Apr 4, 2016

Easy vs. Uneasy

I'll be using the 'Design Hierarchy of Needs' to evaluate a few designs based on their user experience. Three examples of good designs and two of not so good designs.

The Easy!

Case Study 1: Hemingway, an online proofreader app that helps make your writing clear and concise.

The single greatest thing about Hemingway is that it's all in one page. And it's so easy, so nimble — anyone who has a basic knowledge a browser and a word processing software before will feel right at home straight away. It is familiar, has an extremely quick and distraction free user flow, and works in real-time. There are no big headings, or advertisements, and their self promotion stuff is all neatly cornered in the far left. The legend on the right gives the user an instant idea on how the app works. This app gets straight to business very quickly and gets the task done, as it should be. This application is functional, reliable and usable.

Case Study 2: Spotify's desktop application, a popular choice for listening to music online on our desktops.

This is the page that you arrive at when you open up the application.

This is on a page called 'Stations' on the left sidebar.

Spotify borrows some of the features of older music players, such as a dark interface with white/grey text (remember WinAmp?), plus the familiarity of a rather conventional layout, which works great as we want to get into the flow of listening to music as quickly as possible. Even though it's an online application, search is real-time and feels as quick or even quicker than searching an offline desktop application. The search results are drop-down, categorized and scrollable. The entire application is context sensitive, tied to your preferences, playlists and even the time of the day, making it very intelligent in suggesting something based on your mood. The app gets to know the user the more they use it, and adapts to the user's needs. The icing on top of the cake is that it is aesthetically beautiful and has fluid interactions that appear invisible but do evoke a sense of delight. This design is functional, reliable, usable and creative. The only feature I'd add on top is the ability to customize your 'browse' page further.

Case Study 3: Hyperlapse, an application created by Instagram to record time lapse images that move through space, also known as a hyperlapse.

What you see in the screenshots above is the total number of interactions available inside Hyperlapse. The genius of 'Hyperlapse' is that you can move through the entire application's flow in just three or four interactions. The process of capturing a good hyperlapse with a relatively high-end camera is actually fairly complicated. The amazing part about what Instagram has done here is that they have taken that rather intimidating process and ported it so simply into the mobile platform, making it accessible to millions of users, who don't have to know anything new to capture a Hyperlapse. All the work is done for them and they can focus on the capturing, the creative part of it. This design is functional, reliable, usable, proficient and creative.

The Uneasy :(

Case Study 1: Ken Rockwell's Reviews

The latest iteration of Ken Rockwell's homepage. Vintage early 2000s aesthetic design, just absolutely great.

Why are there two logos above the heading?

Ken Rockwell is a legendary name amongst the online photography community for the nature of his extremely informative reviews and slightly controversial/paradoxical opinions on cameras and photography in general. What's great about his site is that the content of his reviews is simply amazing, and all the links work great and he actually has a backlog of articles and resources dating back to the 90’s, which is impressive given the astounding lack of information architecture in the website. He has to be a genius to maintain the sheer number of articles on this website without any sort of organization whatsoever. This site is functional and reliable, but a headache to navigate and therefore it fails in usability. Its barebones aesthetic doesn't award it any points in that segment either.

Case Study 2: VSCO Cam, an iPhone application that helps take pictures and edit them for aesthetic effects.

The circle in the box actually leads to the camera application, but as a symbol it doesn't signify a camera in any way.

Lots of controls that have vague symbols that are difficult for new users to understand.

Again, terrible and misleading use of symbols.

So VSCO, as we can see, didn't turn out too well. It's a pity as the app actually works really well in terms of functionality and reliability, but is extremely poor in terms of usability. There is no flow to the user's actions. The terribly organized interface and bad choice of symbols take the user out of the experience. This app needs a lot of work to help its great core functionality shine.

That's it for now!