Brian Dys

Category: UX Design

  • How do I determine if a UI can be made more simple?

    Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.

    An aphorism attributed to Albert Einstein.

    But how could you determine if the UI you designed could (and should) be made optimally simpler — meaning can still be made more simple than the current without losing anything of value to the users (and while adding more value as well)?

    First, market data

    Given that the product is in the market already, gather insights on the usage of the product and the UI’s role in it.

    Are there complaints pertaining to a particular screen / page? Look deeper into those.

    (more…)

  • Assistive Technologies

    • Amplified telephone
    • Font resizing / larger
    • Hearing aid
    • Screen magnification or zoom
    • Cochlear implant
    • Screen reader (e.g, JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver, ChromeVox)
    • Cane, walker, guide animal or other walking aid
    • Braille terminal
    • Wheelchair
    • Voice Control / speech recognition Software (e.g., Dragon, Siri, Google Home, Google Assistant, Cortana)
    • Prosthetics
    • Speech generating device
    • Wearable tech (not prosthetics)
    • Speech to text (i.e., Dragon Naturally Speaking, Google Doc Voice, Typing, Windows Speech Recognition)
    • Augmentative and Alternative Communication Device
    • High contrast mode or browser color preferences
    • Sign language interpreter
    • Alternative keyboard
    • Speech-to-speech transliterator
    • Alternative mouse or stylus
    • Visual aids
    • Keyboard-only navigation (no mouse usage)
    • Writing on paper
    • Switch access or head pointer or eye tracking
    • Typing with phone or tablet or other device then showing it to others
    • Joystick
    • Caregiver (friend, relative, professional assistant / aid)
    • Teletypewriter (TTY) or Telecommunication device for the deaf (TDD)
    • Closed Captions

    Taken from a Google survey dated September 2019.

  • And yet design and designers

    And yet design and designers. I’m a designer, and what I’ve seen is that we are perpetually distressed, perpetually feel threatened by the idea of democratization. As long as I’ve been a designer there’s been talk about the idea of accreditation, about the idea of licensing designers, about making people take training, take tests in order to practice design, regulating the practice of design. Designers take a look at services and website like 99 Designs, which is a website, a marketplace–if you have a design task that you need done, a business card or something, you post it there and designers bid on the job and the effect is it drives down the price of design. It drives down to the median value of design.

    Khoi Vinh on The Skeptic’s Case For Design Thinking

  • Are we doing the right thing?

    In their writing, they reflect on their own work, and they’re skeptical about what they’re doing often times. They’re also very skeptical and question the world around them. And that’s something that I think that we can do a lot more as designers, and I know it is not an easy thing to do, because a lot of our practice is to serve commercial goals and purposes. Under that kind of condition it’s not that easy to say, “Okay. Are we doing the right thing? Or are we doing good design right now?”

    Natasha Jen on Design Thinking Is B.S.

  • Uncoordinated Stream of Design Deliverables

    I have often seen UX designers present bewildered development teams with an uncoordinated stream of design deliverables that define what they need to build—for example, Adobe Photoshop or XD screen designs, Figma prototypes, Confluence documents, and Excel spreadsheets, along with some hand-coded HTML and JavaScript. Plus, UX teams often seem oblivious or uncaring about the problems their use of multiple, disparate tools causes development teams. Indeed, development teams themselves are sometimes unaware that their job could be so much easier if UX teams used fewer tools and used their tools in a more coordinated manner.

    Ritch Macefield in User Experience and the Big Picture, Part 1: Problems, Problems

  • Do you consider a “cancel” button secondary or tertiary in UX? Can you think of reasons not to use it in a form? What are the best use cases for/against it?

    One thing’s for sure about the Cancel action in a form: it is a negative within the context of Proceed as the positive.

    Then again, in the context of what the user’s goal is, the positive and negative may be one or the other.

    For example, in a 5-step interaction to fully complete the user’s profile, of course, as the designer, the positive action for you is the Proceed until the 5 steps are completed.

    However, this depends on the user. Say user reached step 5 and a personal information is being asked and it’s not agreeable, then what could be a positive interaction for him/her?

    A Cancel or a Skip & Save?

    To keep it simple, design with the user’s best interest in mind.

    Originally published in Quora

  • The Design of Target Areas

    A target area in a website or app is an area that enables a user to interact with the interface through touch or a pointing device such as a mouse.

    Examples are links, buttons, form elements, etc.

    According to Fitts’s law, “the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the ratio between the distance to the target and the width of the target”.

    For a target area to be easily tapped or clicked by the user, its area must be adequate enough to be interacted upon.

    Visually, it may appear small (such as an icon), however, it could still have an adequate target area.

    See the Pen The Design of Target Areas by Brian Dys (@briandys) on CodePen.

  • McDonald’s Cup Print – Holidays 2019

    McDonald's Cup Print - Holidays 2019
    A scanned print on a McDonald’s paper cup.

  • Information Ecology

    Users

    • Audience
    • Tasks
    • Needs
    • Information-seeking behavior
    • Experience

    Content

    • Content objectives
    • Document and data types
    • Volume
    • Existing structure
    • Governance and ownership

    Context

    • Business goals
    • Funding
    • Politics
    • Culture
    • Technology
    • Resources
    • Constraints

    References

  • Reading About aria-label

    Why is text so central to accessibility? Because text is highly interoperable. That is, systems of letters can be translated into code points and interpreted by all sorts of different software. Oh and humans understand text already, of course.

    Because different machines can all read and write text, information can be interpreted and conveyed to humans in different ways. Primarily visually (in letter forms) but also aurally (as synthesized speech) and even by touch (refreshable Braille displays, for instance).

    UX accessibility with aria-label by Heydon Pickering

    References