What do you do when there’s a fly in the urinal (sorry ladies, this may not pertain to you)? It must be something that appeals to the core of man’s basest instincts: to…ready…aim…fire! OK, perhaps not the most elegant solution, but effective. It’s in the stats…this simple solution keeps the bathrooms 85% cleaner!
I think this is an excellent example of a key user experience concept: to appeal to base instincts! In this example, there’s a problem: dirty bathrooms. There’s a desired user goal: to help user’s aim better. There’s a simple intuitive interface: a fake fly sticker near the target.
Understanding core human instincts is a great start in creating intuitive interfaces to solve problems such as: how to make users fill out forms…advance to the next page…and a multitude of user goals. It can help avoid such pitfalls as strange naming conventions and unorthodox page navigation structures. Here are top 3 suggestions to see if your page element or interface passes the “basic instinct” usability test:
Simple “Basic Instinct’ Usability Test
1. Ask test users what action or result they think a certain page element or interface does.
2. For that same element or interface, ask if there’s anything else they think that element might do or represent (this list should not be long!).
3. Ask other users how they would perform a certain task from start to finish, and watch if they instinctively follow your desired path of execution.
It’s common wisdom among usability experts to listen to users…but is there a time to not listen to them? I just found a good talk from Paul Buchheit of FriendFeed and Gmail fame @ Startup School. He shares some pretty good concepts on when to listen to users, but more important, when NOT to listen to them. Here’s my 3 favorite takeaways from the talk:
When Not To Listen To Users
1. “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses” ~Henry Ford
Sometimes people don’t necessarily foresee the best solution. You need to analyze the core user problem.
2. Decipher user advice limited by narrow life experiences.
Things and contexts for success change. Keep in mind the souce of the advice and filter for context.
3. Listen to the enthusiastic voices
Tune into the few users truly enthusiastic about your product. Those users would have some of the best advice and suggestions.
In short, pagination refers to breaking up large chunks of data or information into multiple pages. It is our job to create an intuitive interface for users to navigate those pages. For example, when you do a Google search, and the results are in the thousands, Google does not give you all the results in one page. It gives you 10 results on 1 page and breaks up the remaining results on subsequent pages.
I just found a great blog article on some best practices on handling pagination navigation on SmashingMagazine.com. It gives a lot of examples of the different ways pagination is handled by various websites, and explains some principles on why some techniques might be better than others.
There are a lot of tools, plugins, code libraries out there on various programming frameworks out there to help handle pagination issues. It’s a good idea to work these elements into your design if you are working with large data sets.
Ok, I know, this looks like something out of the Barbie website. But I’ve been using Skitch for a couple days now and find that it’s really a cool tool for simple image annotation and design collaboration. I wasn’t even sure to categorize this post as a “Tools of the Trade” or as a “Usability Design” example of great UI…so, I categorized it as both!
Tools of the Trade:
As a UI tool, Skitch is a great little gadget that I use to quickly annotate notes on mockups, designs, and wireframes. Just grab the design element in question and quickly mark it up with notes and comments. Another click of a button lets you email the image or send it via bluetooth to another device! It’s a simple and effective way to collaborate on designs and ideas. You can even quickly and easily upload onto the Skitch.com website to share collectively on the internet. (Here’s an example I created with Skitch in less than 1 minute)
Usability Design:
This is a great example of intuitive user interface. Every function is self-contained in the window container. It’s amazingly fun to use, and I no longer need to open up Mac Grab and Photoshop to do some simple image manipulations. Definitely a useful time saver! When I imagine future interfaces taking advantage of surface and multi-touch technology…I imagine an application like this, where most of the interaction can be accomplished by directly interfacing with the various areas of the application by touch. Even the “Save Image” function can be accomplished by a simple dragging of the bottom tab into a folder, desktop, document, etc…brilliant!
Hard to describe how intuitive the interface is…just download Skitch and try it yourself for free! Here’s a cool video that shows you what you can do. Skitch definitely has a place on my Dock! (oh yeah, sorry PC friends…Skitch only available for Mac).
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