UX review #6
Street UX, Facebook versus fake news, and efficient logos
November 2017 —week 46
🇫🇷 Version française disponible ici
Hello and welcome to the sixth article of my UX review ! I am Guillaume Tarsiguel, a French UX designer working in a company called Bloomin, and every week or so, I’ll share with you my thoughts on the news and trends of UX design, on the Internet and beyond.
Let’s get started with the review UX #6!
📰 News of the week
Facebook vs fakes news
(article in English, estimated reading time : 5 minutes)
Last month, Facebook announced it would be testing a new way to fight fake news spreading on its network.
The idea is simple : providing context to articles shared on Facebook. Users would be able to assess the credibility of a news article thanks to an “information” button giving access to details such as the source or related articles.
According to Fogg’s behavior model, three elements are needed to induce a behavior : motivation, capacity and trigger.
Here, the behavior expected from the user is for them to check the veracity of the articles they share. The motivation already exists : integrity, desire to share truth instead of lies. The capacity of doing so is also already there : checking news is only a matter of a few Internet searches.
Now, what’s currently missing is the last element : the trigger. And this is exactly what the new “information” button is supposed to be.
By allowing to check news in a single click, Facebook strongly induces its users to do so — and I am convinced of how big of an impact can such a small button have.
Without this button, we unfortunately seldom think to fact-check news we read. As the saying goes : “out of sight, out of mind” — and this is very true in when it comes to interface design.
💡 Good practice of the week
Anticipating users’ lost connection
On Twitter, when user tries sending a message while being offline, the said message is not lost ; user is offered the possibility to copy it in their clipboard.
The good idea here is to anticipate every use case of an interface. Too often do I encounter interfaces that were only designed for ideal use cases. However, in order to really provide a positive user experience in every circumstances, it is crucial to prepare for error states or difficult contexts: loss of connection, low battery, noisy surroundings, etc.
📊 Stats of the week
Memento logo
Got pen and paper with you ? OK, now take a few seconds to draw the logo of Adidas, from memory.
Yes, Adidas, the famous brand. We see its logo everywhere, so… drawing it should be easy, right ? Well, give it a try before scrolling down to the answer.
…
OK, here’s the current logo of Adidas :
Did you get it ? The shape, the black and white colors ? If you did, congrats ! If not, don’t worry, you are not alone…
Indeed, that is one of the conclusions of a study conducted by the Signs agency, whose goal was to find out what makes us remember — or forget — a logo. To this end, more than 150 people were asked to draw from memory the logos of 10 famous international or american brands, such as Ikea, Target or Starbucks.
This synthetic table sums up the conclusions of the study :
As the subjects were American people, the results of the study are specific to the USA, in particular when it comes to national brands that are little known outside of their borders like Walmart or Seven Eleven. There are still some valuable lessons that we can extrapolate from this study :
- Whether you are a regular customer of a brand or not have little impact on the memorization and reproduction of its logo. A good logo should be seen and remembered at first sight.
- The simpler thelogo, the easier the memorization : fewer colors, less complex shapes. It does seem pretty obvious, and indeed see how hard it is to remember the logo of Starbucks compared to the ones of Ikea or Target !
- In average, 80% of respondents found the correct color sets for the logos. That figure show that what we remember is the idea a logo expresses, rather than its precise composition.
Picking the righ logo is crucial for any wide public brand. A good logo will make a great first impression of the brand, and will express its identity in a fraction of a second — as long as people remember it.
As the study shows, in order to maximize its memorization, a good logo should have a simple and recognizable color chart, as well as simple shapes. Think of how powerful of an impact have companies that can be recognized with nothing more than a bunch of colors (Ikea, Mac Donald’s) or a mere symbol (Nike) !
Good thing that, at Bloomin, our logo is a simple shape with only 2 colors. People should be able to remember it easily, don’t you think ?😇
Anyway, you can have a look at the complete study on the Branded in Memory website (estimated reading time : from 5 to 20 minutes). It is very fun to read, interesting and even interactive — and you’ll be able to see how good you are at identifying logos.
📷 Picture of the week
Street UX design
In my UX review #2 (article in French, estimated reading time : 5 minutes), I wrote about how users sometimes use a tool in a way that it was not initially designed for, creating a new usage that we call a desire line.
Those desire lines are often very creative, and we can see examples of them everywhere in our everyday life !
In the picture above is a perfect example I stumbled upon in a street in Paris : trash cans turned into improvised bike racks.
Do you think this usage was anticipated when designing this trash cans ? Anyway, keep your eyes open for UX golden nuggets like these… and see you for the next UX review !
