
UX Crash Course: Fundamentals - JoelMarsh
http://thehipperelement.com/post/75476711614/ux-crash-course-31-fundamentals
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JoelMarsh
I am the author. Thank you for pointing out my mistake: I TOTALLY AGREE about
the new tab/window issue, and I have now fixed it. That must have been brutal
on a mobile device.

It was intended to open a new window when linking from the "directory" post,
but going from post-to-post in sequence shouldn't open 31 new tabs. They were
posted one-at-a-time, so I didn't realize what would happen when being viewed
as a set of 31.

A rather cringe-worthy oversight, I would say. It was indeed a Tumblr theme
setting, which I changed, and also 31 instances of hand-editing the html of
the articles, which was super fun. ;)

Apologies to everyone who suffered and thank you for the feedback. I just wish
I had noticed sooner!

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hmsimha
I found the Miss Teen USA comment in the 3rd article off-putting:

> There are cases where it is more fun if something is hard — like a game —
> but for everything else, we want it to be so easy that even a Miss Teen USA
> contestant could use it.

I followed the reference to the video of Miss South Carolina 2007 answering a
very simple question, and was able to find the humour in how bad her answer
was. I didn't think it was appropriate to insinuate that she is representative
of all Miss Teen USA contestants though.

~~~
digitalengineer
Agreed. I suggest: "we want it to be so easy that even a USA vice-president
could use it" and link to The Tomato Incident.

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weixiyen
> In my opinion, most designers’ weak spot is analysis. But we can fix that!
> Analysis is the main thing that separates UX from other types of design, and
> it makes you extremely valuable.

Agree with this. Most designers lose a lot of credibility trying to argue in
favor of their design in the face of facts showing otherwise.

Although not everything needs to be objective like the shade of color of a
button (See Doug Bowman and Google), but a lot of UX people ignore KPIs, or
don't care to take the initiative measure them, hoping that their design
performs well or depending on product managers to do it.

~~~
bduerst
A/B testing seems to be the industry standard it seems, at least when making
changes from in-house designers. It's becoming more a of a science, with the
hypotheses based on art and design.

A good rule of thumb: If you can't give a definitive % increase in actions,
conversions, etc., then you probably shouldn't be submitting the change.

~~~
seestheday
Not the standard for a surprising number of very large companies or very large
digital agencies.

It should be, but in my experience this is not the case.

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sutterbomb
Sorry to be negative, but the UX of this guide is actually pretty bad. They're
using target="_blank" to open links to the next day's lesson in a new tab
instead of current window. Why?

Set aside the general argument that it's never really appropriate to do this -
because it's certainly not appropriate in this context. The user just finished
reading your article, and thought it was good enough to read another one. Why
would you presume they need to keep the current one open indefinitely?

I have a hard time taking advice on a subject from someone who isn't
practicing it well on their own projects.

~~~
k-mcgrady
>> "They're using target="_blank" to open links to the next day's lesson in a
new tab instead of current window. Why?"

Looks like it's a tumblr blog. Maybe it's how Tumblr works, or they picked a
theme and din't change the defaults.

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lucb1e
Quick heads up: make Javascript listen for keystrokes of ctrl+0 and other zoom
events, and submit them to some counter. Perhaps I'm not the only one trying
to unzoom the website; the header and lead take up the whole screen on a full
hd screen. The rest of the font size seems okay at first glance.

Edit: Then I realized this is a UX guide. Ironic.

Edit2: And then I read through it, it is actually pretty nice! Read a few
pages and bookmarked where I left off, thanks for sharing :)

~~~
annnnd
I have a nice little bookmarklet that works wonders:

    
    
        javascript:(function(){var%20newSS,%20styles='*%20{%20font-size:16px%20!important;%20}';%20if(document.createStyleSheet)%20{%20document.createStyleSheet("javascript:'"+styles+"'");%20}%20else%20{%20newSS=document.createElement('link');%20newSS.rel='stylesheet';%20newSS.href='data:text/css,'+escape(styles);%20document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(newSS);%20}%20})();
    

Basically it changes all font sizes to 16px, which I find suitable for my
configuration. YMMV. I usually use it when the fonts are too small. And I have
another one which colors the text black, background white and links blue - but
in this case that was not necessary.

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sutterbomb
It appears the author has updated the site to stop opening the "next article"
links in a new window. Thank you! Responding to user wants/needs is one of the
most important aspects of UX, and to the author's credit they responded in a
very timely manner to this one.

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keerthiko
For the people complaining about the 'target="_blank" thing,' I'm guessing the
user has to do a little bit of UX for themselves to use this site.

What works for me to make this a reasonable experience is to keep the index
page open, open a chapter, read it, close it, open the next one. Not entirely
terrible. Just use Cmd/Ctrl+W instead of the back button. Not really that bad,
especially considering that's how I've preferred to use sites I want to see
more than one thing from anyway (like wc3.org, google results, shopping search
results, etc).

~~~
sutterbomb
The guide is more akin to a book than to looking at disparate options and
comparing (google results, shopping etc.)

Would you expect someone to read a book by looking at the table of contents,
going to a chapter, going back to the TOC, going to the next chapter?

It's not that the site is impossible to use - it's that a fairly basic and
fundamental part of the UX is broken, yet the entire thing is a guide about
UX. It just makes it harder to believe that they have expertise in the field
when they aren't practicing it on their own work.

~~~
B0Z
Just my $0.02, but it seems to me that if the site is akin to a book as you
say, wouldn't the behavior you're suggesting doesn't make sense (TOC, chapter,
TOC, chapter) work for a technical reference? The successive pages are
certainly quite brief but in a way, isn't it a technical reference?

~~~
keerthiko
This, exactly. I pretty much treat everything on the internet as technical
reference, I never sit and click "Next page" and read through anything but
forums. Everything else I like to keep my handle on how I got there, and then
successively look at the page that looks most relevant to my current needs.
This works pretty well for this too. I never intended to read this from top to
bottom.

However, I do 100% agree that "Next" and "Previous" buttons should never be
target="_blank". That's a pretty unnatural and terrible experience. Only
chapter links and external references should be.

~~~
sutterbomb
Ah, sorry perhaps I wasn't being clear.

At the end of each individual post, there's a link to see the next one. It's
very much the same concept as your next/previous buttons, which you agreed
shouldn't be opened in a new window. That's primarily what I take issue with.

Personally I'd also argue that the TOC shouldn't be new windows either, that
the user should have to take explicit action to follow a link in a non-
standard way. But reasonable people can disagree about the merits of this in
certain cases.

Sharlin's comment below also touches on this.

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girvo
Wow, this is awesome. Just dumped most of the links into my UX instapaper
folder to read through on the train. Brilliant work, and what I've read so far
is really interesting. Cheers for sharing.

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towelrod
The UX on this site would be better if every link did not open in a new
window, especially since each article is so short.

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gboudrias
Regardless of usability, I appreciate this guide. I've long since needed an
intro to UX, and this guide seems good enough for that. I hope/expect it will
end with references to further reading.

Thanks for posting.

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dirtyaura
This seems to focus a lot on visual design and web layouts. Visual design is
very important - more important than it's usually credited in traditional UI
design circles - but user experience is still very much about how things WORK.

If there is a separate article for a layout concept like Axis of Interaction,
I would cover with similar emphasis fundamental user interaction design
concepts such as inplace editing, modality, overview by detail, details on
demand, undo, etc.

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bkmartin
A little pedantic here, but in Day 4 you say, "1 opinion could be completely
wrong."

I was taught that you never start a sentence with a numeral, always spell it
out. "One opinion could be completely wrong."

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afsina
Bad UX as it does not allow moving along pages with arrow keys or links.

~~~
lucb1e
Works for me

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mercnet
Is there a reason why the text takes up 10% of my monitor width? So much
wasted white space that could be filled with text.

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mathattack
Thank you very much for sharing!

