UX for Beginners A Crash Course in 100 Short Lessons

Highlights

Everything has a user experience. Your job is not to create the user experience. Your job is to make it good.

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A user’s experience is just the tip of the iceberg: Many people mistakenly think that “UX” means a user’s experience, but it is actually about “doing” the process of User Experience Design. A user’s individual experience is their conscious, subjective opinion of your app or site. User feedback is important—sometimes—but UX designers need to do a lot more than that.

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UX Design (also sometimes called UXD) involves a process very similar to doing science: you do research to understand the users, you develop ideas to solve the users’ needs—and the needs of the business—and you build and measure those solutions in the real world to see if they work.

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The Five Main Ingredients of UX User Experience design is a process, and these lessons roughly follow that process, but you should always keep these five things in mind: Psychology, Usability, Design, Copywriting, and Analysis.

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Psychology A user’s mind is complex. You should know; you have one, (I assume). UXers work with subjective thoughts and feelings a lot; they can make or break your results. And the designer must ignore their own psychology sometimes, too, and that’s hard! Ask yourself: What is the user’s motivation to be here in the first place? How does this make them feel? How much work does the user have to do to get what they want? What habits are created if they do this over and over? What do they expect when they click this? Are you assuming they know something that they haven’t learned yet? Is this something they want to do again? Why? How often? Are you thinking of the user’s wants and needs, or your own? How are you rewarding good behavior?

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Usability If user psychology is mostly subconscious, usability is mostly conscious. You know when something is confusing. There are cases where it is more fun if something is hard—like a game—but for everything else, we want it to be so easy that even a (moron) could use it. Ask yourself: Could you get the job done with less input from the user? Are there any user mistakes you could prevent? (Hint: Yes, there are.) Are you being clear and direct, or is this a little too clever? Is it easy to find (good), hard to miss (better), or subconsciously expected (best)? Are you working with the user’s assumptions or against them? Have you provided everything the user needs to know? Could you solve this just as well by doing something more common? Are you basing your decisions on your own logic or categories, or the user’s intuition? How do you know? If the user doesn’t read the fine print, does it still work/make sense?

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Design As the UX designer, your definition of “design” will be much less artistic than a lot of designers. Whether you “like it” is irrelevant. In UX, design is how it works, and it’s something you can prove; it’s not a matter of style. Ask yourself: Do users think it looks good? Do they trust it immediately? Does it communicate the purpose and function without words? Does it represent the brand? Does it all feel like the same site? Does the design lead the user’s eyes to the right places? How do you know? Do the colors, shapes, and typography help people find what they want and improve usability of the details? Do clickable things look different than nonclickable things?

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Copywriting There is a huge difference between writing brand copy (text) and writing UX copy. Brand copy supports the image and values of the company. UX copy gets shit done as directly and simply as possible. Ask yourself: Does it sound confident and tell the user what to do? Does it motivate the user to complete their goal? Is that what we want? Is the biggest text the most important text? Why not? Does it inform the user or does it assume that they already understand? Does it reduce anxiety? Is it clear, direct, simple, and functional?

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Analysis In my opinion, most designers’ weak spot is analysis. But we can fix that! Analysis is the main thing that separates UX from other types of design, and it makes you extremely valuable. It literally pays to be good at it. So, ask yourself: Are you using data to prove that you are right, or to learn the truth? Are you looking for subjective opinions or objective facts? Have you collected information that can give you those types of answers? Do you know why users do that, or are you interpreting their behavior? Are you looking at absolute numbers, or relative improvements? How will you measure this? Are you measuring the right things? Are you looking for bad results, too? Why not? How can you use this analysis to make improvements?

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Know Thyself There are two things you need to be aware of, about yourself, before you can start understanding users well: You want things that don’t matter to users. You know things that don’t matter to users.

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What we want by nature might not be what the users want. And that’s a big deal. It means your intuition about the users might be wrong! Do research. Talk to users. Study the data. Cuddle some puppies. When you truly understand a problem, it becomes your problem, emotionally. That’s empathy. You will feel it. A good solution will excite you. Not because you’re an emotional superhero, but because you relate to the users.

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Ask yourself: If you have to choose between a feature for your users or having this design in your portfolio, what will you choose? If users don’t like your design, what would probably be the reason? Have you actually tried the software, or are you just clicking “next” to get through it?

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Designing for people who know less than you is a core part of UX. Not people who are dumber than you. People who know less. You know that your site gets more powerful if you customize it, but users don’t. You know that your menu categories match the teams in your company, but users don’t. And you know your prices are high because licensing fees make your content expensive to make, but users don’t. If users don’t know, users don’t care. And sometimes even when they do know, they don’t care! Licensing fees? That’s your problem. They can get a pirated copy for free. Ask yourself: If you didn’t read the text, would you understand? If a user only had a few clicks to find what they want, would this design be your best bet? Are you judging a feature based on the time it will take to build it or the value to the user? Are you assuming users will click it just because it exists? (They won’t.)

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A good design communicates three things: What is this? What is the benefit for the user? What should they do next?

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“What Is This?” It is always a good idea to have a title or an image (or both) that answers the question: “what is this?” Seems pretty basic, right? But it’s amazing how many websites forget to do it. Why? Because we already know. But the user doesn’t. Is it an article? A registration form? A party for people who love lemons? A place to see goats? Your gerbil’s secret YouTube channel? Just tell them. Directly. And use simple words. Nobody is excited when you pull out the dictionary at a party. Especially not a lemon party.

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“What’s in It for Me?” This is the “why” of user experience. What can the user gain? It is better to show users what they will get, rather than tell them. You can use a video, demo, example images, free trial, sample content, testimonials, or several of those things! The best answers to “what is it?” also tell you a little about what you get. For example, “A global network of megalomaniacs cooperating to conquer the world and share funny cat pics.” That tells you what it is, and what you get (assuming you’re a megalomaniac who loves cats). REMEMBER You’re saying what’s in it for them. Not why you want them to register/buy/click. User motivation is a thousand times more valuable than beauty or usability—for the company—but how much time do you spend talking about it at work?

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“What Do I Do?” If the user understands what it is and they are motivated to know or see more, their next action should be obvious in your design. It could be something small, like “What do I click now?” or “How do I register?” It could be something bigger, like “How do I get started?” or “How do I buy?” or “Where do I get more training?” There is always a “next” step. Sometimes there are a few possibilities. It’s up to you to figure out what the users might need, and tell them how to get

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Solutions are ideas with meaning for other people. Unlike most artists and designers, UX designers do not focus on the ideas that have meaning for themselves. You should care a lot about creativity, but if your ideas are not meaningful for other people—the users—then they are not meaningful for you. That means you have to spend a lot of time trying to understand problems that mean nothing to you. And that might feel unnatural at first. That’s why UX is a unique, valuable job: it’s tricky.

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Solutions are ideas that can be wrong. In UX, we can test things. We can design more than one solution to the same problem and see which one is better. And we can ask users which solution they prefer. This means that UX is a special kind of design: it can be wrong. And we can prove that it is wrong. And the same solution can be right for one site, and wrong for another! Just because Twitter does it, doesn’t mean it’s right for you.

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User Goals and Business Goals When you start a new UX project—before you design anything—you need to understand your goals. Two of them. And nothing is more important to your success as a UX designer. User Goals Users always want something because they are people, and people always want something. Whether they are peeking at an ex on Facebook, trying to find their next ex on a dating site, or looking for sneezing pandas on YouTube, they want something. They might also want to do something productive (or so I am told). There is a whole section about user research starting on page 61. For now, just assume you know stuff. Business Goals Every organization has a reason for creating a site or app in the first place. Typically it’s money, but it might be brand awareness, or getting new members for a community, etc. The specific type of business goal is important. If you want to show more ads, your UX strategy will be a lot different than if you want to sell products or promote via social media. These things are often called “metrics” or “Key Performance Indicators” (KPIs) by the business-y folks.

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UX Is Not an Event or a Task If you ever hear someone talk about UX like it is a one-time thing, or a moment in time, or a task that someone needs to do, feel free to interrupt. That’s wrong. A UX designer is not “the person who does the UX part”. That’s like saying that the water is just the wet part of your drink. Without the process of doing UX, you will have bad UX by default. There is no such thing as “no UX.” Even shitty products give the user an experience. The experience of homicidal rage. You need to get involved in several places, at many times, to design and protect a good user experience.

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Company Has a Process, Too Your process as a UX designer is for you to gather the information you need, research the users, design the solution, make sure it is implemented properly, and measure the results. But, the company you

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A Company Has a Process, Too Your process as a UX designer is for you to gather the information you need, research the users, design the solution, make sure it is implemented properly, and measure the results.

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And if the process just makes your life a living hell—like if they want you to work with something evil called “sprints”—then tell somebody that you’re having difficulty! There might be a better way. If a company’s process forces you to do bad work, the process might be wrong for UX.

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DO NOT LIE ABOUT UX. EVER. If you don’t know the answer to a question, admit it, and say you will find out. There is no room for bullshit in UX. UX is widely misunderstood, and if your bullshit turns out to be false, the rest of us will want to leave a horse head in your bed. (Not good.) Lying in UX makes us all look bad. Your opinion isn’t better than anyone else’s. Make sure your information is.

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Why Do We Need User Psychology? The answer: you can’t be a great UX designer without psychology. UX Design is the practice of creating nonrandom effects in people to solve a problem. In other words, you make them feel, think, and do stuff—on purpose. Therefore, the more you understand your users’ feelings, thoughts, and actions, the better designer you are. Understanding psychology allows you to answer things like why people share. Or why don’t they choose the cheapest option every time? Or why does the design that got 200 Likes on Dribbble actually suck the big one? (Yes, that’s possible. Actually, it’s pretty common.) The answers might not be what you think! Your intuition lies to you all the time. (You’ll learn about that in Lesson 33.) And sometimes the same design looks different to different people. You’ll learn about that, too. And some things that seem super personal are actually universal human behavior. Guess what? You’ll learn about that, too.

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There are six big parts of an experience discussed throughout this book: What the user feels In UX forums, this is what inexperienced designers talk about most. Making the user “happy.” Asking them what they “like.” Making users say “wow!” Users have feelings, and they are useful, but they are only a small fraction of an experience. The good things about feelings are that we can see them on a user’s face, users can tell us about them, we can measure them, and we can relate to them, so feelings are easy to study. What the user wants Much more important, but not as easy for the user to describe. A user’s motivations are the engine of their behavior. Everything they do, click, choose, buy, and even what they see and hear depends on what they want. “When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” And if you change the way they see the situation, sometimes they will want something different. What the user thinks It is helpful to imagine “thinking” as something the user carries, like bricks. Psychologists might call it cognitive load. Every time you make a user figure something out, or read more than a sentence of instructions, or learn a new feature, or hunt for the right link, or do two things at once, you’re giving them another brick to carry. Most people can only carry a few bricks at a time. If you give them too many, they will drop everything. What the user believes Beliefs are tricky. The reasons people believe things are fairly predictable though. That’s why you learned about psychology versus culture before this lesson. More important, your intuition has predictable flaws that most people don’t know about. If you know about them—and you will—it allows you to predict what people will believe, before they believe it. What the user remembers Ironically, almost all designers forget about this one. Humans do not remember things like a video. Memories make mistakes. We only remember certain parts, we change those memories over time, and sometimes we remember things that never even happened! Your design can determine which parts someone remembers, and which are forgotten. What the user doesn’t realize Ahhhh, yes. This separates good UX designers from other random people making wireframes. Most of our daily experience doesn’t catch our attention. You have been breathing this whole time, but now you’re aware of it. There’s a low, constant noise all around you, but you weren’t hearing it until right now. And that itch you just noticed… oh god… it’s so itchy… UX designers must also design things that users will never notice, never give you feedback on, and maybe never remember, like information architecture (which has a whole section in this book) and heuristics (models of how your users act). But that’s a good thing! Unfortunately, though, no client will ever sit in a meeting and compliment you for it, (because they don’t see it either). Those design elements will change the user’s behavior, and only the data can show you how.

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Instead—I give you the simplest practical model of emotions known to mankind: There are two categories of emotions: gain and loss. Emotions are reactions, not goals. Time makes emotions more complicated.

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Gain and Loss Emotions come in two flavors: good and bad; positive and negative; happy and unhappy. Pretty easy so far, right? I call them gain and loss. Gains give you positive feelings. You might feel refreshed after a good night’s sleep, or ecstatic after winning the lottery, or euphoric when your masseuse is a little more thorough than usual. For now, just put them all in the same “happy” category. Losses give you negative feelings. You feel grumpy when you haven’t slept, or devastated after a breakup, or embarrassed when your masseuse turns out to be your cousin. For now, just put them all in the same “unhappy” category.

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Emotions Are Reactions, Not Goals If I locked you in a dark box and gave you chemicals that would make you feel happy, forever, and then shot that box out into space, alone, with no communication, and you can’t move or control anything, would you consider that a good thing? Hmmm… maybe not. If you only make users “happy” it’s like putting them in that box. Five minutes later, not so great. There are two types of feelings: emotions and motivations. Motivations are what we want (goals), and emotions are how we feel when we gain or lose what we want (feedback). We’ll learn about motivations next.

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Time Makes Emotions More Complicated Your emotions, or your “mood,” change all the time. Within reason, that’s normal. If it’s extreme, you should probably see somebody about getting on reality television. But it’s not all about here-and-now. You think in time. You remember the past and expect the future. When you see a box wrapped in colorful paper, you think: gift! When someone says “we need to talk” you think: crap. The “gift” might be full of snakes, but you will be happy until you know that. If you expect something bad to happen—like if the box is labeled “muthafuckin’ snakes!”—you feel fear (or “worry” or “concern”: if it’s negative, it’s negative). You will avoid it or try to escape. Unless you’re on a muthafuckin’ plane. A more interesting emotion, in my opinion, is anger. If you want/expect something, but you can’t get it, you will become aggressive toward whatever is stopping you. This is how emotions interact with time. When someone says “we need to talk” your first reaction is probably fear. You want to keep your job or your relationship, or whatever you think they are going to destroy. But when they actually do try to destroy it, you might get aggressive. Now they are stopping you from having it. When they succeed, you’re sad, (loss). If they change their mind, you’re happy, (gain).

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The last lesson explained that emotions are reactions based on whether someone gains or loses their goals. But what goals? Motivations. That’s what. Motivations are built-in psychological needs. Shit we want. Some are physical—you need them to survive—and some exist only in your mind. All are important. Motivations can fall anywhere between conscious experience and subconscious experience. You can gain or lose each motivation, and you are motivated to do both. That will become very useful in UX, when you learn about conditioning. Motivations are relative. That means it’s not about how much you get, it’s about how much more you get compared to what you have or what other people have. In my book, The Composite Persuasion, I outline 14 things that all people, everywhere, want. At least six of those motivations can be useful to you in (digital) UX and three of those are the foundation of gamification and social networks, like Facebook or Twitter. When you know how to use them, human motivations are UX magic in a bottle.

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This might sound absurd or surprising, but porn sites are actually some of the most active businesses when it comes to A/B testing and optimizing their designs, advertising, and search experience. It’s an incredibly competitive industry, and they even have to consider one-handed navigation. Seriously! We are also motivated to protect our chances of getting sex. A simple bit of text can create a lot of motivation, like: “Profiles with more photos are usually more popular.” Once a user knows that, do you really think they will stick with one photo? More photos = better UX for everyone.

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Affiliation Belong to a group. Any group. The fans of a team. People with “UX” in their job title. People from your home country. People who fish on the weekends. People who hate people who fish on weekends. Whatever. Being part of a group (or believing we are part of it) makes us feel proud. We wear their colors, sing their songs, buy their swag, display their symbols, etc. It could be a sports team, a band, a school, a country, or just your family. If your group has an opponent, there is a good chance you will hate that opponent. If your group has a common belief, there is a good chance you will hate anyone who disagrees with that belief.

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Status Decide for yourself. Call it freedom, or autonomy, or responsibility, or authority, or control, or rebellion. One way or another, you wanna be the boss, at least of yourself. People always want to be in charge of themselves and their own decisions, even when someone else might do a better job, like when buying stocks or when that freedom might create more risk (like getting more responsibility at work). You should let users have control, but help them make better decisions if you can and eliminate any chance of a major screw-up. Confirm dangerous choices or make those choices hard to do accidentally—“are you sure you want to launch the nukes, Mr. President?”

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Go to Twitter. Try to find a profile description of a real person that does not name any group they are part of, any status they have achieved, or anything they morally believe or support. (Blank profiles don’t count, cheater.) If you find one, let me know:

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Understanding is the motivation to get information about a situation that involves the other 13 motivations. Sometimes we call it curiosity. We are also motivated to protect what we already understand. The funny thing about Understanding is that—even though it’s pretty simple—designers and marketers screw it up all the time. There are three rules for creating curiosity: The user must understand enough to know there will be a gain or loss in one of the other 13 motivations. The bigger the gain or loss seems to be, the more interesting it becomes. Hold something back. The illustration for this lesson is similar to the original iPhone’s website. You see just enough to know that it’s better than the not-so-smart phone in your pocket, but the specifics are hidden. Voilá! You’re curious. If the iPhone looked like every other phone at the time, you wouldn’t have felt curious, because you wouldn’t “get it.”

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How to Screw It Up The best way to suck at making people curious is to offer them something that isn’t one of the other 13 motivations. Ironically, the most common example of this is a chance to win an iPhone or iPad. First: everyone already understands an iPhone or an iPad. No curiosity. Second: it’s only a chance to win something that a lot of people already have (remember that Status is relative to other people.) So, the gain in Status is actually pretty small, unless you have no way to get an iPhone like if you’re a kid, or you can’t afford an iPhone, etc. Instead, think of a way to make your product seem like a motivational gain, or not having your product seem like a loss. Stop trying to motivate people with a chance to get free shit. AS A UX DESIGNER You also have to consider the case when users want to understand, of course. Users will choose something they understand over something they don’t, if you give them a choice. It doesn’t matter which one is actually better. When you change or remove features, avoid using curiosity as a marketing strategy. Tell users what is coming, tell them why, show how it will work, and give them time to adjust, (if you can). Otherwise, users will be angry or afraid, because you’re taking away something they already understand. That’s a loss.

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Different People Will Say That User Research Happens at Different Stages in the Process Some say you should do it first. Some say you make some drawings and do it then. Some say you do it after building a working product. They are all right. There is never a bad time to do user research. Do it early, do it often. The important question isn’t when. It’s what. As in “what are you trying to learn about your users?” There are two main types of information that you can get from research

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Subjective Research The word “subjective” means that it is an opinion, or a memory, or your impression of something. The feeling it gives you. The expectations it creates. Not a fact. “What is your favorite color?” “Do you trust this company?” “Does my ass look fat in these pants?” (i.e., There is no right answer.) To get subjective information you have to ask people questions.

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Objective Research The word “objective” means a fact. Something true. Something you can prove. Your opinion doesn’t change it, no matter how hard you wish. “How long did you spend using our app?” “Where did you find the link to our site?” “What size are those pants?” If people had perfect memories and never lied (especially to themselves), you could ask them about this stuff. If you find someone like that, let me know. Objective data comes in the form of measurements and statistics. But, just because you can count something doesn’t make it objective or “data.” The plural of “anecdote” is not “evidence.” —A wise person. For example, if 102 people vote that something is good and 50 people vote that it’s bad, the only objective information you have is the number of people that voted. Whether it is “good” or “bad” is still a subjective opinion. With me so far? (If not, I will blame myself for explaining badly, not you for reading badly.)

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Sample Size As a general rule, more people makes for more reliable information, even if it is subjective. One opinion could be completely wrong. If a million people agree, it is a good representation of the crowd’s beliefs (but could still be false, objectively). So collect as much info as possible for your research.

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User research is very important and you should do it. But make sure you are asking users about what they think and feel, not what you should do next. You Are Not Testing the Users; They Are Testing You As the designer, you will be in a position of authority when you do user testing, but don’t let it go to your head. The users are testing your design. If they don’t do what you want them to do or if they don’t understand, that’s your fault, not theirs. And if you lead them to the right answers by asking leading questions or giving them tips that normal users won’t get, the test is ruined. You ain’t proved nothin’. So when users are doing tests or giving answers, shut up and observe.

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Users Are Not a Crystal Ball UX is a set of skills, not a talent. Which means the average user can’t help you do it, and it is a terrible choice if you’re competing on X-Factor. Therefore, your job is to listen to what the users say, not to be their design monkey. Listen to what users think, watch how they try to get things done, and understand how and why they get lost in your designs. Then go find solutions to those problems. Don’t ask users how they want their problems solved If users think the button should be blue, or wish they could see all the products arranged by country of origin, or want you to smash little cymbals together and wear a cute little red hat, you can make note of it. But, if it doesn’t help you achieve your UX goals, it probably isn’t valuable right now. Ideas and solutions are different things.

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Consensus Is Not a UX Strategy Many designers think that a good way to find the best solution is to ask their colleagues. It’s not. You should include colleagues in the design process to identify their requirements for the project and keep channels of communication open in general. That’s what “working together” means. But just because people at your company really love that button that makes a fart sound when you tap it—who doesn’t?!—doesn’t mean your users need it. And that includes you. You are a person at your company whose opinion doesn’t matter. User research is not a way to confirm your beliefs; it’s a way to discover them.

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How Many Users Do You Need? Should you go for the wisdom of the crowd, or should you trust your most loyal users? Should you ask the people who know the most about your designs, or the beginners who have fresh eyes? This is a very common question, and a good one. How many users should you include in your user research to make sure that you get all the information you need? Well, it depends, actually. The Less Obvious the Problem, the More People You Need to Find It Let’s say there are two problems with your design: Most people don’t notice the button that opens the menu. Your pricing page makes it seem like your product is not free, but it is. Both are real issues I have seen in testing. Let’s say the menu problem affects one out of every three people. That means you need at least three users to find the problem with the menu (it’s more like four or five in real life). And let’s say the pricing problem affects 1 out of every 20 people. That means you need at least 20 users to find the problem with the menu (again, it’s more like 30 or 40 in real life). So if you get five test users—a common practice for user testing—you’ll probably find the menu problem and miss the pricing problem. D’oh! Since real services often only convert a few people out of 20 anyway, that pricing issue might be a significant amount of your sales! That is why face-to-face testing is useful, but not reliable in isolation.

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Important Ask the same questions, the same way, to everyone. Avoid interpreting questions or suggesting answers. People might lie to avoid embarrassment or if it seems like you prefer a particular answer. Take notes or record the interview. Do not rely on your memory, ever.

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Watch How They Choose, Not Just What They Choose One of the most common mistakes for new UX designers is to ignore the process and only record the results. The more the user doesn’t do what you expect, the more useful the testing is. If you just end up with a page full of notes that say “complete” and “incomplete,” you still know nothing. Instead, record how they navigate to the solution, why they think it is where it is, what clues they used to find it (or not), and whether they think they have completed the task or not.

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Remember: Your Memory Sucks Use video, take notes, have two people observing, or all of the above, because as my mom would say, “You can’t trust your memory any farther than you can throw it.” But that’s a confusing metaphor in this case, so just make sure you record your research as it’s happening. Don’t rely on memory.

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Read Between the Lines Users often have body language or facial expressions or say, “hmmm…,” or move their mouse in a way that reveals their thoughts and feelings during the test. If you have video of the screen and their face, you can take advantage of those real-time clues later.

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Do Not Help It will be very tempting to help a user who is confused or uncomfortable because they don’t understand. Resist that temptation! The moment you help a user, or give them a hint, or point to something useful, the test is ruined because you are now testing the design instead of them. Letting users fail is sometimes the most useful result you can get.

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What Is Card Sorting? Not a way to win Blackjack more often. Unfortunately. Basically, you give each user a set of topics or ideas written on “cards”—maybe types of content or features you’re considering—and ask them to organize the cards into categories that make sense to the user. Card sorting can literally be a bunch of recipe cards, or you can use an online tool to simulate it. By doing this with many users and then documenting the relationships they create between cards, you will learn which ideas or features are most related in the minds of the users, and it will help you design menus and information architecture. It sounds a bit complex, but I have done this with a whole class of students in 15 minutes, during the class, using online tools. It took about an hour to create cards for an agency’s future site content—before the students arrived—and the students were able to sort them quickly while I ignored them completely, like the amazing teacher that I am. The software did all the work of measuring the patterns in their choices and probably saved me hours of work. Voilá!

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Creating User Profiles Just like marketers have a target audience, UX designers have user profiles or personas: descriptions of users, based on research. What

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What a Profile Is Not First of all, let’s nail down what personas or profiles are not: Personality types Demographics Characters in your “brand story” Stereotypes based on your experience Shallow or one-dimensional Concepts Predictions

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So, What Is a User Profile/Persona? Profiles or personas describe the goals, expectations, motivations, and behavior of real people. Why do they come to your site? What are they looking for? What makes them nervous? And so on. All the information you need should be in your research and data. If you can’t back it up with research or data, you’re just making shit up and you should stop.

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Think of “Ideal” Users; Several of Them! When you think about features, think of the most valuable version of the users you see in real life. You’re not trying to support the current behavior; you’re trying to nudge those users toward an “ideal” version of themselves. Also remember that all users are not alike! You will probably have a few different behavioral groups, and they all deserve a good profile.

▶ 35:05

Many people think “mobile first” has something to do with mobile being popular. Kind of, but not really: if you design for the smallest, least powerful device first, then you will focus on the content and your core functionality. That leads to simple, beautiful apps/sites. If you do it the other way around, it’ll be like trying to put a marshmallow into a piggy bank, which is neither simple, nor beautiful.

▶ 35:29

This one is a bit advanced, but I think you’re ready for it. Can you use your phone and computer together, like a remote and a TV? Could a group of phones control a game on a tablet, all in the same room? What if you’re logged in on two devices, can you “throw” data from one to the other? Can the location of one device be used on another? What about syncing information; will that cause issues in real-time? What if two users log in to the same account at the same time, on different devices? Give it some thought!

▶ 35:54

Intuition is often called common sense. Or, your “gut feeling.” And some people believe they have a special talent for intuition (nope). But, for everyone, your intuition always feels true. However, common sense isn’t as common as you might think. Intuition is not something you are born with. Trust me, babies make terrible UX designers. Intuition is constructed from your experiences; you expect certain things based on what you have experienced before.

▶ 36:27

The tricky part for many people is that your beloved intuition can also be wrong when there is a right answer. Really, really often.

▶ 36:59

A UX Designer’s Job Is to Design for Other People’s Gut Feelings Not your own. When it comes to thousands or millions of users, “intuitive” means that most people understand it, regardless of whether you are included in “most people.” You know too much, remember?! Saying your own design is intuitive is like saying you are the smartest person in the mirror. You need data and user feedback to know for sure. That’s how I know that I am the smartest person in my mirror.

▶ 37:08

The first number you say affects the next number in someone’s head. For example, if you ask people to donate to a charity, they might give an average of $2. But if you “suggest” a donation of $10, the average will go up to something more like $5. Nothing changed, but you anchored donors to $10, which made $2 feel lower. Next time you want

▶ 37:37

The more people who believe something, the more likely it is that other people will believe it, too. Information doesn’t become more true or more false because lots of people believe it, but your brain doesn’t know that. Your mom always said, “If everybody jumped off a bridge, would you do it, too?” (Because all the other moms say that.) This is why you should usually show how many people have Liked, registered for, or shared something. It’s also why informercials say garbage like “a million people can’t be wrong!” Oh yes they can!

▶ 37:59

Decoy Effect This is one of my favorites. Imagine you want to subscribe to a newspaper, and these are the choices: Web Only: $10 Print Only: $25 Print & Web: $25 Which one is the best deal? After a few seconds to consider it, there is about an 80% chance that you think Print & Web is the best value. Why? Because the Print Only price is the “decoy”—nobody will choose it. Its only purpose is to make the most expensive price look like a good deal. Even though nobody chooses it, if you remove it, about 60% of people will choose the cheapest option instead.

▶ 38:30

Many new designers think about user choices as a random event. The users could pick anything! Well, sort of. They can choose randomly, but they won’t. And they shouldn’t. Sometimes, it really doesn’t matter (to us) what the user chooses. But sometimes it is the difference between success and failure. Always give users the options they need, and make sure everything is easy to find, but—as a UX designer—you can also maximize your own goals, without sacrificing anything for the user.

▶ 39:09

The Paradox of Choice In theory, choosing nothing is always an option. The more options you offer someone, the harder it is to choose. That’s called the Paradox of Choice. If the user can’t decide, they will leave. Providing lots of options might feel like “something for everyone,” but you’re actually giving every user a small aneurysm. Choosing carefully from three things is easy. Choosing carefully from 30 things is impossible.

▶ 39:39

What You See Is All There Is Most people will only consider the choices that they are offered, even if other possibilities exist. On the TV show The Bachelor, you never hear him say, “The second rose goes to… the camera guy, Bruce.” Bruce might deserve that rose, but he’s not an option. If The Bachelor could still choose from everyone on Planet Earth, it wouldn’t be a good show. Whether you’re designing shipping options, or subscription features, or survey questions, this is important. Every choice should take the user closer to their goal, and you can design the choices so they are good for your goals in the process.

▶ 40:06

Choose Defaults Wisely Dan Ariely’s Ted Talk about decision-making includes one of the best examples of good/bad defaults that I have seen. In a nutshell: countries that made people choose to be an organ donor got very few people to do it. Countries that made people choose not to be an organ donor had more than 90% organ donors. It’s easier for a user do nothing than to do something. The lazy option should be the best one for your company and—ideally—for the user. If the user can truly choose “anything”—like a pay-what-you-want situation—then anchoring is the way to set a default in their mind.

▶ 40:42

Comparisons Are Everything Users are choosing things based on comparing their options. Therefore, you should create comparisons that make your preferred options look better. In the previous lesson, we learned about the Decoy Effect. That’s one way to make an option look better. Here are some more: You can point out which option is the “best value,” or the “most popular,” or “most edible.” You can present subscriptions as “per month” or “per day” prices so users can see that yearly subscriptions are cheaper per month, even though they are more expensive in total. Describe which type of people should choose each option. Which one is more you? Many products have a “pro” version so it comes with some status. Are you an amateur or a pro? Put your features in a list so the user can see what they “lose” by choosing the free version instead of the premium version. Have a sale! Forever! Include the “regular” price so users can see how much they are “saving.” Make sure they save the most on the most profitable option.

▶ 41:20

Here are a few ways to get the attention of users: Motion This is the highest-ranking part of your visual system, so when something moves, your attention is drawn to it by reflex. But if everything is moving, the stationary item gets the attention. Surprise This is not the same thing as “shock” or “delight”—this is the principle behind pattern breaking in Lesson 54. When something doesn’t match what we expect, we notice. Big text This usually indicates the “main information” in the design, so our eyes tend to go there first. Sound Audible alerts can be one of the most annoying things on the Internet, but it does get your attention. When used more elegantly, it works well. Contrast and Color These can make parts of your design jump out from your peripheral vision. Users will notice those parts without looking directly at them.

▶ 42:22

might be fun when people comment on that all-singing, all-dancing User Interface (UI) detail somebody worked so hard on, but if that causes them to miss the Buy Button, it’s a bad design choice. If a UX designer wants to design “everything a user can experience,” she’s missing the point of attention.

▶ 43:12

UX isn’t about creating a perfect world. It’s about eliminating everything that competes with our goals and user goals. Good UX is reductive, not expansive.

▶ 43:33

Your brain puts more emphasis on the experiences that have stronger feelings and more “novelty” (they grabbed your attention, at the time). Your brain is also good at remembering patterns and things you do over and over. That’s called practice, or a habit, or muscle memory.

▶ 43:46

If you buy a Macbook from Apple, the next email you get will be full of feature highlights. I’ll bet you a high-five that it changes the way you remember your reasons for buying.

▶ 44:03

It is useful to build patterns of clicks/touches that people can learn and repeat quickly. Think: Tinder swipes. It might be new at the beginning, but once users can do it easily, they will remember it as being obvious the whole time. (Photoshop, anyone?)

▶ 44:14

Many websites use your choices to improve your next visit. My Pinterest feed is about 80% things I like now, but my first experience was only about 10% things I liked. Same with Reddit. However, I just know that. I don’t remember it.

▶ 44:30

Hyperbolic Discounting might sound like a complex piece of mathematics, but it is actually a fairly simple idea: Whatever is happening to you now (or soon) seems more important than what will happen to you later (or in the future). It applies to your perception of value, and how you judge your own emotions, and how you make important decisions. It’s why most people don’t save money well, and why plans almost always take longer than expected. People get fat because eating unhealthy food is easier and more fun “now” than working out to be fit “later.” Usability is basically the idea of getting people to the things they want as close to “now” or with as little effort as possible. The more work it takes or the longer they have to wait, the worse the experience feels.

▶ 44:47

Motivations versus Time Earlier, in Lesson 15, you learned how time affects emotions, but not how it affects motivations. Check it out: Imagine that I offer you $100 now, or $120 next year. In real life, you would probably take $100 now, even though $120 is clearly more money. Now imagine you want something that costs $100 now, or $50 next year, or $10 per month over the next 12 months. In real life, most people will pay $10 per month—like you did with your smart phone—because it is the best option “now.” Even though that is the most expensive option later (do the math!).

▶ 45:35

Usability Is a Two-Way Street In UX, we talk about usability a lot. Most of the time we want things to be easier, faster, simpler. Those are things the user wants now. Everything in your design should be based on getting users to the most valuable actions as quickly and easily as possible. But your design should also make destructive actions more time consuming and unemotional so they feel less appealing. Like Facebook does. When you try to deactivate your Facebook account, it uses Hyperbolic Discounting to change your mind. The form is long and boring, so your emotions have time to decrease. Near the end, it shows you pictures of friends you will lose now, which replaces the impulsive motivation to destroy Facebook (and everything associated with it) later. Most people quit before deactivating, even though, technically, nothing is stopping them.

▶ 46:18

Information Architecture (IA) is the idea of giving a bunch of information some structure (i.e., organizing it, somehow). IA can be relatively simple with a small project, and incredibly complicated with a large project. IA is invisible. To work with it, we need to draw a site map.

▶ 47:11

There are no “rules” for drawing site maps, but here are some general guidelines: Just because it looks simple, doesn’t mean it makes sense. Keep it clear and readable. We usually draw top-to-bottom, not left-to-right. Don’t make a site map “fancy.” It’s a technical document, not a fashion show.

▶ 47:31

Deep or Flat, Not Both Generally speaking, your site map will either be very “flat”—which includes more sections in the menu and requires less clicks to reach the bottom—or your site map will be “deep”—simpler menus, but more clicks to get where you’re going. Notice that both of the structures in this example have the same number of pages. Equal, but different. Sites with a lot of products, like Wal-Mart, often need a deep architecture; otherwise, the menus get ridiculous. Sites like YouTube, which only has users and videos to deal with, are usually more flat. If your site is deep and flat, that’s bad. You might want to simplify your goals, or design a good search as a core feature. COMMON MYTH You might hear people say that everything should be “three clicks away” at all times. This means they learned UX in the ’90s and haven’t learned anything new since then. Focus on the user instead. Make sure they understand where they are and where they can go, at all times. If your navigation is easy and clear, the number of clicks is irrelevant.

▶ 47:50

Notice that nothing in the story tells me specifically how to solve or design those actions, just that they are possible. The purpose of these stories is to describe flows. Sequences of user choices. Not the final UI. If the flows are simple and effective, you are doing a good job (so far). Managers often think user stories are a way to order UX from the designer, but that is absolutely wrong. Why? Because a user story is basically a list of features or functions, and that has a major effect on the final solution. The UX Designer writes user stories to communicate to the team, not the other way around. That would be like telling Bob Ross what colors to use!

▶ 48:54

Things versus Containers Static design is more about the exact layout, because static design doesn’t “do” very much. The things you design just sort of… sit there… like a boss! For dynamic pages you have to design containers, not the content itself. You can never be exact. A space for any headline. A space for any product image. A space for 15,000 posts about anything from babies, to Bieber, to latté art, to Bieber as a baby, to Bieber as latté art, and so on. Containers can be different heights (short article or long article), different widths (short headline or a long headline), or they might even be empty sometimes!

▶ 49:38

Create No-Fail Scenarios If a really long headline will break your layout, change the layout or don’t allow people to make headlines that long. If your layout will completely go to hell because somebody posted a tiny little photo, change the layout, or don’t allow them to upload tiny little photos. Usually, it’s better if you change the layout. But don’t be afraid to create useful limitations so users will make more effective choices. 140 characters didn’t hurt Twitter, right? Just don’t be that designer who puts unnecessary limits on users because “This is the way the layout should be.” Users don’t like that guy.

▶ 50:17

Don’t Count Clicks or Pages The architect of Grand Central Station didn’t count how many steps people would take or how many doorways they would go through, because it doesn’t matter. It is more important to give people the right information at the right time so they know whether to turn left or right to find their train. A long hallway, like a flow with many pages, can be very simple to use, even though it’s long. And a short hallway with too many signs can be confusing, like a website with complex menus, even though it is “only” one choice.

▶ 50:54

Avoid Making a “Dead End” If you send a crowd of people into a hallway with no exit, you’re going to have problems, especially if someone farts. If users navigate through several pages only to arrive at a page with no “next step,” they will leave or get lost, or get angry. Make sure there is always somewhere to go, and make sure the users know how to get there.

▶ 51:26

Make Loops If You Want Users to Go Backward When I say a “loop,” I mean something like this: Page A links to Page B. Page B links to Page C. Page C links to Page A. The user can keep clicking forever without leaving your site. Let’s say this loop is your portfolio site. Page A shows the categories of work you have done. Page B is a list of projects within one category. Page C is details about one project. The user can pick a category, then a project, then read the details, and then navigate back to the categories without ever using the back button to navigate. They could see your entire portfolio without ever going “backward.” If users can always click forward, they never have to stop and decide where to go next. Decisions are hard. Doing the same thing over and over is easy.

▶ 51:48

“The First Taste Is Free” As any good drug dealer knows, nobody can be addicted to something they haven’t tried. So your mission is to get the user to a positive emotion within a minute or less, on the first visit. This is so important, in my opinion, that you should not launch anything until you achieve it.

▶ 52:37

The difference between a game and a nongame has nothing to do with badges and points. It’s all about the psychology. Game design can be very nuanced, but let’s start with some fundamentals. One of the trendiest things in UX over the past few years have been the idea of adding “game mechanics” to things that aren’t actually games. One thing that games do very well is structuring rewards and punishments in a way that leads users through a series of goals. If you want to that, too, you came to the right place. You will learn two major elements of game design: Feedback Loops Progressive Challenges What Is a Feedback Loop?

▶ 52:55

Keep users informed So simple, yet so neglected. Think about what users need to make a purchase or register. Will there be shipping costs? Will you share my email address? Will I get spam? Will you charge my credit card immediately? Just tell them up front! It is better to tell the truth than let the user worry about it. Even when the truth isn’t the answer the users wants.

▶ 53:32

Use simple words It is a myth that complicated language makes you more persuasive. Just speak like a normal person would speak. The more complicated you get, the fewer people will understand. Nobody trusts what they don’t understand.

▶ 53:55

Power Users Are the Minority Statistically-speaking, it is impossible for advanced or power users to be “most” of the people using your design; although it can be very tempting to believe that. Unless your product/service is highly technical, the vast majority of your users will be normal people with other stuff to do. Not super-focused, tech-savvy people like you and your colleagues.

▶ 54:11

Hidden versus Visible: The Paradox of Choice In most projects, there will be situations where you have to decide how “clean” you want your layout to be. Designers will usually choose to hide everything because it looks better. Non-designers will want all of their favorite features to be visible all of the time, which will be a different set of features for each person. So, how do you choose? Visible features will always be used more and discovered more than hidden features. We are reminded that they exist every time we see them. However, the “Paradox of Choice” says the more options you see, the less likely you are to choose any of them. So, if you overload normal users with too many choices, they will freak out and run away screaming. Make sure beginners can find the core features easily. Ideally, without clicking anything. And try to give power users easy access to advanced features, even if they aren’t visible all the time. PROTIP Have you hidden 20 social media options behind a single “share” button? Are you excited about how much cleaner it looks?! Unfortunately, you haven’t designed a “simple” interface. You have just crippled your sharing features because there are too many choices and nobody can see them. Counterintuitive, right? Choose a few options and make them visible all of the time. You’ll thank me later.

▶ 54:35

you design your interface so people have to ask for something—like search—they will only use the features they can remember. This means that, over time, they will use fewer and fewer features. Not more and more.

▶ 55:50

Contrast The difference between light things and dark things is called contrast. The more distinguishable a light thing is compared to a dark thing, the “higher” the contrast. In UX, you want to give important things higher contrast, like the duck in the center. In this case, most of the image is light, so a dark duck is more noticeable. If the image were mostly dark, the lighter duck would be more noticeable. If these were buttons, more people would click the dark one than if all the buttons were the same color.

▶ 56:04

Depth and Size In the real world, we notice things that are close to us more than things that are far away. In the digital world, bigger things are perceived to be closer, like the middle duck in the second illustration, and something that is smaller is perceived to be farther away (like the blurry duck in the back.) If the ducks were all the same size, you would probably look at them from left to right (assuming you read that way). If you use blur effects or shadows it just makes the perception of depth more realistic. Size has this effect even if your design looks “flat.” As a general rule, you want more important things to be bigger than less important things. This creates a visual “hierarchy” on the page and makes it easier to scan, but it also allows you to choose what the user notices first. That’s why it’s wrong to “make the logo bigger,” unless you want users to stare at your logo instead of buying something.

▶ 56:37

Combine Your Principles To make a pattern or a sequence, keep visual weight and color consistent. The user’s eye will start at one end and follow the pattern to the other end. To break the pattern, just switch it up in the place where you want to add focus. Make the “Register Now” button an unexpected color, size, shape, or style, and watch your clicks go up overnight!

▶ 57:30

If Motion Makes People Wait, It’s Bad Before you start designing amazing transitions between screens, and smooth animated buttons, and parallax gravity in your scrolling, think about the user. If the user is trying to navigate, or if they know what is coming, or if they have to see this animation a hundred times every time they use your site or app, you might be doing more harm than good. Animations take time to show, and making users wait quickly gets frustrating. Even worse than waiting, sometimes animations make things hard to read, or they distract users from the content and buttons you want them to read and click.

▶ 57:53

wireframe is a planning document. It is a technical instruction document for the “builders.” Wireframes allow us to say insightful stuff like, “Oops, I forgot the main menu!” in the same way an architect could say, “Oops, I forgot the front door!” Still, many people have a broad misunderstanding of wireframes and use them incorrectly. The following is a list of what wireframes are not. See if you recognize yourself in any of the Top 5 unforgivable (!) wireframe sins:

▶ 58:30

Wireframes should be taken seriously. I have watched people move a printed wireframe (on paper) from one section of a site to another because it “feels” better. I have seen a 70-page set of wireframes for a social network that didn’t have a profile page (designed by one of the top ad agencies in the world!). I have seen user-generated content that cannot be generated anywhere. I have seen a client cross out a “register now” button because it’s “ugly” in the wireframe. I have seen a site designed and launched by a global agency without a main menu (you thought I was joking when I said that, didn’t you?). These might or might not seem like a big deal, but each is an example of a crippling mistake that could destroy a product or service. Plan enough time for wireframes—especially in large projects. Label and describe (i.e., annotate) each element of each page so a developer never has to ask you what a button is supposed to do.

▶ 59:00

Wireframes are not meant for display. I die a little every time I see wireframes colored blue and presented in a stylish way. Immediately I know that the people behind those wireframes have no respect for what they’re doing: they have not used color with meaning (red for warning, etc.), they have tried to pass important things by a client/boss by making them prettier, and they have put the focus on the “look-and-feel” in a document that is primarily for technical purposes. Making a wireframe look like a blueprint is the equivalent of using Comic Sans to write a contract.

▶ 59:59

Avoid Convenient Examples One of the most common design mistakes is to forget about less common user behavior. If you only use ideal content in your wireframes, your design might break in real life. If your design works well for 90% of users, it’s broken. In my experience, conversations about UX design focus on the way you want users to use your stuff, not the way they could use it. That’s dangerous. If you hear yourself saying things like, “Most headlines will probably fit on one line,” or “Users probably won’t have more than a thousand friends anyway,” or “Most of our users will probably use their face as a profile picture,” you’re creating opportunities for failure.

▶ 60:33

How Short Can It Be? What if someone choses a period as a title? Or leaves it blank? Or makes a one-word description? Or, what if their whole blog is just single word posts? It is tempting to imagine everybody doing normal things, but people are creative and weird. Maybe they are writing articles about punctuation or maybe they run a “word of the day” blog, or maybe they don’t need one of your features. On Pinterest, people regularly “skip” the description by typing a single period. If you need users to click that text to navigate, they are now trying to click a single period.

▶ 61:15

How Long Can It Be? This is the more common mistake when designing: to forget the really long possibilities. In 1999, singer/songwriter Fiona Apple’s second album title was an entire poem. I have seen a trademarked company name that is 40 words long. I have seen a blog where the whole post is in the title and the “body text” is always blank. If you’re designing a music site, or a trademark list, or a blog template, would those behaviors still work, or would your design break?

▶ 61:52

What If It Doesn’t Exist? It is surprisingly common to forget the “empty state” of a design. What does the page look like if a user hasn’t posted anything yet? Don’t just let it be empty; design what it looks like if it is empty.

▶ 62:24

What’s the Worst That Can Happen? Don’t ask yourself what most users will do. That’s the easy part. Ask yourself how a user could abuse your design the most. Limit the number of characters they can type, or design it so it looks ok with only a title, or no title, or take away the button that lets them delete the post, or add an ellipsis (the three periods at the end) when it gets too long (that’s called truncating!), or add a little note if the user edits the original content so other people know it changed. And test your design with a lot of ugly, unusual images!

▶ 62:39

What Is a Design Pattern? When many designers have the same challenge and someone solves it in an elegant way, and many designers use that solution, it is called a design pattern. A design is not necessarily good just because it’s common. To be a “good” design pattern, a solution must be common and usable. Some design ideas become popular because they allow lazy UI designers to ignore a challenging feature. It’s like putting a bag over someone’s head because they are ugly. For example: Facebook’s “hamburger” button—which represents the hidden menu in many mobile apps—has started appearing on full-size websites that have plenty of space for a menu. It’s common because hiding the menu is easier than designing a nice one, not because the results are better. In real life, many users don’t notice the hidden “hamburger” menu button at all, and they leave the site or get lost. That’s bad. And lazy.

▶ 63:16

Some sites actually have really nice footer designs, which is great, but if users need those links to make the site work, the footer is the wrong place for them. Ask yourself: “Are there going to be any pages that have an infinite scroll?” If the answer is yes, make sure everything in the footer is available somewhere else. If the language selector is in the footer and it runs away every time I try to change it, fuck you.

▶ 64:12

Huge Submenus Are Never a Good Idea I am always surprised when someone tries to argue that their mega-menu is the best idea available. That actually means the Information Architecture (and the information architect) sucks. Everything-in-one-menu is the laziest design in the universe. Do better. Menus are like dating: if you need more than seven or eight choices, it’s time to break somebody’s heart—maybe your own. tl;dr Create navigation and footers that work for all of the pages/screens in your app before you get into content. You’ll thank me later.

▶ 64:36

The Fold One of the most popular old-school misconceptions is about “the fold.” In case you’ve never heard of it, this is the part of your design that is visible before the user scrolls. Everything above the fold will get maximum visibility. However, from the studies I have seen, 60 to 80% of users will scroll immediately if they expect to find something useful below the fold. Whatever is above the fold should inform users about what is below the fold. If user’s don’t know what is down there, they might not be interested enough to find out. Careful: It is popular right now to use huge background images at the top of the page. If it looks like the site ends at the fold, people might leave instead of scrolling. And if you need to add a graphic that says “scroll down,” your design is weak. To learn more about the fold, go to http://thereisnofold.tumblr.com/.

▶ 65:11

tl;dr Give people something to focus on before they scroll. Make it obvious that they can scroll. Choose images that add emotion and direct the user’s eyes. Use headlines to direct users to what matters most.

▶ 66:00

One Long Page or a Few Short Pages? The most common question with regard to forms—from UX designers and marketers alike—is “How long is too long?” It is a good general rule to keep forms as short as possible, but don’t be afraid to break it into pages if it makes sense, or if you want to save the input in steps just in case the user quits in the middle. The main thing is to make a form feel simple. Keep related questions together; eliminate questions you don’t really need; and use as many pages as you need, no more, no less.

▶ 66:15

Labels and Instructions When you’re labeling your inputs—how else will the user know what to do with them?—be short, clear, legible, and put the labels close to the input. In the grand scheme of things, that will solve 99% of labeling problems. Sometimes instructions are needed if the question is unconventional or complicated. In that case, it can be helpful to add a little explanation. If it’s only a few words, put it near the label and the input. If it’s more than a few words, put it on the side of the form instead of within it so it doesn’t interrupt the flow of users who know what they’re doing. For more on this, I highly recommend the book Web Form Design, by Luke W.

▶ 66:50

Preventing and Handling Mistakes When it comes to forms, mistakes happen. It’s your job to prevent as many as possible and handle the rest as gracefully as you can. You can prevent mistakes by adding some intelligence to the inputs. For example, if a text field is for phone numbers, make the form smart enough to handle the structure (000) 000-0000 and 000 000 0000, or 0000000000, or 000.000.0000. (Talk to your developers about this.) Giving users an example of the input you expect can also reduce errors. It can be directly in a text field, for example, or part of your instructions. When users miss a question or make a mistake, you should alert them so they can fix it. If it is a question that you can verify, you can show a check mark or an “X” to indicate whether it is correct or incorrect. This is called inline error handling. Password fields also use the inline method to indicate if the password is weak or strong as you type. Do not use inline error handling if you can’t verify the input, like when people type their name (i.e., you never know if a name is “correct.”) When the user clicks “next” or “done,” you can check the form for missed questions or mistakes. If there is a problem, make it visually obvious which ones they missed and why they are wrong.

▶ 67:31

For most forms, put the “done” button on the left, on the Axis of Interaction. If the form will do something really destructive or critical, put it on the right so people pause to look for it instead of clicking it by reflex.

▶ 69:03

This example shows two button examples (don’t tap them). As a general guideline, you will need only two button styles because most user actions fall into one of two categories: Primary Actions that are helpful to our goals. Secondary Actions that are not.

▶ 69:16

Primary Buttons Some actions that are available to the user are productive, like registering, buying, submitting content, saving, sending, sharing, and so on. They produce things that didn’t exist before. Those are primary actions, or things that we want the user to do as often as possible. Buttons that execute primary actions—primary buttons—should be as visible as possible. We do that by using the principles we learned earlier in the course. Primary style High contrast compared to the background (very different color or shade). Position in layout On or near the Axis of Interaction so users notice them first, by reflex.

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Secondary Buttons Some actions that are available to the user are counterproductive, like canceling, skipping, resetting, declining an offer, and so on. They remove or stop the creation of new things. Those are secondary actions, or things we don’t want the user to do, but we provide the option for the sake of usability. Therefore, buttons that execute secondary options—secondary buttons—should be less visible, to prevent accidental or “reflexive” clicks. Secondary style Low contrast compared to the background (a similar color or shade). Position in layout Away from the Axis of Interaction so users notice them only when they are looking for them.

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Importance Is a BIG Exception Sometimes counterproductive actions are important, like deleting your account. Those actions should get a primary style but secondary position in the layout. The reason is that we want the user to find it, but we want them to think about their action before doing it. It is also a good idea to give this button a warning color that indicates the importance of the action (red, orange, yellow, etc.).

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Special Buttons In some cases, you will have one type of action that is unique to your site or app, which requires special focus. Design a special button for this so it stands out in your design (pattern breaking). Amazon’s “One-Click Purchase” buttons, Pinterest’s “Pin it” button, and Facebook’s good ol’ thumbs-up “Like” button all got this treatment (more or less).

▶ 71:22

Adaptive design takes less time and it’s easier because it is a lot more static than responsive design. Lots of designers will post a version of their design for mobile and a version for web and call it “responsive,” but in reality they often haven’t designed the “in between” states of the design.

▶ 71:45

One of the most common myths in UX is that good usability is more pleasing to the eye. It is impossible for something to “look usable.” If someone says that about your design, ignore it. When users are surveyed about which design is “most usable,” their opinions are more related to the beauty than the effectiveness. This means we can’t trust user opinions about how usable a design is. Usability is measured by what people do: If more people buy something in an uglier design, it is more usable. If people read more in an uglier design, it is more usable. If more people register via the uglier design, it is more usable. Sometimes you will be forced to choose between beauty and usability. Always choose usability.

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Below are four ways you could think about it (heuristics), each with their own advantages and disadvantages. Simpler: Fewer Steps It’s only a matter of time, as a UX designer, before someone brings you a seven-page registration flow that needs to be simplified. You could: Remove any questions that aren’t necessary, like confirming your email address. Detect information, like the type of credit card, instead of asking for it. Automatically format answers properly, like a phone number, instead of asking for it in several chunks (or using errors). The disadvantage with simplification is that it might collect less information or take more time to build. And if you don’t confirm that email address, a typo can ruin the whole registration.

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Easier: More Obvious Steps It is almost always possible to make a question more obvious. Just pretend you’re designing for one of the guys from Duck Dynasty. You could: Let them choose their country from a list instead of asking them to type it. Add super-clear instructions for every question, including questions like “Your name.” Break complex questions into more steps so each step is easier to understand. The disadvantage with making things more obvious is that it often creates more questions or more reading for the user, which works against your simplification.

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Faster: Less Time to Complete/Repeat the Process Often, the process itself is something the user has done many times before, or they will do it many times in the future. Over time, making it faster can improve your conversion a lot. You could: Let them save their address and autocomplete it for them next time. Choose popular defaults so most people don’t have to change anything. Make shortcuts like Amazon’s one-click purchase for people who are logged in. The disadvantage with designing for speed is that you make the process less flexible—changes mean slowing down—and mistakes are easy to overlook while you’re click, click, clicking your way to the end.

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Minimal: Fewer Functions Many designers believe minimalism is about flat design, or hiding your options in a hidden menu. It definitely is not. Minimalism is about doing less, better. In theory, minimalism makes a design simpler, easier, and faster. For example, Outlook is an email app with a lot of features like an address book, a full-featured calendar, meeting reminders, and different ways to sort your inbox. It is not minimal. It may be more powerful, but it is also harder to learn. Sparrow, on the other hand, is an email app that allows you to send, receive, forward, delete, and put emails in folders—and that’s basically it. It is very popular and easier to learn but not as powerful. Minimalism often requires a redesign from the ground up, and although it makes the fundamentals of your product better, it might not be enough for power users.

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Browsing, Searching, or Discovery Different people use sites and apps for different reasons. If you design for the wrong behavior, you won’t get the results you want. This can mean a variety of things in the real world, so for the purposes of this lesson, let’s clarify: Browsing This is when you go to Ikea to look at all the model rooms “just to get ideas,” and you probably walk out with a bunch of random crap anyway. Searching Searching is when you go to Ikea looking for a new sofa that will fit in your absurdly small apartment. Discovery This is when you find the sofa you’re looking for and also buy the clever little nested end-tables from the same showroom, because they are so damn clever and nested. As if those are things you need in your life.

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Browsing When you visit an online store just because their products look nice or because you’re following trends, or because you’re dreaming of the day when your life will finally be completed by a $2,000 watch, you are browsing. A browsing user will glance quickly at most of the images, one by one, starting at the upper left. She might skip some, but that’s ok. Photos that the user finds attractive will get extra attention (maybe even a click!). To design for browsing: Make scanning easy and keep the content quick and visual. Don’t overcrowd the page with too much shit. Focus on the aspects of the products that create emotional appeal. If that’s style, focus on photos. If that is power (like boat engines or guns) then provide that info as clear labels. If that is brand names, clearly show the logos. If it is craftsmanship, magnify the handcrafted details. And so on.

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Searching When someone is trying to find something they have in mind, it might seem similar to browsing, but eye-tracking studies show a very different behavior: they are hunting. A searching user will ignore a lot of products or pictures. Organization in your layout will help them systematically work through the options; they don’t want to miss any! A Pinterest-style layout works against them because it is “staggered” and random. But being able to “filter” the options is often useful. To design for searching: Focus on attributes. If users want a restaurant with a certain price range and style, they will stop at every option that seems to have those qualities. Highlight the attributes that are most likely to be “critical” for most users, and nothing more. Ignore any ideas you might have about what looks “cluttered”; if the information is useful, it isn’t “clutter.” This isn’t an art gallery. When the user finds what they want, they will click for more information (or buy). A restaurant’s menu, photos, and prices might be major points of interest, but the number of seats or name of the sous-chef, not so much.

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Discovery Ok, so let’s say your users aren’t finding your amazing selection of antique kazoos, but you think they would buy them if they did. How do you create discovery? The way you think people discover new things is probably the opposite of how people actually discover new things. Welcome to the wacky world of UX. There are two mistakes you will probably make: You will put it in the main menu or create “banners” on your own site promoting it. You will expect your most loyal users to find it first because they spend the most time with your current design. Both of those things are wrong. Mistake 1: Users only click things in the menu if they are looking for those things. Simple as that. Almost nobody “discovers” via the menu. And banners don’t work because banners never work. Haven’t you ever used the Internet before? Why would people suddenly get excited about banners now? Mistake 2: The more experienced a user is, the less they explore for new things. In real life, only beginners explore sites or apps to find out what it can do. Experienced users know what they want and they know how to get it, so why would they explore?

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“If you liked that, you’re gonna love this…” Instead of relying on users to find new things, let them find what they are already looking for. Put the new stuff there, too, (and make it relevant) so they can “discover” it. This might feel like you’re hiding it, but really you’re making it as visible as possible to the right people. On a site like Reddit, people come for the top-voted content, not new submissions. But if nobody votes on new submissions, there will be no top-voted content! So, Reddit puts a few new submissions—from the categories you like—into the top content so they become visible, get votes, and start the Circle of Life once again. The more you understand your users, the more you will know what to design for. Do your damn research!

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Accessibility Is Visual The simplest and most obvious way to make your designs more accessible is to make it easier to look at. This is actually very similar to the idea of designing for different devices, except that the differences are the users instead of the device. Big text is easier to read, so if your audience is a little older or visually impaired, spend some extra time on readability. Color blindness is a real thing, and more common than you might think. Depending on your audience, up to 10% of them might have trouble with red and green, for example, so they might not be the best combination for “yes” and “no” options.

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Accessibility Is Content Use simple words, simpler grammar, so people who are not-so-great in your language can still read without a lot of trouble. Make it easy to change the language. Many sites—especially American ones—forget that two-thirds of the world doesn’t speak English very well. For many users, the language selector is not a minor detail; it is a make-or-break feature. Make the content shorter so it doesn’t take as long to listen to it. Make it easy to jump within long pages. Make it easy to scan. Accessibility

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Accessibility Is Extra Thoughtful Like all things in UX, you should try using an app or the Internet like your audience will. I promise you this: about 30 seconds into your testing, you will hate yourself and every other designer who hasn’t considered these things. But don’t stop there! Really think about your design instead of just looking at it. What would you want if you were 80 years old, not tech-savvy, and just needed to find a recipe online because you can’t remember anything for more than a few minutes?

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Copywriting in UX Is Usability Remember when I said that the purpose of UX is to make the user effective, not happy? Copywriting is probably the most pure example of that. Perfect UX copy is understood immediately and forgotten after it serves its purpose. The UX designer is not the copywriter, or the marketer, or the salesperson, or the creative director. So, when we write copy we need to focus on making the user understand and engage. Our headlines are calls-to-action, not storytelling. Our explanations are instructional, not inspirational. Our form labels are simple, not clever. And our buttons labels are written for clarity, not to maximize whitespace.

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Copywriting in Branding Should Create Associations Remember when we learned about memory? Humans connect certain things with certain feelings. The goal of brand copywriting is to create those associations. You might want users to believe your company is more human or more scientific or more authentic than your competitors, and the way to make them think that is to write in a certain tone. A brand copywriter might write a clever tagline or campaign slogan like Nike’s “Just Do It.” They might write headlines so they feel more fun, like MailChimp’s quirky copy. They might name products or features to make them more “catchy” or “on brand” like Apple’s iEverything or McDonald’s McEverything or Ben & Jerry’s flavor names.

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Good usability is always on brand. Don’t sacrifice function for style, ever.

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You can follow this formula for text on anything you want people to click: Verb + Benefit + Urgent Time/Place I have personally increased clicks on a button by 400% just by changing the text, and let me tell you: if you want your boss to think you’re a wizard, this is the lesson for you.

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Verb The verb is the action word: get, buy, see, try, upgrade, download, register, win, lose… whatever. This should be first, because it gets to the point immediately and turns the button into a command. Benefit Sometimes the verb and the benefit are the same thing, like the word “upgrade”; it is both the action and the benefit. But in a phrase like “Download Version 2 Now!” the new version is the benefit. In the phrase “Lose 5 kilograms today!” the benefit is losing five kilograms. You get the idea. Just make sure the benefit is a benefit to the user, not the website. A phrase like “Become a Member” has no clear benefit for the user, but the person who owns the site thinks it sounds great. Urgent Time or Place Words like “now,” “today,” or “in 1 minute!” provide a time frame that is urgent and feels easy. Words like “here” or “this” tell users that the button itself is what they are looking for. “Like This” or “Start Here” are common examples. On a button that says “Start Here!” you get an action, a benefit, and a place. In my experience, “Start Here” buttons work really well when the first question from a user will be “Where do I start?” Seems obvious, but it’s not as obvious when you’re planning the site in real life. In this case “here” describes the button itself. Wild Card The word “free” can sometimes take the place of an urgent time or place. If the button provides something big for the user like software, the user might assume there is a cost involved. In that case the word “free” can help reduce anxiety and improve click-through-rates. But use it carefully, it can also make premium brands feel less premium and imply that the benefit isn’t worth much. Things to Avoid A Call-To-Action (CTA) button/link—the one that you want users to click, like a buy/register button—should never begin with “Click here to…” The fact that it is a button or a link has already told the user that they need to click it (if you designed it properly), you don’t have to tell them again. That type of copy loses clicks because the user doesn’t see the action or benefit that the button executes, so they don’t click. “Click here to win” is not as good as “Win today!” Also, long or difficult words on a button lose clicks. “Start here” would work much better than “Commence Forthwith” or “If you would like to enter the site begin by clicking this button.” Silly examples, but it’s important to remember.

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it isn’t 100% obvious how users should do something—and even if it is—you might want to help them out. Instructions should be short, literal, and direct. No lingo. No industry terms. No clever jokes or sarcasm or funny business. Don’t be too wordy or too soft. Tell the users exactly what to do. Use the simplest words and phrases you know. Write to everyone as if they were smart children or a non-native speaker of the language. Not stupid, just clear.

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Bad: “Swing on down to the clicky spot when yer all set!” Also bad: “All input in this area is required data and must be successfully submitted to initiate the account creation process.” Stupid: “Look at you! You’re so good at forms! When you get everything typed in there like a good form filler-outer, then you should just go ahead and click that fancy yellow button below! You’re almost there, champ!” Good: “Answer every question. When you’re finished, click the yellow Done button at the bottom of this page.”

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Labels It can be very tempting to make labels clever or unique, but always resist that temptation. Use the most common, easiest, most basic version of the label that you can imagine. If your label can have more than one type of answer, it might not be clear enough yet. Take a look at these: Bad: “Where your heart is…” Not good: “The place where you live” Better: “Address” Best: “Home Address” Labels also apply to buttons, which is something that a lot of designers overlook. If you skip the headline and the instructions, will you still understand what the buttons do? If not, make the labels better. Bad Button Labels: “Ok” or “Yes” Good Button Labels: “Ignore Changes” or “Save Changes” However, this is one of the times in UX when the method is fairly easy and the real-life scenario can get political. If you have a creative director or a copywriter or client looking at your text and saying, “We need to make it more awesome,” you should say no. Prove it with an A/B test if you must, but never back down when the text is for practical, functional reasons. Sometimes, the “experience” the user needs is something simple and clear, not something awesome and confusing.

▶ 87:29

A good landing page answers the Three Whats of UX: What is this? What’s in it for me? What should I do next?

▶ 88:43

Readability Is a Combination of Things Depending on your design, various things might help. The person doing the typography will be a great resource, as well, since they spend a lot of their time playing with text. Here are some things to try: Is the text big enough? Small text tends to look better but it’s difficult to read, especially on mobile devices. Try increasing the size of all the text in general. That’s also a good way to make it feel simpler. Add space between the letters This is called kerning or tracking. When letters get a little too close together, they can become hard to read, especially in a paragraph. Put some “air” in there to make it easier to read. Add space between the lines This is called leading. As a general rule, the space between the lines should be about 1.5 times the height of one line of text. More can be nice, too. Don’t add too much though, or else it might be too distracting to go from one line to the next. Add space around the text All the other crap in your design might be distracting people from reading. That’s why “reader mode” in some browsers and apps take away everything except the text. Focus. Adjust the width of the column The optimal width for a column is said to be between 45 and 75 characters, give or take. The narrower end (50-ish) feels better, and the wider end (70-ish) is actually faster. You can adapt your design based on the device and the type of content. Use real content, and actually read it If you’re trying to do any of this with lorem ipsum dummy text, then you’re not really doing UX. You can only test readability by using text that is readable. Even better, try copying and pasting an article that you actually want to read!

▶ 88:52

Imagine someone posts in a forum and asks, “How do I get laid?” At first glance, you’re not particularly interested in helping, unless you fancy yourself an artist with this sort of thing. This is the way a lot of corporations approach their social media activities; direct questions and factual posts, and self-centered content. It doesn’t create engagement. Now imagine if it were phrased more like this: “What is the fastest you have ever had sex with someone after meeting them? How did it happen?” Suddenly the reader has been challenged to tell a story that makes them look good, or at least makes them interesting. There is no obvious benefit for the person asking the question, but that doesn’t mean there is no benefit for them. It’s more fun to have a crappy or funny answer than not to answer, and that’s the whole objective here. It creates engagement! This version of the question was on the real-life front page of Reddit, with more than 700 comments. (One person answered “17 years.” Clearly an artist.)

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The Question/Problem First and always, you need to start with a question. In your case, it might be a user problem. Your job is to understand the problem well enough that you can describe it specifically and then design a way to solve it. Many people think that you should come up with some questions first and then use UX research to answer the questions, but that’s wrong. That’s called guessing. UX research is supposed to find the questions and problems. By researching users and data you will uncover user behavior that needs to be fixed, or doesn’t make sense. Why do users do that weird thing? What is the main problem for the user? How do users think about this feature? Why do people leave on the second step of the checkout? Why do so many people bounce on our landing page? There are millions of those questions.

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Hypothesis Your design is your hypothesis: a strategy to solve the problem or answer the question. It is based on your research and data. It is your solution to the problem or question that you discovered in your research. You think it will work because the evidence says it will work. The problem in digital projects is that you are usually so busy celebrating your launches that you forget to see if they actually work. UX is not a matter of taste, it is a matter of results. Just because you like it, doesn’t mean it’s good.

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Experiment Change your attitude: The launch is the experiment, not the result. You don’t know anything until you prove it with real users. If you have done your research well and based your design on that research, you’re not guessing. You’re experimenting. Big difference.

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Results After you launch a site, you can get results like how long people stay on your site or how many registered or bought. These are not guesses, they are facts. You might need to wait a month or two on a small site, but the data will come. These facts might not agree with your strategy. They might indicate that your design—although beautiful—is confusing. And they might prove that your obnoxiously large logo is distracting. This is not a failure or a weakness; it is part of launching a site professionally. There are some things we just can’t know before launching. The site might also be humankind’s greatest creation, but we don’t know that, either, until we test it in the real world.

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Search logs Many people don’t realize that a search field on your site can save every word that is typed into it. If people are searching for it, it means they can’t find it, so those logs are very valuable for improving your information architecture and layouts!

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The most common causes of high bounce rates are designs that aren’t trustworthy, headlines that are bad or unexpected, confusing IA, and designs that don’t show the user where to click.

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1% of People Will Do Anything Many years ago, after many discussions about user-generated content, a colleague of mine named a rule after me: Marsh’s Law: “Every feature will eventually be abused to its maximum abusability.” Or, you can think about it like this: if something can be used, it will eventually be used by someone. That doesn’t make it good.

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Probabilities Are Not Intuitive If 10% of people click on your landing page, and then 80% of those people make a purchase, is the design good? Actually, no. Many people will look at the conversion rate and say “Wow! 80% of our users make a purchase!” Then, the whole team will go have drinks, or play in the inflatable castle, or whatever it is people do at your company to celebrate. However, as the UX designer, you should not go to that party. You’re losing about 90% of potential sales. But you aren’t losing them in the checkout. You are losing them at the landing page. If 40% of people click on the landing page and 40% of them make a purchase, you would actually sell twice as much, even though your conversion rate is half. 80% of 10% = 8% 40% of 40% = 16% Almost every company I have worked with has had a problem like this, but very few people notice. It can literally be a million-dollar mistake.

▶ 94:40

Anchoring only works when the anchor is the first option. If you have something else in the first position, it might be getting clicks just because users see it first. I have seen people build strategies on the assumption that Option #1 is what users like most, when in reality it is just what users see first.

▶ 95:41

Content Attention versus Surface Attention You have learned how to grab the user’s attention and how to minimize competing messages. So what if everybody loves your site, but nobody reads it? A common trend lately is websites with amazing visual effects and animations as you scroll. The problem is this: sometimes, it is more interesting to scroll up and down than to stop and read. That’s surface attention. We want content attention. Animations and cool effects should be used as elements of delight, not the whole design. Remember that motion beats everything, attention-wise. That means people will watch whatever is moving and ignore whatever isn’t. Ever tried to read moving text? Probably not, because you were too busy watching it. Motion and parallax effects should draw attention to things the user should do. Not the pure awesomeness of the designer’s imagination.

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What Is an A/B Test? An A/B test is a way of asking thousands or millions of real visitors which option is best. The tests make sure that each unique visitor only sees one option. Then, after enough people have gone through your test, you can see which version of the design created more clicks. The test should also measure the “confidence level” statistically so you know when you’re done (don’t stop it too early!) You can do it with 2 versions, or 20 versions. Just remember: only part of your traffic can see each one, so the more versions you are testing, the more traffic or time you will need.

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Some tips A/B Testing is usually free, other than the time it takes to design and create the pages you’re testing. The results can be extremely valuable, so even a small cost to do an A/B Test is very worth it. It is not the same thing as launching a new page and then watching to see if that page seems better than the old one. The only way to compare two designs is to run them both at the same time, using (roughly) equal numbers of people for both. An A/B Test is most reliable when you only change one detail. If two pages are the same, but one has red links and one has blue links, that’s fine. If they also have different menus, then there is no way to tell whether it is the link color or the menu that is making the difference. If you want to test multiple changes, you need a multivariate test (next lesson!). Testing two totally different pages, like a home page and a checkout form, is useless. That’s not a proper A/B Test.

▶ 97:30

multivariate test can test combinations of changes. Multi-VARIATE. (Say: “multi-very-it”) When you change one thing on your page or site, it can affect how the users think about something else. A multivariate test allows you to test relationships between design elements. Let’s say you have three options for headlines: Headline 1: “This is the greatest thing ever!” Headline 2: “This is the worst thing ever!” Headline 3: “This is kind of really ok, ish!” And you also have three options for photos to go with those headlines! Photo 1: A puppy. Photo 2: A hamburger. Photo 3: Your mom. That doesn’t sound so bad. Seems like an A/B/C test. Right? Nope. Here’s the kicker: Any of the headlines will work with any of the photos. But depending on the combination, the user might have different reactions. Maybe some people want to see the greatest thing ever, but only if the photo shows something they like. Maybe some people would love to see the worst thing ever, but only if the photos show something they hate. Or, maybe your mom makes every headline more effective! Who knows?! Very subjective. Very complicated. How would you know what combination to use!? A multivariate test, that’s how. Multivariate tests think harder than you can. In this case there are nine combinations of photos and headlines: Headline 1 with photo 1, 2 or 3. Headline 2 with photo 1, 2, or 3. And headline 3 with photo 1, 2, or 3. That is a lot of information to compare in your head. You will never be able to make a rational guess about which combination of headline and photo will be most popular. So don’t! Let the software pick combinations of headlines and photos randomly, and at the end it will tell you that Headline 2 with Photo 3 got the highest percentage of clicks. Or Headline 1 and Photo 1. Or whatever. Multivariate tests need more traffic than an A/B test because there are more combinations to test, but they also produce answers that would be a pain in the ass using A/B testing. Try it!

▶ 98:29

Different UX Jobs Are Different Depending on the type of clients you have, the type of projects you do, the type of company you work in, and whether it’s a poor company or a rich company, your calendar will change. But since you asked, this is what you might spend your time on, based on my not-even-slightly-scientific analysis of years working with startups, agencies, and in-house teams.   Internal meetings (mostly unnecessary)    30%    Documenting designs    10%    Sketching/wireframes    10%    Facebook/internal chat (Skype, Slack, etc.)    7%    Discussing requirements and feedback    6%    “Coffee breaks”    6%    Watching funny videos sent by colleagues    5%    Analyzing data/research    5%    Discussing designs with developers    3%    Presenting insights to bosses/clients    3%    Reviewing analytics    3%     Saying  yes to things when the answer should be no   2%    Staring out the window, thinking    2%    Reading UX blogs    2%    Feeling like the Wizard of Oz    1%    Doing face-to-face user research    1%    Being micromanaged by a nondesigner    1%    Expressing yourself artistically    0.99%    Expressing yourself violently    0.9%    Getting people to agree that true facts are true    0.5%    Bragging to colleagues about your salary    0.5%    Explaining why “a chance to win an iPad” is stupid    0.1%    Winning awards    0.01%

▶ 100:30

First of all UI and UX are very different jobs. If you ever see a job where the job title is “UI/UX” it means the company doesn’t know what UX is, or it’s trying to cover two roles with one salary. Beware. The User Interface (UI) is what you see. UX is why you see it. If you’re more excited by making beautiful apps, or working with branding and ad campaigns, or designing logos and icons and color schemes, UI is for you. If you’re more interested in what this book contains, UX is more your style. (But you’re always welcome to learn both!)

▶ 101:59