Basics of UX: How users think and what mistakes we do on designing products
How can we decide, is design “works” or it “does not”? It’s really a difficult question. But for the starting point we can assume that the design what rises question like “what is it?”, “how to use it?” or makes a user expend any effort to think about it — is the design that does not work. Instead, design should be self-evident, self-explanatory about how to use it.
I’m providing 2 examples of Azerbaijan Republic government websites with comments on it. So you can explore it and even maybe you could mention some additional design mistakes(as I did not cover all of them) in comments below.
As you see, the first example rises a lot of questions when you look at it, as: Where is the navigation? Why did put the home page icon there? What is that, sub-categories?
And later you can look at the second example. Do not you find it more understandable and self-explanatory? From the first sight you can define what section does what.
So make your users think in that way:
“Okay. That’s a ____. There’s a ____. And that’s what I’m looking for! Great!”
and try to get rid of the questions like in the first example. Because every question adds to our cognitive workload and distracts the user from the main goal.
But do not think that you can make everything self-explanatory. Your goal instead is minimazing the gap between the user and your product and make your user thinking/analysing as less as it is possible, so just by looking at your product the user has to know what it is and how to use it.
If you want to design good and effective Web pages then you have to know how your users act(generally).
Because there are a huge difference between how we think people use websites and how they actually use them.
We think that users carefully reads all the informations on your website, figuring out how we crafted everything there but in reality they just skim the page quickly and click on the element what attracts they attention or somehow is close to what they are looking for and they almost always skip the most part of it.
Imagine yourself that you are the creator of booking.com website.
Let’s go through the example by showing you how users mostly act:
The scenario here for the user is:
— I want to find an accomodation where can I stay during my vacation
— Okay, how do I book a hotel here?
— All I need to do is to fill boxes and press to search
How you could notice, we tend to focus on words and/or phrases that seem to match our tasks and/or interests.
Your users do not like to figure out how things work. They try somehow to achieve their goals.
There are only few percentage of people who is ready to spend some additional time to understand how everything is structured and how to use it. Most people interested in not how it works or structured but how they can achieve their goals quickly.
Have you ever interested why does this happen?
Because for most of us it does not matter whether we understand how something works or not. The main thing is we can use them. Because we mostly do not care. It’s just not important to us. And once we have found how something works we stick to it! We are starting to use it mostly always in that way and we are not interested to find out better ways for usage.
I hope today I could somehow help you to understand some basics of UX, to know how users think and what mistakes we have to avoid on designing your products(web sites, mobile applications, et cetera).
You can ask your questions in comments below and let me know if you are waiting for the next part, as I planned to write a series articles about UX.
