This entry was posted on Friday, November 14th, 2008 at 20:36 and is filed under Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
justdrew
Interactive musings from a creative technophile
Usability means taking care of the WHOLE User Experience
Sometimes we fall into the pattern of thinking that UX is mostly about making pretty pictures and putting the right label on a button, or making sure there are affordances that show the user how to interact with something (like showing a handle or grabbable texture to show the user to click and pull, or a plus-sign to indicate there are hidden sub-elements in a tree, etc.). Of course, delivering a solid user experience is so much more.
It includes things like delivering the right information, at the right time, and to the right audience. Enter this example: one can easily envision the harried parent or grand parent browsing a site to pick out titles for the little ones. Looking forward to an evening or afternoon with the whole family gathered around the wide-screen hearth fully expecting some wholesome animated entertainment, they accept the recommendations into their purchases…
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Not-so-good-recommendation
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If looking at this picture doesn’t immediately make you chuckle, let me point out the “one of these things that’s not like the others”. Fritz the Cat is the animated realization of underground comic illustrator Robert Crumb’s raunchy and irreverent character whose bawdy adventures earned the title an X rating on its release in 1972.
No recommendation engine or other similar automated system is going to be perfect, but catching serious glitches like this before they go live should be top on every UX practicionner’s mind. Sure, the buttons to the left and right of the carousel indicate there are more recommendations on either side… but is the content “right”? Things like this can make all the difference.
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