read.” - Use real words (PDF)
Another passage from Getting Real: “Copywriting is interface design. Great interfaces are written. If you think every pixel, every icon, every typeface matters, then you also need to believe every letter matters.” - Copywriting is Interface Design (PDF)
“Text is a UI” says Jakob Nielsen in his piece on the importance of copywriting: Twitter Postings: Iterative Design.
“Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.” - says web designer and author Jeffrey Zeldman.
A detailed article with practical advices on how to change your design approach from “lorem ipsum” to real content: Lorem Ipsum is Killing Your Designs and also The Importance of Copywriting in Web Design.
Remember that lorem ipsum can go horribly wrong.
The only possible excuse to use lorem ipsum is to use the gangsta lorem ipsum generator.

Zoltán Gócza

Myth #18: Flash used to be evil

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 04:39:00 -0400

Note, this post was written quite a few years ago when Flash was still a thing. You know, like floppy disks and audio cassettes.

In the earlier years of the internet, many web designers preferred overusing Flash animations, ignoring users with slow internet connections or without Flash player. These early implementations often neglected basic usability principles, too, therefore the whole technology was criticized for being unusable and inaccessible.

Flash technology later improved a lot: it became SEO friendly, got rich accessibility features and even supported the use of the browser’s back button. Most users used to have no problems with Flash itself, suffice to mention the popularity of online video sharing sites that used to only provide a Flash version of the video players. Flash was also responsible for the internet’s most creative era.

However, with the growing popularity of smart phones and tablets (most of which don’t support this technology at all), Flash is no longer an option for any user-friendly website or app.

Fun facts about Flash:

According to Adobe, there are 1 billion desktop computers with Flash installed
Google can index almost all Flash content since 2008
A Flash site can meet virtually all web accessibility criteria
Flash supports navigation with the browser’s back button
Text content within Flash can be copied and pasted

Even when it was widely used, Flash had its limitations:

Flash used to be a good choice when it added value to the visitors’ experience over the standard browser functionality. For example, Flash was often a good choice for a portfolio sites where animations, 3D effects or audio contributed to the overall experience. An interactive Flash product presentation could also be a very effective sales tool while an e-commerce site totally done in Flash was not recommended at all.
To make your Flash site accessible to everyone, a non-Flash version was also required, too, which will need extra resources to develop.
Several security experts, such as Symantec and McAfee, recommended users to disable Flash when visiting unknown and untrusted sites because of its vulnerabilities.
Although almost every desktop internet user has Flash installed, many also use Flash blockers.

Myth #17: The homepage is your most important page

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 04:39:00 -0400

Usability experts, including Jakob Nielsen, have long argued that your homepage is the most valuable real estate of your website. As a result, lots of web designers and developers still spend most of their time on the design of the home page.

This, in fact, is no longer the case, as users’ browsing and searching behavior has significantly changed over time. Website statistics convincingly show that on many websites the homepage gets less and less share in pageviews.

Statistics and articles challenging the importance of the homepage:

Statistics from Gerry McGovern confirm the decline of the homepage: “In 2003, 39 percent of the page views for a large research website were for the homepage. By 2009, it was down to 19 percent. In one month in 2008, of the 70,000 page views a technology site received, 22,000 were for the homepage. For the same month in 2010, of the 120,000 page views the site received, only 2,500 were for the homepage. Another technology website had roughly 10 percent of page views for the homepage in 2008, and by 2010 it was down to 5 percent. One of the largest websites in the world had 25 percent of visitors come to the homepage in 2005, but in 2010 only has 10 percent.” - from the article The decline of the homepage
In Prioritizing design time, Joshua Porter from UIE analyzes their website’s visitor statistics and concludes that lower level articles are far more viewed than the homepage, so optimizing these templates makes more sense than optimizing the homepage.
Jared Spool has a great podcast on why a site’s home page is actually the least important page on your site.
Further articles from UIE: Is Home Page Design Relevant Anymore? and The 8 Types of Navigation Pages.
And don’t miss xkcd’s hilarious diagram on what a typical university homepage does and should contain.

Zoltán Gócza

Myth #16: Search will solve a website's navigation problems

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 04:26:00 -0400

On a website, people usually scan for trigger words first and only use the search function when they’re unable to find a good enough navigational link. This holds true for most websites, though people habitually search by default for books, DVDs and CDs, computer games; that is, products whose title or author they know.

People are better at recognizing things than recalling them from memory. It’s much easier and faster to click on a link than to enter a search term: you don’t have to spontaneously come up with the proper search expression, or worry about synonyms and spelling.

Studies and articles on why links perform better than search:

In Navigation is more important, Gerry McGovern discusses that they “did some extensive task testing with a technical audience. 70 percent started the task by clicking on a link, 30 percent used search.” He argues that it’s faster and more natural to use the navigation links instead of typing in search queries.
In a study to test search-preference, Jared Spool’s team at UIE found no search-dominant people. What they did find though is that 20% of the participants were link-dominant, using exclusively navigation links. They also found that search is usually used for books, CDs, DVDs and video games, and in cases the user got stuck. - Are There Users Who Always Search? and also in the UIE podcast
The superiority of recognition over recall is discussed in the book Universal principles of design. The book also advises to “minimize the need to recall information from memory whenever possible. Use readily accessible menus, decision aids, and similar devices to make available options clearly visible.”
Jeff Johnson discusses on UXmatters that recognition doesn’t require the brain to search in the memory, it’s instantaneous.
This phenomenon is also reflected in the evolution from the command line interface to the graphical user interface. The former required people to recall commands from memory, whereas on the GUI, options are laid out on the screen for much easier access.
This is Myth #6 in Keith Lang’s UX Myth list: If you Have Great Search, You Don’t Need Great Information Architecture.

Zoltán Gócza

Myth #15: Users make optimal choices

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 04:10:00 -0400

In an ideal world, users would scan through your entire page to find the very piece of information they’re looking for, but research shows this is not the case. Usability tests prove that people tend to choose the first somewhat reasonable choice that catches their eyes.

That is, once they come across a link whose label refers even a little to what they’ve come for, they’ll click it. This is due to their experience that guessing wrong and hitting the back button is still more efficient than reading a whole page to find an exact match.

This behaviour, known as satisficing, is a well-known decision-making strategy in psychology.

How users make decisions on the web:

Steve Krug discusses in Don’t make me think that instead of making optimal choices on web sites, users usually just ‘guess’ because they find it fun, and in addition, there is no penalty for guessing wrong
In Smashing Magazine's 30 Usability Issues to Be Aware of, Vitaly Friedman claims that users "permanently scan for quick’n'dirty-solutions which are good enough”
According to Meta4Creations, “users will not always make the best choice, they will generally make the easiest one”

Zoltán Kollin – Let’s connect

UX Myths

Myth #34: Simple = minimal

Minimalist style doesn’t always lead to product simplicity

Minimalist UIs that led to complex UX

Myth #33: Mobile users are distracted

First of all, mobile is not on-the-go

Distractions are everywhere, not only on mobile

Mobile engagement is now higher than desktop

Myth #32: Success happens overnight

Seemingly swift successes that took a long time to achieve:

More on the idea of instant success:

Myth #31: UX design is a step in a project

How UX design is way more than user interface design:

Some UX design process examples:

Myth #30: If you are an expert, you don't need to test your design

Why an expert review can’t substitute usability testing

Expert reviews have their benefits and purposes, too:

Why is it hard (even for experts) to predict how users will react?

Myth #29: People are rational

8 experiments to prove our irrationality from the books Predictably Irrational and How We Decide:

Further readings on our irrational behavior:

Resources every designer should read:

Myth #28: White space is wasted space

The importance of white space in web design

Elements of white space

Some beautiful websites with generous white space

What the world would look like without white space

Myth #27: UX design is about usability

Good design is pleasurable and seductive:

Good design is playful:

Good design gets you in the flow:

A well designed product has a meaning to the user:

… the difference between UX and usability is illustrated in:

Myth #26: Usability testing = focus groups

How the two research methods are different:

Myth #25: Aesthetics are not important if you have good usability

In defense of aesthetics:

Myth #24: People always use your product the way you imagined they would

Examples of how unorthodox product use can contribute to innovation:

What makes people use products in unorthodox ways:

Myth #23: Choices should always be limited to 7+/-2

Articles debunking the myth of 7+/-2:

Myth #22: Usability testing is expensive

How can you fit usability testing into a low budget?

How to get stakeholder buy-in for testing?

Myth #21: People can tell you what they want

Research failures from Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink:

Further insights on how to interpret what people tell you:

Myth #20: If it works for Amazon, it will work for you

Why copying Amazon can be dangerous?

Myth #19: You don't need the content to design a website

Why base your design on actual content?

Myth #18: Flash used to be evil

Fun facts about Flash:

Even when it was widely used, Flash had its limitations:

Further reading on debunking Flash myths (from 2009-2010):

Myth #17: The homepage is your most important page

Statistics and articles challenging the importance of the homepage:

Myth #16: Search will solve a website's navigation problems

Studies and articles on why links perform better than search:

Myth #15: Users make optimal choices

How users make decisions on the web: