Hm, I Wonder What This Does: Motivation and Predictability
The user is always right ...
"Ever get in the situation where you had to take out a design sledgehammer to make something blatantly obvious to visitors? And for just a moment there in the usability studies, just for a nanosecond, you’re thinking, “maybe the user is stupid,” before your professionalism and experience tells you that despite the skywriter pointing out the search box, maybe it was still poorly designed.
It’s easy to fall into a trap of designing around a use case or flow that the team feels is “optimal”. “Well, the user should go here, and then search for ‘palaeontology’ and change the dropdown from ‘all’ to ‘books’. We’ll make sure they notice the search box and highlight ‘books’ in the dropdown to show they should change to that.” Or not.
Instead of designing around a specific flow, we can try to design around motivation and predictability. Why is the user searching for a book? What is the context of this search? Was it perhaps in reference from some other related content from which we can provide a more direct link? And does the user know what will happen when they take certain actions? Often, it’s not finding the feature that’s the problem (the blinking text and skywriter took care of that) but just because somebody notices a feature doesn’t mean they will act on it. The feature has to use vocabulary familiar to the user and contain obvious cues on what would happen if acted upon." continued ... (Via OK/Cancel)
"Ever get in the situation where you had to take out a design sledgehammer to make something blatantly obvious to visitors? And for just a moment there in the usability studies, just for a nanosecond, you’re thinking, “maybe the user is stupid,” before your professionalism and experience tells you that despite the skywriter pointing out the search box, maybe it was still poorly designed.
It’s easy to fall into a trap of designing around a use case or flow that the team feels is “optimal”. “Well, the user should go here, and then search for ‘palaeontology’ and change the dropdown from ‘all’ to ‘books’. We’ll make sure they notice the search box and highlight ‘books’ in the dropdown to show they should change to that.” Or not.
Instead of designing around a specific flow, we can try to design around motivation and predictability. Why is the user searching for a book? What is the context of this search? Was it perhaps in reference from some other related content from which we can provide a more direct link? And does the user know what will happen when they take certain actions? Often, it’s not finding the feature that’s the problem (the blinking text and skywriter took care of that) but just because somebody notices a feature doesn’t mean they will act on it. The feature has to use vocabulary familiar to the user and contain obvious cues on what would happen if acted upon." continued ... (Via OK/Cancel)
Forcing the design with a sledgehammer.
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