UI/UX Articles and Interesting Tidbits of the Week
November//16//2018
Here are some interesting finds on UI/UX of the week!
1.https://www.hotjar.com/blog/app-mistakes-hotjar/
App Mistakes. Hailing from the HotJar blog comes this very interesting case study for an app that the HotJar team developed, and that they terminated. It’s an interesting and in depth article, that details the lessons learnt from the development of that project, from surveys, through understanding what an MVP actually stands for. Very insightful and pertinent. Highlight of the article includes:
“At this point, we’d send out a survey to our customers to get qualitative validation. We’d ask them, “Listen, we’re thinking of building a spaceship. On a scale of 1–7, how important is having one for you?” Quite often, customers might think they want a spaceship, but end up not using it once it’s built. So we’d also ask them to compare and prioritize it against other features we are thinking about building: “How important is having a spaceship versus creating dynamic heatmaps? Which one would you prefer and why?” (Personally, I’d go for the spaceship. But I’m not Hotjar’s ideal customer!) We’d also want to discover what specific problem our customers are facing, to make sure that the spaceship is the right feature to build in the first place”
2.https://www.uxbooth.com/articles/how-to-run-a-successful-design-review/
Running Design Reviews. Not a new topic, but this is an interesting article that formally puts in place good recommendations on how to run an effective design review, including elements to focus on such as note taking, problem definition, eclectic team member participation, among others. Highlight of the article includes:
“A formal design review meeting can have various formats. It can be remote or co-located, but in any case, it is essential to involve key decision makers from the design, management and development teams so that everyone is in the know about the findings and next steps. It’s also important to include designers that did not do the original design work themselves in order to get a fresh, unbiased perspective. Finally, having an executive give final approval to release the design work is also an important step in order to maintain a design standard.”
3.https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2018/11/5-trends-of-voice-ui-design/
Voice UI Trends. As Voice driven UIs get more prominence, it’s important to understand the principles by which these new products abide. This article sheds light on important factors surrounding VUI, namely adaptable interfaces, from narrow AI to General Intelligence and what personality means in a VUI context. Highlight:
“Improving the accuracy of speech recognition (more sophisticated NLP algorithms). — Focusing on understanding the user’s intent (a reason for interacting in the first place). When users interact with a system, they have a particular problem they want to solve, and the goal of the designer is to understand what this problem is. — Providing meaningful error messages.- Crafting contextually driven flows. While it’s impossible to predict all commands that users might ask the system, designers need to at least design a user flow that is contextually driven. The system should anticipate users’ intent at each point of a conversation and provide users with information on what they can do next. For example, finding a restaurant near the user. When users search for a restaurant, the system should match exactly what the user is looking for.”
