What qualities do the best UX professionals have?
The best UX designers know the world and they can articulate how their designs are either working with or against the facts of the world.
Examples:
- The eye and brain: The designer knows how the eye and brain work, so they can tell you which elements on the screen they want people to notice and how they are going to use contrast etc to achieve that result.
- The domain: The designer can distill the knowledge they’ve received about the domain and tell you why a certain screen does or doesn’t provide the means the user needs to accomplish their goals.
- The materials: The designer knows whether their interface will sit lightly on the conventions the programmers use to implement the product or if it will require lots of special cases that raise the cost of change.
- Human nature: The designer understands peoples’ attention spans, their emotional ups and downs, their habits to skim or read carefully, their tolerances for learning curves and so on.
- Aesthetics: The designer knows what is appealing or what is unappealing to the user they’re designing for.
There are probably more examples, but this gives a sense of the idea.
Default cursor on mouse over of a button is not a hand pointer
Why is the default cursor an arrow when you hover over an HTML <button>? I always thought that arrows let you select stuff, but hands let you execute an action. Since buttons execute actions, shouldn’t I override the de…
Default cursor on mouse over of a button is not a hand pointer
Why is the default cursor an arrow when you hover over an HTML <button>? I always thought that arrows let you select stuff, but hands let you execute an action. Since buttons execute actions, shouldn’t I override the de…
What is the best way for a college freshman to learn enough about UX design to be valuable to a startup in 3 years?
First, don’t call it “UX Design”. Call it Product Design. You’ll earn far more credibility by calling it something tangible start-up leaders can point to and dissect intelligibly as part of their business model/plan. “User Experience Design” is a vague erratic phrase from the dot com era that C-Level folks don’t grok.
Familiarize yourself with the fundamentals of visual design (type, color, grids, layouts) by studying Mullet/Sano’s Designing Visual Interfaces. Practice critiquing sites and products against visual qualities of communication of affordances and tone/voice/quality. Start the path of gaining that sensitivity, which takes years.
Start sketching and keep a sketchbook with you at all times. Jot down ideas, sketch solutions, and constantly iterate, fast. Jot down the reasons for/against possible solutions. Revisit, repeatedly, after reflection.
Know the basics of user research methods and cog psych principles, concepts like affordances, cognitive load/chunking information, basic user/screen/input ergonomics, Fitts Law, etc. A/B testing vs heuristic eval vs contextual inquiry, etc.
Start thinking about flow, scenario, tasks, goals, activities. Look at how you use your iPhone or Tivo or XBox or Microwave even. What’s the sequence of actions, feedback/information loops, hierarchies of needs/values in getting tasks done, etc. Sketch out the flow of actions, accounting for error states or diversion paths, sub-paths, etc.
Read Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things. Great rundown of the basics of basic usability concepts and examples.
Always ask yourself how to simplify, simplify, simplify: visuals, behaviors, navigational paths/error states, and terminology.
Learn how to prototype, from click-throughs to HTML/CSS/JQuery or Flash/Flex/AIR tools. Study the digital behavior and affordances of online and desktop apps, and on your iPhone/Android device. Look at the timing, transitions, visual effects, all those cues.
Keep asking yourself how to make something better, in terms of visuals, behaviors, information architecture/navigation paths, simplifying and unifying elements. Start developing that sensitivity now so that in 3 years you’ll be sufficiently valuable to a start-up.
And start designing something now 🙂 Either fix up an existing product or invent something as a hobby, for practice. Enjoy!
Signifying to user that field is editable
I have a grid that has a bunch of data. Some of the fields are editable and cause a postback updating the data. What are the best ways to show that to the user?
i.e. Is there a best practice for how to make a distinction bet…
Signifying to user that field is editable
I have a grid that has a bunch of data. Some of the fields are editable and cause a postback updating the data. What are the best ways to show that to the user?
i.e. Is there a best practice for how to make a distinction bet…
Is it true that UX people have a hard time working for Google?
Charles WarrenDoing good design is hard wherever you work. At Google, us UX designers are finding more and more opportunities to truly lead Product Design. One great example is our turn-by-turn navigation product for Android. The team was co-led by UX…
What qualities do the best UX professionals have?
Humility.
You must be humble enough to recognize your own human limitations,
including the cognitive biases that you bring to the table. You must be
humble enough to recognize the best idea whether it is your own or
someone else’s. You must be humble enough to learn from subject matter
experts or users or business stakeholders. You must be humble enough to
take constructive criticism without taking it personally. And you must
be humble enough to understand where your strengths end and those of
your team begin.
How would you describe your user experience design philosophy in one sentence?
The best thing about users is they eventually all die. Users come to a design with certain expectations, until they don’t anymore.
Good design is invisible. If a design draws focus to itself, instead of the users’ objective, it is not a good design.
Risk averse companies produce crap.
Design is not immune to Sturgeon’s Law. Sturgeon’s Law: 99% of everything is crap. How do you prevent your design from being in that 99%?
What qualities do the best UX professionals have?
Dan SafferThe ability to quickly see to the actual problem, not just the issues that result from that problem.The ability to visualize that problem.The ability to generate multiple solutions to the problem, then discuss the pros and cons of each.The a…