uxdesign.cc – User Experience Design — Medium | Flavio Lamenza

IRALOT #05 — I Read a Lot Of Things 👍

Every week I curate inspiration for design thinkers, curious humans and adventurous readers.

1. The less interface, the better.

Are we growing impatient with interfaces, or are interfaces taking too long to do what they have to do?

Do designers want to give their extra personal touch by making the button go wibbly-wobbly-shrink-and-slide-to-left in an animation that takes 3 seconds or do users want to: press button >> something happens instantly?

That’s why I loved the article “Just Enough Interface“, from Neil Turner. It made me think about myself as a user (afterall, we all are). Do we want less interface? In the conclusion of his article, he used a quote, from the grand master UX Designer Don Norman that nailed it:

The real problem with the interface is that it is an interface. Interfaces get in the way. I don’t want to focus my energies on an interface. I want to focus on the job… I don’t want to think of myself as using a computer, I want to think of myself as doing my job.

Do users want beautiful animations, lots of features, or just to get the job done? A curve-ball: is Reddit a huge success because it never changed much the interface (and still looks like a website you can access using Netscape Navigator), or because the competitors (Digg, for example) tried to adapt their interface to the ever-changing internet and died a slow death?

Are we designing so the user can’t even notice, or should we add lot’s of beautiful animations to beautify the interface and delight the users with these moments?

One example of a **** interface: It was late at night. I was tired. I sat down on my bed and was using Siri (I was whispering) to set up an alarm so I could wake up early (I know I could be using the app… but I wanted to test Siri if it would work with me whispering). My wife was sleeping already. Believe it or not, Siri goes shouting like “Sorry, but I couldn’t understand that, Flavio“. Oh… my… god… I am trying to make Siri shut up and I look at my wife and she is like:

The volume control overrides the “night shift” and uses the default volume. You might think I am exaggerating, but I am fed up with voice interfaces answering me all the time loud and clear. Why can’t I have the option to turn on: “you are a robot, please, don’t need to answer me, just do what I ask you to do”?

Try asking Siri to “Set a timer for 15 minutes”. She will set, as expected, but she will ALWAYS go on with a long confirmation message. It’s useless, because:

Reason 1 — If the timer was set in the wrong way, I would have seen it and asked her to reset it again.

Reason 2 — Why can’t she go like “Done!”, or “Ok”.

Reason 3 — Accessibility mode would be set up properly, so it’s not a valid argument to question me “what if you were blind?”.

Am I getting old, or is this also something that is bothering you guys while trying voice interface with Alexa’s, Siri’s and Echo’s?

It took us a while to design minimalist interfaces. Will we reach a moment where voice interfaces will go through their minimalist phase?

1.2. So who decides to go with less interface, the user or the designer?

Henry Ford has the famous quote (even though there is no real proof that Ford ever said this):

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said: faster horses.

Steve Jobs said this one:

It’s not the customer’s job to know what they want.

If this is the case, then I would love to hear your opinions on this £360 invention by Philips, called “Sonicare DiamondClean Smart” with the feature you ever wanted (but don’t know yet) “personalised mouth coaching”:

Do users want to brush their teeth and hold a smartphone? Do they have a bathroom vanity top the size of a mattress?

Or what about the “The Homer“: A demonstration of what can happen when you only follow user suggestions (By the way, it had gigantic cupholders which became a feature on many cars in the 1990s onwards).

1.3 Design it with love

I am asking too many questions. Here is what I think:

Design a product/interface with love. Design it from the heart. Don’t just design something that someone goes “I know how to build this, here is what you do”. Do it because you are passionate about it, because you really care. Not because you want to make money, or just to look cool by opening a car with your mobile.

Finally, back to the article: Neil’s article is quite thought provoking and a very interesting read for every designer out there.

👉 The full article is HERE.

2. We are just taking the same Instagram pictures

I won’t say much about it, because this video explains it all:

#DealWithIt

3. Brazil is doomed (okay… half doomed)

Brazil is the 5th largest country in the world. But every now and then I read some stuff that makes my stomach turn.

Things are so bad that even the chilled and always kind Canadians are going to Brazil to find out some deep 💩

The Globe and Mail is one of the (if not, the most) awarded newspaper in Canada and they’ve published, on the 26th of January 2018, a BEAUTIFUL article about a disastrous scenario: a Highway that crosses Brazil from top to bottom.

If you ever wanted to know how valuable good education can be VS how poor bad education can be, read this quote and gaze in wonder:

There are twice as many cows as there are people in Brazil — but this country has the world’s least productive cattle industry. Canadian farmers raise, on average, seven cows per hectare; here, they raise just one.

The end is not near…

This will be one of the best articles you will read this month, so save some time to read it properly.

👉 The full article is HERE.

4. Creative people’s brains are uniquely wired

Philip Perry wrote this intriguing article stating that scientists discovered that our brain operates in a unique way when we are being creative. This is really mind-blowing, because they can now predict from a certain functionality of the brain if someone has the capacity to generate original ideas or not.

And it gets even wilder when you think that it’s the brain that is studying about the brain 🧠 Imagine if there could be a conspiracy of brains not wanting us to know their secrets… 🤯

Was it the brain that gave the name “brain” to itself?

Who is reading this: is it you, or the voice in your brain?

Are the brains studying themselves?

👉 The full article is HERE.

5. Talking about Creativity

“Creativity, the psychology of discovery and invention”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is one of the best-known psychologists (and also the most misspelled).

He found out that the best creative moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

And what I really love about his work is how he proves that it is not relaxation that makes us happy… ironically, jobs are easier to enjoy than free time!

“The reason is that free time is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed, while jobs have goals, feedback rules, and challenges; all of which encourages us to become more involved.”

And the following quote is so important that can be found on the first page of his book:

A genuinely creative accomplishment is almost never the result of a sudden insight, a light bulb flashing on in the dark, but comes after years of hard work.

Do you think you are not creative? Do you feel you can be more creative?

Work.

6. Interesting links:

• A look inside Design at Linkedin.
  An interesting interview with Moses Ting, the UX Design Lead on LinkedIn’s mobile team.
• Designing Your Product’s Continuous Feedback Loop.
  A loop, or a learning spiral?
• Gimmic or fundamentally improving the experience?
  You’ve probably seen it already. But here you go, check it again!
• You’re not the user: 5 things I learned from using Hotjar for a year.
  Hotjar is a tracking analytics software. The designer walks us through how analysing the results has helped him make better design decisions.
• Design’s Lost Generation.
  Crème de la crème of a design era discussion that Mike Monteiro brought to the table.

7. Wrap up!

Thank you for your time reading. If you liked it, show how much by clapping and if you would like to talk, leave a comment below.

👋

The less interface, the better was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.