Dan Nguyen has an interesting writeup of Dan McKinley’s talk about why the implementation of infinite scroll at Etsy didn’t work.
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I don’t think speed and volume are at fault here. I think the reason it didn’t work was because the kind of interaction the user has with the data is much more suited to a paginated interface than an infinite scroll. In the case of something like Etsy, the user is searching for something in particular within the list of results. In the case of something like Twitter, the user is scanning and consuming the flow of information. In the latter case, infinite scroll makes sense because the user is essentially reading or scanning down the list of tweets until they get bored. In the former case the user isn’t just linearly consuming the data, they’re mapping the information in their mind, trying to remember the items they like or think are worth researching further.
Is it ok to ask your users to learn your interface? As UI design is maturing and the web is becoming a more advanced land of complex interfaces is it now unreasonable for every feature to be instantly usable? Touch devices have also entered the mainstream and added a multitude of interactions that UI designers can lean on.
So, how do you know when it is ok to hide features and ask your audience to learn your application? Is ‘learnability’ now more important than usability?
[Factors considered are…]
Importance
Frequency
Cost
Alternatives
There are many different methods we can use to think about our audience segments, focusing on differences that can help us prioritize and design the features that best meet the needs of each.
market segmentation—Within the business and marketing communities, this has been the most commonly used type of audience segmentation for decades.
experience lifecycle—This segmentation model shows the end-to-end lifecycle of the customer experience.
mental models—This model comprises an affinity diagram of user behaviors surrounding a particular topic.
capability level—This segmentation model indicates the stages of capability our audiences go through over time.
mood—This type of segmentation draws on a concept Will Evans put forward, using mood maps.
game-play style—While this method of segmentation is somewhat specific to the world of online games, this type of segmentation takes into account the way players want to play games—solo or multiplayer.
As more diverse devices embrace touch as a primary input method, it may be time to revisit navigation standards on the Web. How can a navigation menu be designed to work across a wide range of touch screen sizes?
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So what does it mean to consider touch across all screen sizes? Two things: touch target sizes and placement of controls. Any navigation system that needs to work with touch needs to have menu options that can be comfortably used with imprecise fingers. It also needs to be positioned in a way that aligns with how people hold and use touch-enabled devices.
Touch target sizes are relatively easy: just make things big enough to prevent accidental taps and errors. Your reaction to this may be “but I have so many things to fit in my app. How can I do that if the touch targets have to be so big?” frankly you can’t and quite often that’s a good thing.
Designing towards touch really forces us to simplify and decide what’s most important- what needs to stay on the screen. …
“If someone asks you to add social buttons sharing to the website, DRINK!”
When designing for the web, you can analyze usage data for your product and compare different interfaces in A/B tests. This is sometimes called “data-driven design”, but I prefer to think of it as data-informed design — the designer is still driving, not the data.
To make this work in practice it’s important to use the right metrics. Basic traffic metrics (like overall page views or number of unique users) are easy to track and give a good baseline on how your site is doing, but they are often not very useful for evaluating the impact of UX changes. This is because they are very general, and usually don’t relate directly to either the quality of the user experience or the goals of your project — it’s hard to make them actionable.
User Interface Design patterns are recurring solutions that solve common design problems. Design patterns are standard reference points for the experienced user interface designer.
This site will help you in two ways: You can read insightful design pattern articles and browse screenshot examples.
According to Jared, they are:
#1: Sketching
#2: Storytelling
#3: Critiquing
#4: Presenting
#5: Facilitating
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