22 items tagged “ux”
2024
Mapping the landscape of gen-AI product user experience. Matt Webb attempts to map out the different user experience approaches to building on top of generative AI. I like the way he categorizes these potential experiences:
- Tools. Users control AI to generate something.
- Copilots. The AI works alongside the user in an app in multiple ways.
- Agents. The AI has some autonomy over how it approaches a task.
- Chat. The user talks to the AI as a peer in real-time.
How do you accidentally run for President of Iceland? (via) Anna Andersen writes about a spectacular user interface design case-study from this year's Icelandic presidential election.
Running for President requires 1,500 endorsements. This year, those endorsements can be filed online through a government website.
The page for collecting endorsements originally had two sections - one for registering to collect endorsements, and another to submit your endorsement. The login link for the first came higher on the page, and at least 11 people ended up accidentally running for President!
The Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design (via) By HCI researcher Ben Shneiderman. I particularly like number 4, “Design dialogs to yield closure”, which encourages feedback at the completion of a group of actions that “gives users the satisfaction of accomplishment, a sense of relief.”
2023
The 6 Types of Conversations with Generative AI. I’ve hoping to see more user research on how users interact with LLMs for a while. Here’s a study from Nielsen Norman Group, who conducted a 2-week diary study involving 18 participants, then interviewed 14 of them.
They identified six categories of conversation, and made some resulting design recommendations.
A key observation is that “search style” queries (just a few keywords) often indicate users who are new to LLMs, and should be identified as a sign that the user needs more inline education on how to best harness the tool.
Suggested follow-up prompts are valuable for most of the types of conversation identified.
Why Chatbots Are Not the Future. Amelia Wattenberger makes a convincing argument for why chatbots are a terrible interface for LLMs. “Good tools make it clear how they should be used. And more importantly, how they should not be used.”
2013
Do you need the feature in Dropbox mobile app that allows using the chosen files in offline mode? Why?
I use this all the time. It’s especially useful for travelling (when you’re abroad you often don’t have inexpensive cellular data or access to WiFi). I use it for:
[... 117 words]How can I produce an animated prototype out of designs for an iOS app?
Keynote is a surprisingly good tool for this kind of things, especially since they added path based animations to it a few years ago.
[... 55 words]How long should I budget for an experienced designer to design a responsive ecommerce store?
There’s no single answer to this—it depends on the scope of the project. A one-page store selling 3 items is quicker to design than a thousand page store with dozens of category homepages etc.
[... 87 words]What are the best web design and web development conferences/ meetups in Central & Eastern Europe (2013)?
We have a list of Web Design conferences and events in Central and Eastern Europe on Lanyrd—you might find our full list of Conferences in Central and Eastern Europe useful as well.
[... 94 words]What would be the best design conference to attend in 2013?
That’s a pretty tricky question to answer... there are a lot of excellent UX conferences around (we’re listing 69 upcoming UX events on Lanyrd at the moment, and more get added frequently). A few things you should consider:
[... 198 words]2012
What are some good ways to insult an Information Architect?
Ask them if they’ve started calling themselves a UX designer yet, or if they’ve jumped straight to Service Design :)
[... 36 words]Are there any good examples of ’large amounts of information being displayed simply and intuitively?’
Much of Edward Tufte’s career has been dedicated to documenting (and inventing) ways of handling these problems—his books are an absolute joy to browse through: http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/
[... 75 words]How do you make an existing web application more mobile-friendly without rebuilding it?
Learn about responsive web design. Provided your site is built reasonably well using CSS for layout there is a TON of stuff you can do with CSS media queries to make your site work better on small screen devices. For example, using media queries to detect small screen (mobile) devices you can...
[... 147 words]Which sites do a good job of guiding first time users?
The Twitter sign up process is fascinating, and constantly evolves. I create a new Twitter account every six months or so just to see what their latest iteration looks like.
[... 157 words]What activities, games or examples have you used to persuade developers that they are different from ’real’ users?
I doubt there’s anything as effective as getting them to watch a well-run usability test—either a video, a fancy one-way glass setup or just having them quietly observe a zero-budget testing session in a coffee shop.
[... 62 words]Why does Facebook Comments Box only support two levels of hierarchy?
I’ve heard in the past that regular (i.e. non-geek) users often have enormous trouble understanding hierarchical comments—they don’t understand tree based file systems either.
[... 65 words]2011
What is the “best” programming language to learn if you want to mockup your own ideas but don’t have a technical background?
I knew a very talented UX designer at Yahoo! who did all of his interactive mockups in PowerPoint—including widgets that you click to transition to another “page” in the interface. I’ve heard of people doing the same thing in Keynote, and OmniGraffle Pro also has tools for creating interactive mockups.
[... 111 words]What are some good user interface/user experience workshops/conferences coming up this March(p.s. distance isn’t a factor, I’m willingly to travel)?
We have a list on http://lanyrd.com/topics/user-ex...—the best option in March looks to be Adaptive Path’s MX conference: http://lanyrd.com/2011/mx/ / http://mxconference.com/
[... 51 words]What are the best free resources to begin learning UX design?
We’re collecting videos and slides from conference sessions covering user experience on Lanyrd—here’s 10 videos and 14 slide decks:
[... 42 words]2010
What UX/UI conferences in the SF Bay area are worth attending?
BayCHI is excellent from what I’ve heard: http://www.baychi.org/
[... 50 words]To what extent is it still valid to assume that your web app users are stupid?
They’re not stupid, but they’re probably WAY less web literate than you might expect—unlike you, they haven’t spent their entire career learning how the web works. See the famous “What is a browser?” video the Google Chrome team released:
[... 71 words]Why doesn’t Facebook use nicer URLs?
Just noticed this link: http://www.facebook.com/notes/fa...—so it looks like things are beginning to improve.
[... 28 words]