Hoping to think more clearly, through thinking out loud
Category Archives: UX
At Facebook, this is pretty standard practice. We test many different interesting ideas that come out of hackathons or team brainstorms, like the ability to save posts for later, useful if you’re in a hurry and see a post that you want to respond to or an article you’d like to read later. However, we only wanted to launch the feature if enough users used it and found it valuable. If not, then it wasn’t worth taking up space as yet another action link on every story. A test helped us verify that it was, in fact, something only a small group of people used, so we decided ultimately to not launch it.
Nice story about how Facebook takes into account the extra cognitive cost of having a feature added in the UI, after deploying, and then using that decide if they want to launch a feature or not.
When I refer to UX, I'm referring a human-centred process of either designing products, or services that has somewhat fuzzy edges with other disciplines like service design, and I'm including examples that occur in the built environment as well as just onscreen.1
It's not a huge intervention, but making it slightly more awkward to condemn otherwise recyclable waste to a fate in landfill somewhere, is a lovely touch - the implicit communication here acts as a elegant trigger for the question:
Could what I'm about to throw away be recycled instead??
That said, I'd love to know if there was any data about if it affected recycling rates, beyond just looking like a clever idea.
As an aside, you could do a lot worse than follow what Richard Pope is up to: in addition to being one of Govuk's first hires, he also has a habit of making lovely little things, the most recent being his Bicycle Barometer.
Which seems like a fine candidate for a future UX Thursdays post - that's all for now, hope you enjoyed it!
I may be on safer ground referring to this as design thinking, but UX Thursdays, sounds so much snappier. ↩
For the last few years, I've been keeping a scrapbook where I screenshot or take photos of clever little design ideas, either online, in products, or in the built environment, that either gracefully guide behaviour in a particular direction, or otherwise represent some noteworthy example of considered interaction design.
Sharing one, each week
They'd be more useful shared online than just on my 'pooter, and this blog seems a good a place as any other.
So, every Thursday, for as long as I can keep it up, I'll be posting something from my scrapbook onto this blog for your perusal, dear reader.
After Path were discovered to be uploading their customers address books en-masse from their app, there's been a renewed interest in consumer privacy.
The editor of the Silicon Alley insider issued an terribly written piece efectively saying that everyone was up in arms over nothing at all, but more constructively, Matt Gemmell put out a brilliant piece explaining how this whole scenario could have been avoided, simply by hashing the contents of the address books, and sending that data instead.
This provides all the utility, but avoids stops impinging on customer's privacy, and I if you haven't read it, stop reading here and go read it.
It's okay, I'll wait.
An other interesting product of this debacle has been the release of a HashContacts, a free, opensource library to make both asking a user for permission, and hashing an addressbook like this, trivially easy for iOS developers.
After only 3 hours of effort I wrote a class (available in github) that provides both of these functions in an easily dropped-in fashion.
Any developer that does not take at least these two trivial steps to protect their customers’ private data is being willfully negligent and should be ashamed
When Chrome was first released, there was a huge amount to like about it - it was incredibly fast, extensions were much simpler to make than Firefox, and it was based on some already good work from the webkit that Apple had been working on, and the UI was full of lovely little touches, like putting tabs on the top of the browser's chrome to save space, or the clever little bookmark bar that only appeared on when opening a blank window, that really showed that the people building it cared about the details.
Firefox by comparison with each version seemed to get slower and more cumbersome, but the sheer utility of Firebug kept it in the typical web developer's toolbox, until Chrome's own developer tools reached the point where Firebug was no longer needed.
And about a year ago, it did seem like Firefox was starting to lose the plot - they had announced an incredibly aggressive 3 month release cycle that forced people to actively redownload the app all the time, breaking all their plugins each time, the shockingly talented Asa Raskin left the organisation, and in general, it became harder and harder to find reasons to click on the that Firefox logo when Chrome did the same job so much faster, and without forcing you to jump through endless upgrade hoops.
That said, there was a lot to like about Mozilla's labs projects. Weave felt years ahead of it's time, Prism, was handy and quite clever and Tab Candy (now Panorama) as a concept was ingenious enough to have me using crashy as hell alpha builds just to be able to use the feature, and the when I first came across it WebGL work totally blew me away.
Coming back
Last week, I met @cyberdees at the fantastic MonkiGras, and after talking to him, I figured it was worth trying out Firefox again, I switched back yesterday, and on the whole, I'm really impressed. It's feels about as fast as Chrome does now, and I find the combination of App Tabs, Panorama, and the way Firefox will make it easy to select an existing tab rather than open yet another browser tab pointing at the same gmail account or the same page in github is exactly the kind of flourish that made me enjoy using Chrome when it was first released.
Giving it a week
I'll be using Firefox for browsing at home, and as my main browser for development this week.
After watching this new demo of their new dev tools that are built in:
I think it's safe to say the gap with Chrome has closed again, and I'm really looking forward to using them in anger this week.
For the benefit of other possible switchers, I'll write a short post this weekend, reviewing the coming days of Firefox based web development again.
Every now and then, you come cross a piece interaction design that's so well executed, it'd be plain disrespectful not to write about it. Today, I had one of those moments on Slideshare.
See? Very clever, these Slideshare chaps.
I wanted to favourite this presentation by Drew Houston, Dropbox Startup Lessons Learned, about how they applied lean startup principles internally at Dropbox, so I signed in to the site.
From there, I was 'upsold' into tagging the content (useful for me, but also useful for the site)
From there, I had already switched from being a passive consumer, to being an annotator, and from there it wasn't much of a jump to convert (note the deft use of clever micro-copy) to being a commenter, adding what (I hope) was some extra value to the page an increasing my engagement with the service.
