Tag: usability

usability – Onboardings and wizards – should I show the steps of the process?

So I need to design onboarding screens for a credit card company. I started to look around on different onboardings and collect ideas from different products such as Lemonade, Forward, Grammarly etc.

I noticed that instead of showing the upcoming steps, there’s only a bar indicates the progress.

What’s the logic behind it? I always thought that indicating the exact number of steps is essential information for the user.

What do you think? In which cases showing steps is a must? Do you have any articles or researches on this topic?

Thanks <3

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usability – USA date format best practise

I am working on a table that displays dates by using USA format. I was wondering which format below is more legible or usable – I guess there’s a slight difference between these two, but I was wondering if there’s any previous research or existing pattern.
Please note that dates will be displayed across the platform and we should use a consistent format whether it’s displayed in a table or not.

a] Nov 20, 2020

b] 11/20/2020

Thanks!

usability – How to handle long text that should be also searchable

I have this row, where the content highlighted in red is searchable.
I expect it always to be visible, but we have some corner cases where this content can be quite long and hidden behind ellipsis (css line clamped).
However, we need this data to be present too, so I considered using tooltip for the rest of content hidden behind ellipsis. Do you think it’s a good idea or there are some other ways?
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usability – Displaying issues with animation and getting feedback about it

Well I can at least address your first question with the information belongs to it’s implementation part, even it has considered within development phase which is out of this site’s scope.

First, it’s pretty easy to find out a client (targeted user here) device’s operating system via a server-side programming language. So that you may understand if it’s iOS, Android, or Mac/Windows. By this way basically, you may try to warn each of iOS/Android users that they may have an experience of this kind of problems first.

Then additionally, you may make them voluntarily report these kind of issues or try to use any other kind of operating systems or devices (to say web here) to be able to get a better performance.

And also for your second question: I think most of the sites like HackerRank already doing it today like warning their users to use Firefox or Chrome other than the rest, when they want their users to get most benefit out of their applications.

usability – Mobile side scrolling: On some screen sizes, the gap between elements land right at the right edge, so it looks like there isn’t any scrolling

I have the elements going off the right edge of the screen to show it’s horizontal scrolling.

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Issue is at some screen sizes, the gap between elements lands right at the right edge, so it looks like there isn’t any scrolling.

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We’ve thought of the following solutions:

  1. animation on page load (issue with this is it can slow down page load, look glitchy, and add extra level of effort to the project)
  2. gradient on the right edge (not a fan of how this looks)

My question is, are there other design solutions? Are there code solutions – like forcing the padding to change so the last element is always peeking in? I feel like there has to be, because how do apps solve this?

Would prefer a simple solution that would work well on a website, not an app.

Thanks!

usability – Drag and drop lists – multiple items with same priority

Initially, I had the following requirements:

  1. There are 2 lists with items. The user needs to be able to move the items from one list into the other.
  2. Each item needs to have a priority.

I’ve implemented the following solution:

mock

The user can drag and drop the items and I’m also keeping track of their priority.
For example, in List1, Item1 has priority 1 and Item2 has priority 2 and so on.
In List2, there is just Item4 with priority 1.

So this solution covers all the requirements.

The problem is that now there is a new requirement: multiple items can have the same priority.

So I can have Item1 and Item2 with priority 1 and Item3 with priority 2.

Can this current solution be adapted to this new requirement? I did think about it but wasn’t able to find a solution.

Or is there a completely different approach that is more suitable?

Thanks!

usability – Why do nearly all the social media platforms have nearly the same layout for “user’s post” and how can I implement similar layout in my design?

So I am making an art sharing app ( image sharing ) and have noticed that nearly all the existing social media platforms have similar layout for user’s post.

e.g.

  1. Facebook

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  1. Instagram

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  1. Twitter

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Now as it is quite clear from the above pictures that they follow a similar layout which goes something like this :

  1. Profile photo and user name, with follow button if user isn’t following that user.
  2. The caption, description, tweet etc.
  3. Images ( if any ) ( in case of instagram, point 2 and 3 are interchanged ).
  4. Then comes the interaction button.

My question is why all of them have Poster’s name and profile photo ( optional ) above the content of the post and not below it ? What is wrong with having the poster’s name and pic below the main content ? And also, in most of the cases, description is above the image ( if any ) ? Is it because our eyes start reading from top to bottom ?

If so, how can I improve the layout of my app which is just the opposite and quite frankly looks not that good.

Layout of my app :

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Red area is for the image ( which is the main content of my app ), I want at least 70% of the users screen to show the image, also I don’t want to overlay any buttons or text on the image cause it can hide important details of the picture. What can I do make it look more good and at the same time easy to use ?

usability – Should I notify the user that the thread owner deleted their post?

I have a website that works like a forum but not exactly. Here, users can create their content of threads while any user can add their posts to this thread. However, the thread creator has editorial rights and all action controls on the thread so that, they can delete posts of other users. Also, the creator can open/close the thread at anytime.

The idea is, the creator of the thread is expected to put most of the posts in the thread but if they want and permit, others can contribute the thread too.

The question is: Whenever a thread creator deletes a single or multiple posts that contributors added to the thread, should we send a notification to the user who posted it that their post was deleted by the thread owner?

I know that comments should be deleted silently, but the posts sent by the user also showed on their profile and they make up the thread whereas comments are detached. Also any other suggestions would be appreciated.

user research – Does Usability Tests and Product Experience Maps go Under Discovery or Define Stage?

In an ideal world, you would expect to include Usability Testing at any stage that you are trying to design for a user interaction to validate the research and/or assumptions you are making about design decisions.

In the practical world, it is very difficult to schedule projects and UX activities so that they are in sync with product development timelines, and you may discover more things during the project so there is no specific place where Usability Tests should be locked in (and you might find that multiple rounds are scheduled at different stages of the project).

Where you choose to do this and how often you do this (which will determine what you end up doing in the testing process) is generally constrained by project budget, access to users and the process/method you propose for the testing. And then when you get the results back you’ll have to also make adjustments if it turns out that your assumptions were not quite on the mark.

As for the product experience map (not sure exactly what format this entails for your project), it is an artefact that can be used to capture and summarize the main journey/experience for the end-users, and can be created at any stage of the project when you have enough research output to synthesize the information into a usable artefact. However, you should also be continuously updating this document as the research and design matures so that this document is an up-to-date reflection (or versions) of the research and product development cycles.

I think the more you think about the project in terms of the information you need and what you do with the information, the more it will help determine/tailor the activities and the artefacts that you need (there are good articles on this elsewhere). So rather than going with a prescribed method or plan, just have something that is loosely based on the closest approach that fits your project and be prepared to tweak or adjust some of the activities along the way will work the best (this involves putting in some time buffers in the project schedule).

user research – Does Usability Tests and Product Experience Maps go Under Discovery or Testing?

I’m creating education materials for my company on UX to help better educate the team and secure more funding for UX at the company. But as I was reading how we define stages of UX I came across what seems to be a paradox / conflicting information.

The discovery stage to put it very briefly as I’ve understood it is to explore the problems whether it be on your own product or problems prospective users may be facing, building empathy. Then this moves to the Define Stage where the team forms alignment on evidence based results from discovery.

I always assumed Usability Testing was part of the Discovery Stage and you can build personas and experience maps based off of these in the define stage. Because if the Define stage is to form alignment, an experience map allows you to take pain points and convert them into goals which hands off to the development stage.

However in my research I see that Usability testing is not often put in the “Discovery Stage” Example here and here .

In the above examples only user interviews are included. Usability tests can include pre and exit interviews which aid in the discovery stage. Usability tests also help discover what problems users are facing. So why are these left out?

I see Usability Tests are Discovery and Product Experience Mapping as defining.

But I don’t want to commit to this on paper without reaching out to my fellow UXers and hear their thoughts and get some guidance. I never tried to break down the process so defined before and I am running into material that makes me feel my process of DISCOVERY Interview -> Usability Test -> DEFINE Experience Map -> Personas -> DEVELOP STAGE is wrong.

Thanks for all those that contribute in a positive way to this discussion.