

Designing For Your Mother - diakonia7
https://medium.com/design-ux/dd45ec50f7b0

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jmduke
This is a wonderful article.

The only quibble I have -- and I want to emphasize that its a quibble, and in
no way detracts from the overall thrust of the message -- is the point about
filling out forms. Equivocating "some users don't mind clicking" with "you
should feel okay with forcing some users to click more" is dangerous, because
there are better ways to give visual feedback than forcing them to hit a next
button (especially when the user hitting that next button is using a
comparably slow internet connection.)

For example, one thing my dad does with all registration forms (offline or
online) is review everything he's typed in before hitting the final submit
button. I've watched him do this with countless sites and break the
registration in the process because he hits back on Page 3 and resubmits on
Page 2 and suddenly nothing's working and you just lost a customer over the
age of 45.

There are better ways to "give your users visual feedback that they are
accomplishing the task they’ve set out to do" than unnecessarily break their
experience -- which is not to say that multi-page web forms don't have their
place, but that they should be used consciously and sparingly.

Still a great, great article.

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Tichy
I actually feel the same about sharing photos. Social Networks are only usable
for me because I assume everything is public. Once I tried to organize a small
party with G+ and accidentally invited the whole internet. Luckily G+ wasn't
so popular back then (maybe still isn't).

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taylodl
Interesting that the bank had the most stable interface. They may be boring
but they know their customers well and apparently are doing a good job taking
care of their needs. In the end that's what it's all about.

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doubledub
Yep, low cognitive overhead. There is a reason an ATM is on every corner.

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jfarmer
This is easy to say and lots of folks say it. This article says it, too.

However, I liked it primarily because it illustrated a practical way of
achieving "low cognitive overhead", viz., creating narratives around a
hypothetical customer's emotional state. What are they feeling? What are they
anxious about? What are they trying to achieve and why?

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dylangs1030
Reading through this made me feel sad. I don't know why exactly, I guess just
the way he was describing how helpless his mother _feels_ doing these things.
My mother is probably the same way.

 _" She doesn't know what she's doing...she wants to though."_

 _" They fumble frustratingly..."_

 _" She's not confident enough..."_

 _" Am I doing it right?"_

\---

Anyway...the takeaway is great. Especially for iconography. I really, _really_
wish more designers woyuld take this to heart. So many user interface
designers are so forward thinking and fashionable in their methods that all
they do is sex everything up, completely alienating users that _just don 't
get it_ \- and they can't be blamed for that.

There is such a thing as taking design out of the way of users. But at the
same time, your design is not their responsibility. It can be their problem,
however.

