Let’s Talk About Design!
Part of learning user experience design is getting used to thinking about design and documenting your thoughts. To move me along my UX learning journey this post will discuss three things that I think are well-designed and three things that could use some improvement.
The Good
Skinny Pancake, Burlington, Vermont
My first thing is not a thing at all but a service. I recently was in Burlington, Vermont, and had dinner at a crêpe restaurant called the Skinny Pancake. I was pleasantly surprised by the thought this restaurant had given to the user experience.
This restaurant operates on a partial service model, meaning you order at the counter and they bring the food to your table. This is nothing unusual in and of itself, but what made this a great user experience was that they actually bothered to communicate this clearly to the customer!
There are so many different models for restaurants and cafes: wait to be seated; seat yourself and someone will come to you; order at the counter and wait at the other end of the counter for your food…. The variety is confusing enough and the confusion is amplified by the fact that many establishments assume you know what to do.
As we walked up to restaurant my burgeoning user experience brain was delighted to see a large sign outside telling me exactly what to do. This sign was repeated inside the restaurant as soon as you walk in.
As a follow up, right over the register was a large sign saying “Order Here”.
I knew exactly where and when to order my food. No stress, no doubt, just clear signifiers!
It speaks volumes to how little many dining establishments consider user experience that clear signage is the exception and not the rule. So, a gold star goes to the Skinny Pancake for user experience. Also, the crêpes were delicious, they had free WiFi and the restaurant was a Pokéstop. What more could you ask for?
Messaging App on Samsung Galaxy
The next well designed thing is the text messaging app on my Samsung Galaxy phone.
One feature that I absolutely love is Swype Text. Instead of tapping individual letters, you swipe over the letters to make a shape:
Then the system guesses what you are trying to type and inserts the first choice word into the message and provides you with a list of other alternatives.
With the level of accuracy I usually achieve, I am not sure this is actually quicker than typing individual letters. But I stick with it because it is so much more elegant than tapping at individual letters and when it gets it wrong it is so spectacularly wrong that it is a constant source of hilarity.
Bonus fun fact: the shape for the word “shark” looks like a shark fin.
Another feature that I find very useful is the next word suggestions. These are informed by both data from Google as well as your individual text history.
Here I have written “thank” and the second suggestion is“you”, which is what I would like to say. I just have to tap the suggested word to select it.
To conclude, the accuracy of the Swype text could be improved but it so enjoyable to use that I tend to overlook the issues.
Comcast Xfinity X1 Platform
The Comcast xfinity X1 cable television platform tops the “most improved” category because it is so much better than Comcast’s previous offerings.
The X1 may well suffer from featuritis, but some of the features are actually useful.
One of the most advertised elements the technology is the voice controlled remote.
This is a nice idea in principle, but I find that it struggles with my British accent. For example, “Orphan Black” takes consistently at least three tries to be understood.
I persisted with using the awkward voice recognition until I found a feature that was more user friendly for the accent challenged. You can search just by pressing the numbers that correspond to the letters of the search on the remote. You don’t have to navigate to a search menu, just press the numbers and the search menu comes up.
Here I am looking for HGTV. All I had to type was 44 for the system to offer this to me as an suggestion. Even better, this also works to search for shows (such as Orphan Black).
For the next great feature, xfinity has been learning from Netflix. When you pull up the episodes of a given show, it tells you which ones you have watched and the show will register as watched regardless of whether you watched it live, recorded, or on demand.
These are great features, but for me, the most notable improvement has been fixing some of the truly horrible user experiences that the previous system subjected me to.
The worst example is that with the old system if you were watching a show on demand and you paused it for more than about 15 minutes, it would revert back to live television and reset the on demand show you were watching. So, I would be 40 minutes into a show and my mum would call and we would talk for an hour or so. When I go back to my show it has reset. And since you can’t fast forward most on demand shows, I have the choice of watching 40 minutes again or not watching the last 20 minutes of the show.
With the X1 platform, if you leave an on demand show paused, after a few minutes it starts to show screensaver images. If you leave it paused for longer, it will eventually revert back to live TV. However, when you go back to the on demand show, it has saved your place and you can resume watching were you left off!
So, despite the featuritis and the voice recognition issues, xfinity has done a good job of listening to users and fixing some truly egregious user experience as well as adding some nice new features.
The “Could Do Better”
Prego Ready Meals Pasta Pouches
My first thing that needs to see teacher is a microwave ready meal, or more specifically, the packaging.
When you put ready meals in the microwave the packaging gets hot. This packaging has the ingenious solution of cool touch areas which allow you to pick up the heated pouch without hurting yourself.
Now look where the “tear here” notches are to open the packet.How do you open the pouch without touching the hot packaging? You can’t!
This may seem minor, but it makes my “could do better” list because it is frustratingly close to being brilliant design, but the designers didn’t follow through. A quick round of user testing would have revealed this issue immediately.
The fix is very simple:
You make the cool touch area a little larger and put the “tear here” notch in the middle of the cool touch area. Then the user can grab the pouch from both sides and tear it open without touching any of the hot packaging. Then this would have been brilliant design worthy of my first list.
Vizio TV Text Entry System
After singing the praises of the xfinity X1 platform, we return to my television to discuss some not so great user experience, namely the Vizio text entry system.
My television is a Vizio smart TV. To use the built in apps, for example Netflix, you have to use the remote control that came with the television.
This remote control has quite possibly the most infuriating text entry system I have ever encountered.
To demonstrate, let’s go to the Netflix search screen.
To enter text, you have to use the arrows on the remote control to navigate to each individual letter, then when you get to the letter you want, you press OK to select it.
The only saving grace is the Netflix search suggestions. So it only takes four painstakingly entered letters to discover the very sad news that Netflix is no longer streaming Doctor Who.
I think pretty much any other text entry method would be better than this. For example, it could be done like texting back when cell phones only had numeric keyboards, i.e. multiple press on the number to select a letter.
Norman Door
Finally, no post about design issues would be complete without a Norman door. In his book “The Design of Everyday Things” Don Norman laments that his name is now synonymous with doors that are difficult to open or “Norman Doors”.
My old place of employment had Norman doors.
There are handles on both sides and there is nothing on the doors to indicate which way they open. But, surely we can figure this out logically. For safety doors must open towards the exit so that people don’t get trapped in case of fire. The elevators are on the other side of the doors. So, to open the door we should push!
Wrong. The doors must open towards the exit in the case of fire, which is the stairs not the elevators. The stairs are behind us so to exit we must pull the door.
Virtually every time I went through these doors, I would try to open them wrong way. To add to the confusion I often worked after hours when the doors would be locked and require key card entry. It would go like this: I pull the door. It doesn’t open. I pull harder. Still doesn’t open. Wait, what time is it? Maybe it is locked. Where is my security pass? Oh wait, I have to push… By which point whoever is on reception duty is invariably laughing at me.
Obviously, these doors could not be set to open the logical way towards the elevators because this would be a fire hazard. However, the solution is very simple: put a metal plate where you are supposed to push and a handle where you pull. These are such obvious and efficient signifiers all swing doors should be made this way. Although there may be some economic and functional reasons for making doors with handles on both sides, it shows an absolute disregard for usability, and in my humble opinion should never be done.
And it is with the ungainly swing of a Norman door that I will end this post.
