Last week I got the chance to speak at the St. Louis Day of .Net Conference for the 3rd year in a row. I love coming and speaking at this conference because I’m always amazed at the attendees interest in User Experience. It’s a welcome sight to see at a developer based conference. I’d like to thank the organizers of Day of .Net once again for letting me come back this year.
During my session, I provided insight into common design pitfalls that, while small in nature, have a huge impact on a person’s experience. Now, there are many different kinds of pitfalls that can befall a project, not all of them being technical or design based. However, design pitfalls are normally those that simply fall through the cracks during the process of design and development. Why do they fall through the cracks? Because nothing is easy anymore. I used buying a plane ticket from St. Louis to LA as a prime example. On the surface this seems like a simple task to complete. However, as you’ll see in the slides below, there are eight cognitive decisions to make in just the first step.
Over the course of the presentation, many examples were shown that highlighted common problem areas that negatively impact a person’s experience using a product or service. These examples fell into two categories:
Low Hanging Fruit – These are issues that can be caught at the spec level and sent back to the designer. The best solution for many of these are to use accepted best practices, unless you have good reason not to, and validated design patterns.
- Bad Search
- Bad Navigation
- Poor Readability
- Gestalt Violations
Conceptual Design Problems – These are issues that can really only be prevented. If they are caught at the spec level, it’s probably too late and improvements will need to be planned for future iterations or releases.
- Bad Interaction Design Framework
- Bad Information Design
- Accessibility
In closing, I expressed to the developers in the room that THEY are key to ensuring these design pitfalls get avoided. The best way to do that is to ensure that users get included in the process. The earlier the better. Also, and more importantly, it’s vital that they have a fundamental understanding of the user experience profession and craft. User Experience Designers are being pressured right now to become more familiar with the back end aspect of the systems they are designing for. In many cases this pressure is deserved, and in the end will make them better designers. So, it’s only fair that developers need to become familiar with our work and our principles, because in the end it will make them better developers too. I’m not asking for developers to become designers over night. What I’m asking of them is to be able to critique and provide appropriate feedback on designs during either design reviews or spec reviews.
This was fun talk to give and it was great to see so many people responding to the examples I provided. I can only guess they’ve ran into many of these same pitfalls either on their own projects or during their everyday use of digital interfaces.
Below are the slides from my presentation.
