As someone with a background in languages and, more simply, as someone with some common sense, this has been a pet hate of mine since I first saw it in the late 90s.
For US users, at least, when exporting all of a LinkedIn account's data, if a user selects "Download Larger Archive" to get the full archive, when they click to request the archive, the UI just switches their selection to "Select the data files you're most interested in" instead, then selects ALL THE OPTIONS, and finally disables the form and submits the request. I guess the BE developers were busy that sprint.
Hey Mastodon! As I continue to dig through post-layoff life, I'm setting up more community discussions like the old days. Join me Wednesday Feb 28 for FREE at 4:30 PM PT on Zoom (registration required due to attendance limits) for an interactive Q&A session inspired by my book #DesignBeyondDevices. I'll open with how my practice has been going, then facilitate some community Q&A.
Qwerty keyboards are laid out to keep the arms of a mechanical typewriter from hitting each other as you type, because letters that are more commonly used side by side are farther apart on the "keyboard".
Thumb typing has different constraints. There's probably a case for a different keyboard layout, now, to reduce common typos.
Who would research new layouts and the demand? One of the O/S publishers?
I've already said this before but I'll say it again...
One change I'd like to see in the World Wide Web, is the emergence of websites that can't be accessed 24 hours a day.
Maybe that's a website that's only available from 9-5 each day.
Or maybe it's a web forum that you can only post on for a one hour period every week.
Too much UX design is about pushing people to stay on websites as long as possible.
I won't need to tell you that this obviously encourages unhealthy behaviour from the people using a web service but also...
Also, it means that if a web service goes down at any time of day or night, some poor bastard has to stop whatever they are doing and spend an indeterminate amount of time trying to fix it while the whole entire userbase cries murder.
Maybe, just maybe, we can set boundaries.
Maybe an admin doesn't need to be on call at any time of day or night.
Maybe that thing that you really want to post at 3am can wait until the morning (at which point you might end up being glad that you didn't post it).
Artifacts are only valuable when they help achieve something: disseminate/explain an idea, convince people, etc.
Don't be afraid to ask how your outputs will be used. If there's no clear purpose beyond "we've always asked for X" then you will never be seen as an equal partner contributing value.
Now that we have #LLM for generating content and visuals on a whim that nobody will look at again. It is not necessary for humans to continue doing it.
So many Apple first-party apps with accidentally rounded corners revealed in screenshots. Such a weird property to get wrong. I wonder if it's truly an oversight or something to help with screen transition animations.
Throwaway prototyping is a software development approach that involves rapid creation of a prototype with the understanding that it will be discarded after use. The primary goal of throwaway prototyping is to provide a tangible representation of the app functionality early in the development process, allowing stakeholders to visualize and interact with the proposed system.
We need an equivalent of "this is not financial advice" for design: "this is not based on research."
I've seen countless well-meaning teams say "we will do it this way and then come back to this decision" - and they almost never do. That's because unless you carefully document decision provenance, coming back to the right decisions is impossible.
One drawback of using an anti-tracking function and continuously deleting cookies is that when you donate to a free site you use, by the next session they have no idea it was you and are again asking for a donation.
Unless you sign in. But that defeats using an anti-tracking function.
Last week I broke the screen on my phone and have been using an old broken Pixel 3a in the interim. A significant portion of the keyboard does not respond to taps, so I can't even log into Google (as the login screen is portrait-only), so no play store, and it's been an interesting experiment to carry on my day without apps.
First thought: people absolutely SUCK at building fast websites. Mastodon, Fastmail, Discord, Messenger (duh). Hot garbage.
I may be unemployed due to the cruel coldness of the random Riot Games layoffs 2.5 weeks ago, but since then I've still managed to ship a fix. 🤣 I convinced LinkedIn to fix a major bug in their conversion workflow by posting thoroughly and thoughtfully about my experience and speaking briefly with engineers - you can take the designer out of the company but you can't stop the designer from designing.
I'll say something for Rogers support; I'm impressed. I've been on “hold" waiting for a specialist since 5:00pm and it's now 8:30PM and no one has shown up yet.
(I haven't actually been sitting there waiting. I walked away and came back periodically to check and am now officially giving up)
[edit] Changed my mind. I'll leave it open overnight just to see …
Now, very likely, something is broken in the chat, but because it failed in such a way as to not inform me, I wonder how many other less technically savvy people just sit there, waiting.
If it fails, or breaks, it should inform the user.
Today, I heard that a client’s #uxdesign team has growing indicators that end users want less pages of minimal content and no scrolling (which leads to more clicks) and more single page, no click pages with lots of scrollable content. Has anyone heard similar inklings? Any UX/web designers seeing similar trends?
AI has already been used to run scams, rip off artists, destroy search engines, and drown publishers under an avalanche of shit.
Now AI boosters found a new thing to enshittify: #UserResearch .
"AI research is better than nothing" is the latest in a long series of "bad research is better than nothing" arguments that miss the point of research in the first place.
Are you one of the many folks who struggle to get design integrated into the product development process? My latest Medium article may provide some helpful insights for you - I break down the most successful techniques I've used in UX leadership. #uxdesign#gamedev#uxresearch#tech
Challenge for a UX designer: rethink the UI/UX around content warnings on the Fediverse (mastodon, pixelfed, etc) to allow capturing not just a text field, but also some predefined labels (e.g., 18+, sexual imagery, violent imagery, etc)
Technically these labels would come from "providers" which define what they mean and controls that should be implemented.
"to allow capturing not just a text field, but also some predefined labels"
And if there is no predefined label that is applicable, label that as "none"
(Anecdote: on an instance I was on once, a moderator announced quite emphatically that they always CWd recipes because "some people don't like reading recipes")
@pluralistic brilliantly clarifying our modern world for us, as usual:
We’re nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we’re well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job.