{"id":423,"date":"2011-09-26T05:02:54","date_gmt":"2011-09-26T12:02:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/10kdev.ivystreetinc.com\/?p=423"},"modified":"2011-09-26T05:03:33","modified_gmt":"2011-09-26T12:03:33","slug":"pondering-poor-ux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/?p=423","title":{"rendered":"Pondering Poor UX"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s kind of hard to believe these days that poor user experience that can hinder your website would be developed and deployed. \u00a0But it happens &#8212; all the time. \u00a0Its just a testament to how difficult UX is to understand.<\/p>\n<p>Recently I was on an artificial sweetener website. \u00a0I could not, for the life of me, find their products. \u00a0Across the top menu \u00a0they had &#8220;About Us, Lifestyle, Recipes, Community&#8221;. \u00a0 Nothing, NOTHING on the home page to list the products. \u00a0 I was forced to change a page and scroll <em>down<\/em> to find a category called &#8220;products.&#8221; \u00a0And it was listed third in that page menu on the left!<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>The site&#8217;s retail home page literally did not have a link to its own product list.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I see this all the time. \u00a0Now, while I am no UX expert, I do consider my self an expert use-er. \u00a0 It means, I know what I want when I go to a site and if I am overly inconvenienced I bail out.<\/p>\n<p>What \u00a0causes this? \u00a0Having sat on a few of the meetings with people who uh, design this stuff (usually I&#8217;m just working on the engine code so I get no say) I observe this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>No talent to design. \u00a0Serious. \u00a0Design is measured subjectively so often, this always slips by.<\/li>\n<li>Failure to understand the user. \u00a0Usually this manifests itself by the application team using their domain language in meetings, thinking the user knows the same domain language. \u00a0They do not.<\/li>\n<li>Too complex. \u00a0It may be a designer, a pm, or a developer but they want to flex their technical muscle.<\/li>\n<li>Failure to understand the mission of the company. \u00a0That&#8217;s right &#8212; what the hell are you trying to do with the site?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There are some ways to get around this, a few solutions:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>AB testing for your pages.<\/li>\n<li>Full blown web analytics.<\/li>\n<li>An\u00a0experienced\u00a0UX team AND you listen to them.<\/li>\n<li>A good set of missions statements\/grounding for the project team.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That&#8217;s just a few.<\/p>\n<p>These days companies are trying to re-invent the user experience, \u00a0 Personally I think it fails more often than not. \u00a0 One redesign I would be curious to see stats on is Target&#8217;s new site. \u00a0Personally, I think it was a step back, and, it loads very very slow and you have to scroll like a madman on the home page. \u00a0 I think they were trying to get away from the standard, Amazon, but sorry that pattern is laid down. \u00a0People like it, it works.<\/p>\n<p>A site years ago, Campmor, used to have an almost Craig&#8217;s-list appearance. \u00a0It was unique in that you could drill and filter to products quickly. \u00a0 They &#8220;updated&#8221; and made it Web-2-oh-ish. \u00a0 And I stopped shopping on it; the site was too difficult to navigate and required a ton of clicks; I couldn&#8217;t do my visual scans on a ton of say sleeping bags like on the old site. \u00a0It became useless.<\/p>\n<p>This is just retail but like well designed clothing, a well designed site is difficult to find. \u00a0I find the mobile sites interesting because they FORCE a team to be practical. \u00a0Maybe that&#8217;s the place to start before trying to predict behaviors that don&#8217;t exist.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s kind of hard to believe these days that poor user experience that can hinder your website would be developed and deployed. \u00a0But it happens &#8212; all the time. \u00a0Its just a testament to how difficult UX is to understand. Recently I was on an artificial sweetener website. \u00a0I could not, for the life of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=423"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":425,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423\/revisions\/425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}