Tag: UX

Interpretation of Technology: Annotated Bibliography
Dorothy Baker
Stevenson University

User Testing. “UI vs. UX: What’s the difference between user interface and user experience?” 16 October 2018. User Testing Blog . Document. February 18 2020.

The article defines the term User Interface (UI) and User experience (UX) in terms of the world of technology. User intelligence pertains to anything that the site user interacts with when using the product (graphics, mouse, keyboard, sound,etc.). The user interface has been modified throughout the years: in 1970 the user interface of the computer consisted of coding on a screen that people had to interpret, in the 1980’s the UI consisted of limited graphical aspects such as check boxes, and in 1984 apple released the first computer that utilized a point and click mouse. The article then explains that there are User Interface designers whose job it is to evaluate and create the user interface on specific items.
User experience, I learned, was defined as how the users feel about the UI. People who are concerned about the UX will ask questions such as, what is the use of the technology like for the user? This article discusses how some people in the field have varying views of the definition UX and those definitions have been expanded to encompass other aspects. Among these expanded definitions are ones that “encompass all aspects of end-users interaction with the company, its services, and its products”. Most
notably the UX is centered around the human being/user and the UI and UX designers must work together.
The article also explored some key differences important to the redesign of the Greenspring Review: people should be interacting with the products final design, and UI focuses on all elements that enable the user to interact with the product. While the User Experience focuses on what the users take away from the product were.

Li, Jacky. “3 practical tips for product builders when designing in an era of digital exhaustion.” 7 January 2020. UX Collective. Document. 18 February 2020.

The article focused on giving tips on how designers can be more successful when designing technology in todays era. The article focused on the need for designers of technology to understand the well being of the user when they are to be using the product. The first tip that was offered in the article was “know the current landscape of mental capacity” which meant that the designer must create their product with an eye to how the user will receive it. People create their own routines because they are creatures of habit. One person may be able to incorporate a piece of technology into their lives while another person does not have the ability. Therefore, when creating new technology, the designer must keep this idea in mind.
The second tip talks about behavioral design. The focus of this step is to urge designers that the way to achieving change is not always creating and marketing new tech. Some change can be done through little nuances such as pictures on a bill. Designers can work
on shifting people’s behavior to urge them to practice the desired outcome through inspiring the people to want to observe that outcome. Said outcome can be focused on or around improving a habit the individual already maintains each day through methodology such as printing pictures on the individuals electric bill that compares their usage to the neighbors.
The third step discussed in the article was that of the emotional piggybank. This step stressed that users of technology are people and people crave human interaction. Make users lives easier with technology is the goal of any designer, however the technology should not get to the point where people are dependent on it. People should spend time looking at one another rather than looking at their technology screens. The article emphasized that technology should be used to benefit human relationships not replace them.
I learned that it is important to focus on people when creating new technology. This will help with the redesign of the Greenspring review because it is people that will be viewing the website. Without people technology in the world has no purpose and no one to use it. Therefore, when new technologies are being designed the designers and team must be very careful in considering what ways the technology will benefit and/or possibly harm the people.

The article I chose to explore is written by Rameez Kakodker and it is entitled “10 Rules for User Sign-up Journeys”. I found this article interesting because of much of the impact it has on every person who uses the internet. For every website, it seems like a user can sign-up for something related to that site or company. I doubt some people can keep up with all the sites they have signed-up for and given their personal information.

In the article, Kakodker gives us 8 rules for the “sign-up” attachments to a site. under each rule, he allows the readers to understand why based on research to apply this rule. The first rule he gives us is to ask for basic information only to create an account. Some of the research behind this is that sign-up with more 2-pages cause users to drop off the site. Only asking for name, email and password are far more reasonable than asking for 3 pages worth of personal information.

After we learn the first rule of sign-ups, Kakodker then gives us steps 2, 3, and 4; Mark what is required and group them together, indicate password policy, and implement inline field validation & indicate errors onFocusOut. These three rules allow a site to minimize the steps necessary for a user to enjoy the site fully beyond the extent of signing-up. Grouping items together makes the process shorter and eliminates the repetition of information. Indicating a password policy will put a stop to common passwords by help the user create a unique one.

Rule 5 and 6 are next and they discuss the efforts and energy in not blocking access to an account with an unverified email and an just indicating the account exists with the email. These two rules speak to the safety of an account made by a user. Setting these email extensions up with the sign-up allow the confirmation of the correct person logging on and off of the site. “If a user enters an email that already exists in your database, don’t just tell the user that the email exists.” (Kakodker, 2019) By providing the user with a reason attached to their failed login, it becomes easier for a person to figure out the correct login and avoid creating a whole new one.

The last two rules (7 and 8) are social login should be the norm, and a tab keypress should go to the next field. From a user’s point of view, pressing the tab button is second nature when wanting to go from one field to another. But sites must put these features in place in order to create a smoother experience for the users. In terms of rule 7, creating normalcy of logins is great for all sites because it gives the user a personal connection to whatever site they are using.

With these rules, sites are able to change and evolve for their users based on the UX preference. Decision and mistakes are made based on the use of the user and their ability to control their own journey successfully through a login process.

Kakodker, Rameez. “10 Rules for User Sign-up Journeys.” Medium, 28 Sept. 2019, https://uxdesign.cc/10-rules-for-user-sign-up-journeys-7f9b19079a72.

Kalina. (2019, December). 7 Psychological Principles for Better UX. Retrieved from https://livesession.io/blog/7-psychological-principles-for-better-ux/

After looking through the various articles on the website livesession, which serves to be a center for various tips to help people create better user experiences with their sites. In the article I chose, it focuses on several different ways to use psychology to the developers benefit. This stood out to me as I took a psychology class in high school my senior year and have been interested in it ever since. 

When starting to make a website, UX designers have endless colorways, layouts, and aesthetics to choose from. Using these psychological tricks explained in the article serve as a good guiding point to create an effective site. One trick in particular out of the list related to my rhetorical analysis, the law of figure/ground, which says that the brain either determines things as figures to focus on are whether things are the background. This relates to the decision of colors for obviously the background and then the text that the designer decides to go with. A decision like this is very important as the goal is to make the text stand out and is easy for the user to decipher as information warranting their attention to read it. Another one off the list that also stands out is the principle of least effort, meaning that users are attracted to interfaces that require minimal effort out of them to use the site. Focusing on the users attention span, making the site well organized and not cluttered with various bits of information or attention grabbing animations is to the UX designers benefit. 

Along with the two tricks I mentioned above, this list is helpful for the Greenspring review when deciding on how to structure their site. Making the site friendly on the user’s eyes and using text that pops out and easily distinguishable from the background is an important place to start.

Buley, Leah. “Are You Really Ready to Grow Your Design Team?”.Uxmatters, 21 May 2019, https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2019/05/are-you-really-ready-to-grow-your-design-team.php

The article and information I found came from the website uxmatters which helps to give more insight on UX and any questions someone might have about it. The site contains educated articles along with the authors who have been used as well as the different topics within the UX. 

Throughout the years of technology, it has become more popular and complex. With this being the case, organizations have now begun to strengthen their design teams with the importance of UX becoming greater and greater. Many people have seen a screen become their primary touchpoint making the experience they have become all the more important. What has been discovered is that just because someone may have a larger design organization, does not mean the design maturity will be there as well. Many companies with design teams noticed that the return on investment was not as great due to their design team was not being properly calibrated. In order to give the users a proper experience it is important to apply design to solving strategic problems. Making sure the designers have a voice in the decision making process becomes important and have been noticed to have a great impact. Using data to make design decisions is also important as it is able to drive efficiency gains and savings costs all across the business. It has also been noted that most of the successful designers in the business have not come from a design oriented background. This means that people have come from all different disciplines and have been taught the fundamentals and keys of the design process. 

The principles discussed in the article can be applied to the Greenspring Review in the sense that finding a proper design team is not as easy as it might seem with just finding a person with a design based background. The articles research has proven that many design teams can come from different backgrounds and studies.

Tyrkiel , Kalina. “7 Psychological Principles for Better UX.” LiveSession, 11 Dec. 2019, livesession.io/blog/7-psychological-principles-for-better-ux/.

This article describes how user experience (UX) designers’ role is to create a user-friendly interface that caters to all of the customers’ needs. Listed are three branches of psychology that can be utilized by UX designers and seven different psychological principles that may be used when designing an interface to give customers the best experience when using a service or product. Starting off, the writer talks about behavioral psychology as a branch.

Behavioral psychology assumes that behaviors are actions to certain stimuli, or their origin is from past punishments or praise. A UX example of this concept is that users assume one website works exactly the same as another website they have visited before. The next branch mentioned is cognitive psychology, which focuses on the user’s mental processes. This researches how the customer thinks; attention, perception and problem solving. A UX example for this principle would be “least effort,” to get something done or to go to a specific page in a user interface, the user will find the easiest path to do so. Another branch of psychology that was mentioned is gestalt psychology, which is primarily how users perceive and simplify objects and complex images, specifically those in an interface.

The second half of the article began to talk about the seven psychological principles UX designers can apply. The first is Jakob’s Law, which says that users will expect to find certain features in certain places, implementing the desire path, or the easiest way to get there. To determine these paths, you can record their sessions to see how they navigate through the interface. The aforementioned principle of least effort is mentioned again as the second principle, where users will find the fastest way to get something done with the least amount of effort. Then, the Law of Proximity states that elements near each other are perceived to the user as a single group. Next, the Law of figure/ground says that an element can be perceived to the customer as a figure or a background, which can be applied through the color and brightness of the background and buttons in the interface. The Law of Similarity, like the previous principles, is the concept that if two elements are similar then they are perceived in the same group. Number seven, which is Hick’s Law, states that when there’s an overwhelming amount of features that the user has, they feel frustrated. So essentially, less is more. Lastly, Serial position effect combines primacy and recency effect, where users remember the first and last items in a series respectively. In context of the user interface, it’s better to repeat a feature at the beginning and end of the webpage.

From this article I learned about different psychological principles and how they can be applied when designing, or in our case redesigning, a user interface to enhance user experience. Using elements such as series, primacy and recency, and grouping similar objects together to provide an easier navigation. Utilizing these principles may aid in the construction of our redesign and serves as a guide for how to organize them.

Braga, C. (2020, January 16). Rendering intentionality. Retrieved from https://uxdesign.cc/rendering-intentionality-1a57df40b585

The article starts off with the process of how products begin. They start off tiny and concentrated and are successful with what they end up with. However, as time progresses the developers started to make the app fancier and sophisticated by adding more features. And it worked! They did this for many reasons. 1. users asked for updates and features and the developers and designers, of course, had to follow suit. With that being said, a lot of times most businesses get in touch with the designers and they begin to push for more features because they calculate their performance based on the number of features they produce and not their actual function or relevance. What some businesses don’t realize is that the increase in features comes a decline in the user’s experience on the app. Newer apps, like Tonic, have created a news app that does not even make you do a sign in, which makes it immensely simple and very user-friendly. Being aware of your designs and how it relates to your users is knowing that the job is to solve the needs and wants of the user and not to just keep the developers happy. This means that the designers need to care about the wants and needs of the users.

The information of this article was very informative, which kept on cue with the subject being discussed. In the case of this article, they kept it nice, short, and simple. The way they delivered this information was more important than them trying to be extravagant and be unnecessarily wordy.

I found the information in this article was very useful. Something that I learned from this article is that less is most definitely. The addition of features does not necessarily enhance the site, but in fact, makes the website harder to use and more complicated for users. Simplicity is key if we want to keep the user experience a good one. I will keep this in mind when we redesign the Greenspring review, because not only do we want to keep our current users happy, but add more users due to this redesign.

Tyrkiel , Kalina. “7 Psychological Principles for Better UX.” LiveSession, 11 Dec. 2019, livesession.io/blog/7-psychological-principles-for-better-ux/.

The information came from the site livesession, whose goal is to help people understand consumer’s digital experiences. They provided great examples of not only the 7 psychological theories or ideas but gave examples related to UX and the design of websites for users.

UX designers need to understand how users think in order to answer problems people are facing and fix them efficiently and effectively. UX designers can use psychology to spot the areas that could use large or small amounts of improvement.  There is no list of rules as to what users want but these psychological principles can be helpful. Understanding these basic principles can help reinvent a site to match the patterns of the user. Users expect some commonality with things like the x button being in the top left corner or the contact us button being somewhere near the bottom of the page. A designer has to understand the standards that users expect while also being creative. Users want to find things on sites with ease. Making everything on a site easy to find such as navigation bars to the placement of photos and content. Categorizing things that go together so the user can decide from the list and not have to figure out how to get to the list is another important aspect.

A website’s goal is appeal to the users’ needs and not what the designer thinks would be best. These principles can be applied to the Greenspring review as users want to put forth the least amount of effort possible in finding what they are looking for. Making things easier to find for them could attract more users and allow them to have a more favorable site experience.

Tyrkiel, Kalina. “7 Psychological Principles for Better UX.” LiveSession, 11 Dec. 2019,livesession.io/blog/7-psychological-principles-for-better-ux/.

Tyrkiel states that “UX and psychology go hand in hand”.  Throughout the article she explains how seven psychological principles relate to UX.  These seven principles include: Jakob’s law, the principle of least effort, law of proximity, law of figure/ground, law of similarity, hick’s law and serial position effect.  Jakob’s law, explains that if a site is laid out in similar ways to other sites users know, they won’t need to learn how to use it. The second principle, the principle of least effort, states that people want to do as little work as possible to find something on a website.  Making sure that customers can achieve their goal as soon as possible is important for creating a good UX. The law of proximity explains that elements located close to each other are perceived as one group. The law of figure/ground states that an element can be perceived as a figure or as a background.  This UX principle is applicable through contrast, brightness, or colors. The law of similarity states that if multiple elements are similar, they are often seen as parts of the same group. Hick’s Law simple demonstrates that less is more. Grouping things into categories makes it easier for the user to make a choice as to what they want to find.  Finally, the serial position effect illustrates how people tent to remember the first and last items in a series. This is important for UX because you need to grab the user’s attention at both the beginning and end of the page. Overall, these seven psychological principles can be applied to the greenspring redesign, so that the user experience improves.  I believe that the most important of these seven principles to apply to Greenspring is Jakob’s Law and principle of least effort. Most if not all college students, the most important audience of the Greenspring review, want to find information quickly and with as little effort as possible.