ux

Showing 7 posts tagged ux

rianvdm: This is from Google+. I don’t understand why there is a grey +1 button that does something very different than the slightly more grey +1 button on the other side. Putting it on separate sides of the panel doesn’t make it less confusing… Good point. Especially in this state. How would you fix this? To me, the grouping of actions on the left gives some sign that the left “+1” is an action. When hovering over the post, the actions become clearer. Anyone want to venture how it could be made better? High-res

rianvdm:

This is from Google+. I don’t understand why there is a grey +1 button that does something very different than the slightly more grey +1 button on the other side. Putting it on separate sides of the panel doesn’t make it less confusing…

Good point. Especially in this state. How would you fix this? To me, the grouping of actions on the left gives some sign that the left “+1” is an action. When hovering over the post, the actions become clearer. Anyone want to venture how it could be made better?

SoundCloud Next design critique.

I love SoundCloud. Discovering artists and being able to share my music with others. I’ve been using soundcloud next for a few weeks now (and have submitted feedback). However, here is a more extensive critique of soundcloud’s redesign.

First, the bad news:

1) Waveforms just doesn’t load. It’s horribly buggy and ends up looking shoddy. Examples: 

2) Genre doesn’t display in the feed. I follow a lot of artists, and some create various types of music. I don’t always have time to listen to all of it, and depending on my mood, sometimes not in the mood for certain types of music.

vs old souncloud:

3) No clear distinction between genre and tags on song pages.

Genre holds the same value as tags (even in the old soundcloud). In other words, clicking on a tag sends you “tag/rock” and clicking on the genre in sends you to “tag/rock” as well. So, I understand in a certain way to deprecate “genre” to just being another tag, but as you can see above, it looks stupid. It looks like I “accidentally” added “rock” twice.

4) No more download information on songs.

To a certain extent, I understand removing download information. Plays is a good enough indicator. It will most likely always be higher than downloads. And, some artists on soundcloud hit the download limit, in which the download indicator then doesn’t add value too. However, I liked it, mainly for my own artist page. I now have to go through a click to my stats page to see how many a specific song of mine has been downloaded. Considering that the old soundcloud returned this information, I don’t see it as any technical challenge to allow users to just set a tickbox to see it. Turn it off be default.

5) Some parts of the site is unresponsive and slow.

The new notification box at the top is a bit slow sometimes. When I click, it loads the part of the box right against the toolbar. Only once the rest of the information is loaded, the rest of it shows. It’s a small amount of lag, but long enough to be annoying. It is however substantially better than previously seeing activity related to you.

I checked the network activities for the stream page and user page.

On the stream pages, your recent activities are displayed in another box. When then clicking on the notification box, it doesn’t load your activities again. Which makes sense, considering the data has already been called.

However. On the user page (where there is no recent activity box), activities are still being called. It should then be expected that when clicking the notification box that it shouldn’t send another callback for you activities (compared to behaviour on the stream page). It does however, creating pointless lag.

Any SoundCloud developer want to elaborate on this? I can understand as a design choice to send another call (for more recent activities than when the page loaded), but if the stream page doesn’t do it, why does the user page?

6) Where’s my spotlight tab?

This is probably the most worrying thing for me. I haven’t seen any feedback to suggest it is coming back. I bought a subscription specifically for this. I have a lot of songs, so I want to put my best foot forward and show what I can do. Hopefully this will return.

7) No genre or music tags on user pages.

Similar to the feed, there is no information on genre or tags on user pages whatsoever. The only way know what music a person makes when they follow you (or land on their page) is to either read their bio, or actually having to play a song. If the song is new and you don’t know what it is, you have to click through. Due to this, I haven’t followed a lot of users. Even if they want to forego displaying, how about a tag cloud underneath the picture?

Somewhere here.

8) No more mini-update box.

This is much easier to read and quickly digest than the stats page.

Now for good news (or things I like):

1) Better stream.

Much less visually noisy.

2) Recent Activity Box.

Previously I had to click through to my activity, or have my activity be lost within the main feed. I like this.

3) Better looking waveforms.

When it actually loads fine, it looks better than the previous iteration.

4) Better commenting.

By far the best improvement.

The previous version often obscured most of the waveform and tried to display most comments. It was ugly. I often just switched off the comments.

Now it displays under the waveform and doesn’t display every single comment on a popular song.

5) Larger pictures.

Visual elements add to my music experience. I like this. Probably not for everyone.

6) Better album/set listening.

It gives a nice idea/feel of where in the set you are.

As well ass better information about different songs. Compared to old version:

7) Concurrent listening.

I can now move about soundcloud while listening to a specific song (instead of it closing the song). Nice. However, I’m a bit unsure how obvious this display is. To me it wasn’t immediately obvious that it would return me to my current song I’m listening to.

Any ideas on how to improve this?

8) Reposting and changing of vocab.

A favourite is now a ‘like’ and you can now repost songs to the stream for others to listen to. I feel ‘like’ is entails a smaller investment of interest and should hopefully increase its usage on the site. In other words: I ‘like’ a lot more songs. I have fewer ‘favourites’.

——

All in all. Still a great experience. The biggest issues are for me: Bringing back spotlight tab (or at least tell us that it wasn’t going away anyway), less buggyness and more tag/genre information on the stream and user pages.

What do you think of the new soundcloud? A fan?

EDIT (11th August):

It seems SoundCloud has added genre information back to tracks in the stream and user pages!

Yay!

Elon Musk’s Hyperloop and the Manufactured Normalcy Field

How’s that title for some sci-(fi) jargon? My brother linked me an article by Venkatesh Rao talking about Future Nausea. It’s quite a doozy. So take your time. The most fascinating part about the article is Venkatesh’s idea of the manufactured normalcy field. The concept is more simple than it sounds: We aren’t psychologically capable to quickly adapt to the future, and thus products have to be manufactured in a way that sustains the idea that nothing really changes. Thus there exists this “field” of manufactured (natural, emergent or designed) normalcy that makes us comfortable and be able to deal with future technology.

An example of this (and the one he uses) is air travel. As humans, we have evolved without a doubt not to be able to fly, yet we are. It is rather absurd, but to us it feels normal and okay, because the experiences have been designed so that it seems familiar. For example, why are forward-facing seats still used when rear-facing seats have shown to be safer? Adults have shown that they prefer using forward-facing seats when given the option (tested in trains). If you think about it: we are already flying in a tube high in the air, moving at speeds we were never designed to go, facing forward makes it a lot more mentally ‘digestible’, because, well, that’s the way we’ve always been moving forward.

New technology must be normalized:

Normalization involves incorporation of a piece of technological novelty into larger conceptual metaphors built out of familiar experiences.

This idea for me, gels with Jack Dorsey’s stance on technology:

The best technologies, they disappear, they fade into the background and they’re relevant when you want to use them, and they get out of the way when you don’t.

Related to Venkatesh’s manufactured normalcy field, this is exactly what Square is doing. It just fades away, using the same interaction experience we’ve used for ages.

Out there technology on the other hand, while novel and seemingly useful might not be adopted because it is just not adapted to our familiar concepts.

Continuing from the airplane example: the Concorde’s demise has been cited by lower passenger numbers after the 2000 crash, general lower air travel after 9/11 and high maintenance costs. However, read this guy’s experience of it, and you’ll see all the points of unreal experiences and technology that gets in the way. Crazier g-forces, loud noises, seeing the curvature of the earth, hot sides, etc. It was great flying the Concorde, because that was the experience of itself, not using it as transport.

Another great example is the Segway.

As the top voted answer on Quora about why the Segway failed points out (by Anshu Sharma):

The Segway is great but its not a great solution that fits into our existing way of moving:

Elon Musk’s Hyperloop

Now. Where I want to get at with this whole post, and what sparked the relation to Venkatesh’s normalcy field concept, is Elon Musk’s hyperloop. If you don’t know, Elon Musk was behind PayPal and now recently SpaceX and Tesla Motors. In pandodaily’s recent fireside chat with Elon Musk, Sarah Lacy asked whether he had any other ideas lying around. One of these got me quite excited: he called it the hyperloop. 

He starts talking about it at 43:50 about. Basically: fast, can’t crash, immune to weather, etc. He thinks it is entirely possible. It sounds like the idea of a vacuum tunnel, however after a recent tweet, Elon said it’s not. On top of that he’ll open source the idea soon.

However. I can’t shake the feeling, that although given his track record, it just won’t work. If it is just too future-y, how will people adopt it? Ideally it shouldn’t be marketed like the Concorde (the experience itself) and be comparable to the mass populace’s idea of moving. I’m opening myself up to potentially being entirely wrong in the near future. What do you think?

UX gripes: Hootsuite’s Refresh Button

So. I plan to now and again (when the vibe takes me) post a blog of UX gripes I encounter in the wild.

First up is Hootsuite’s Dashboard. I’ve been using Hootsuite as my primary Twitter client for a while. Twitter’s main site kept behaving badly, and I was already using hootsuite to check up on other Twitter activity (multiple accounts, ie @tweeklyfm and @twimemachine).

One thing that irritates me about Hootsuite is the position of the refresh button.

It’s position is there to indicate that if you press the refresh button, it will refresh the current tab (as opposed to all the tabs). I don’t use automatic updating, because I don’t like Twitter “continuing”/”updating”/”refreshing” in the background. Apps that have notifications distract me. When the apps don’t have notifications, I still choose to refresh manually, because having it refresh automatically creates a sense of urgency that I have to check it every now and then, which is equally as bad (for me).

Fitt’s Law: “…the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target”.

The refresh button being where it positioned means that often times you can overshoot the mouse pointer and then ‘reverse’ to the button. The mouse is usually to the right of the button when it has to start traversing.

The problem is, is that if you overshoot and, your cursor hits that left sidebar… and if you stay on it for a second or so (estimated a second), the sidebar pops open to reveal more information on the icons. Like this:

 Which means, I now have to move my mouse out of the region (so the sidebar collapses) and then slooowly move back to the refresh so that I don’t overshoot again. It slows me down, is downright irritating and not well thought out.

How would I fix it?

The other buttons (“choose refresh time” and “+Add Stream”) to the right of the refresh button isn’t used a lot, not nearly comparable to refresh button. I can imagine use cases where users won’t really use the refresh as much as I do, but I can’t image it being used less than the buttons next to them. In other words, I don’t see why it should be grouped so closely to those buttons. It should be close (especially the ‘arrow’ button), but it need to be close so that you accidentally click on it. Also the grouping of icons so close to all the side-bar icons might make it more difficult on the user as well. It is kinda jumbled.

I would move the refresh button all the way to the right of the screen.

That bar there is used to shift how many tabs you want to have on your screen. The further right, the more can fit in. Again, that control element won’t be used as much as a refresh button.

The problem with shifting things to the right, is the possibility of a scroll-bar interfering if you overshoot. On Chrome and OS X, there is no scroll-bar (because Hootsuite uses a fixed layout). I am not sure if it is the same on other environments. Even if a scroll-bar interferes, it is still substantially better than a sidebar constricting access to your refresh button. Also: Why be shy of space? The above mention slider, refresh button, refresh options button and ‘add stream’ is the only control elements in that bar.

Move the refresh button to the right and make it larger.

This way, the refresh button is still on the same level of hierarchy (on a tab), it is larger, it won’t interfere with a sidebar and it isn’t jumbled amongst the other (possibly confusing) icons.

If you have any inputs, please share them. Would like to learn of other places to put it!