
Dashboard Ambush [slides] - shreyakrishnan
http://tariq.co/dashboard-ambush
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sgt101
One problem he doesn't account for is that the community of users is often
diverse and therefore ui complexity gets driven by corner cases. Often teams
will start out with a visionary who holds the line for a while but gradually
the pressure to add another bell or whistle increases until it is impossible
to resist. For example coversion rates; if a feature is shown to drive up
conversions by a small amount it will tend to get added, it doesn't take many
of these discoveries to ruin an interface.

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roled8
Conversion and user engagement features as well. It's good for the product to
have a user spend more time on it

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brudgers
In the early stages of a project everyone is a beginner. Success is success
because people become experts and experts are experts because they know how to
do and want to do sophisticated things.

The example of the toilet is perfect. Good interfaces are designed to meet the
needs of the user community. An expat in Japan is not a member of the
community for some sense of "member" and "community". The solution for the
outlying case is that the outsider asks for help. This transfers the
expertise.

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the_duke
The biggest challenge is providing all the functionality that users want with
a clean UI.

There's a trap and tradeoff in making an interface too clean: discoverabilty
suffers.

Some users might never go beyond the simplest of use cases, but more advanced
things need to go beyond that and it shouldn't be hard to find out how.

If users have to google how to do something, you have lost.

Apple is a good example of this. They value their clean and intuitive
interfaces.

But I don't think they actually are. Give an iPhone to someone who hasn't used
it in a while and see how well they handle things...

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weego
This touches on a problem our current product has. We're on the second
iteration where the first iteration had almost no traction yet the design and
features coming from the product side assume so much implicit knowledge of the
business that there's no way a complete newbie can look at it and feel
confident that they know what is going on.

Because we have no traction and thus no metrics we're in a vicious "I think it
should work like this so let's do it that way because you can't prove people
won't like it" cycle.

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cjcenizal
Sounds like you should check out "Don't make me think" by Steve Krug! It's a
quick read and contains very simple effective advice on how to make your UI
usable. He outlines ways to do very cheap user testing to add objectivity to
the decisions you're describing.

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plehoux
"Clearly define a functional happy path for the users' goal."

There is never just one functional happy path or goal.

Each user is uniq.

Even same user expectations and 'happy' path change with time.

Take the Airbnb example, yes, at one point you just want to book a new trip.

Maybe your looking for the invoice of a past trip?

Maybe you are looking for an old booking because a friend is going to that
city and you want to recommend it.

The more users, the more goals.

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appleflaxen
but I think the author's point holds up under your criticism.

he's right that 99% of the time when you are looking at your account, you want
the current trip. Take the 90% of the dashboard junk dedicated to "you might
need this, so we're showing you just in case", and wrap it in a single,
exposable "junk drawer" interface.

Or at the _very_ least, call out the main content with styling, and make the
junk more muted.

He calls this "dashboard ambush", but it's just as accurately characterized as
a signal:noise problem. All the extraneous functionality is noise to 99% of
use cases.

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pixl8r
Is this advocating removing dashboards? What do you replace it with then?

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cpayne
See the Product Hunt example. It's not that dashboards are bad, they should
immediately be obvious what the user should do. The eBay example is good too -
just wtf is going on there?

