Good UX is In The Details

Have you heard the saying "the devil is in the detail"? It means that you have to put effort on the details to catch the devil and evil for the sake of good. It is the same for user experience design. In order to do it good or better you have to put enough effort to the details. 

There is a site, called "Little Big Details", dedicated to curating these UX details. So get your daily dose of design inspiration.

Yolkfish: Funny Tool to Separate Eggs

Yolkfish by Peleg Design could be the best designed kitchen equipment and one of the simplest. It is basically egg yolk and white separator. At the same time it has a funny look.

Kickstarter Projects are Good UX Case Studies

Kickstarter is always good place to see courageous and reformer people. Most of the successful Kickstarter projects prove one thing: Project backers are the ones who can imagine the prospective improvements to their lives with the final products. And these improvements are all about their experiences. It can be rude to say but UX design sells (look at what Apple products do).

In Kickstarter you could find a lot of examples, here is one: Zipi by Frank Cho.

What did motivate him to start this project?  I guess it is his poor earbud experience. In order to see and solve a real life problem you should either have an empathy with your users or have the same problem by yourselves.

Let's think about the times which we were trying to get over our earbuds no matter if we are designer or not: Switching between usage and non-usage of earbuds is hard. At the same time they are always problematic to store. The Kickstarter project Zipi comes addressing both these problems. It eases switching between usage and non-usage; and eases to store the cable junk. 

As pointed out above the best tool we as designers have to never part ways is the empathy (or having the same problem). This tool helps us depict the problem and discover a solution. User experience design is not just polished screens for users, it is a connection between the user and the product. It may come in many forms: sometimes a simple button in UI and sometimes a string with a magnet. So UX design is to make users feel better what they use and get more out of it. The best designed products provide its users self time, a.k.a "me times" instead of messing up with the product or manuals.

A Good UX Pattern Candidate: Providing Users Progress Tracking Ability

Online education has become an important part of our lives. Right now, whatever you want to know is available online. And my husband works for one of these an online education startups and this detail is pointed out by him a couple of days ago. It is a todo list of a curated article list about a JavaScript framework called AngularJS: http://www.thinkster.io/

Well, why is this site is mentioned here? It is because of one tiny but powerful detail: Their way of keeping user's progress. This site is all about written content and links to outer site contents curated in a way that it is like an actual curriculum. And this tiny power detail is that it has check buttons for the user to keep track and it asks for the credential after  the user's first check.

This is a simple yet powerful way of keeping track of what you have learnt on the site. You don't have to manage the article tracking by yourself, site helps you to do it. Loved it! Now the question: Is this possible to generalize such a concept for all content-heavy sites?

Thanks Google: Google Drive Activity Stream

Do you use Google Drive? I definitely do use it more now!  It is the most effective file storage ever. For me, it is a way to create and organize my projects. And some times, it is my publishing tool, too. 

Besides, it is not just about storing. Drive makes group projects easier because everyone can share files and work together.  I have been using it for years, despite the complexity. So, the time came for us to share good news about this complexity. 

Google just announced a new activity stream in Drive showing us what's changed. I found this feature truly helpful and becoming indispensable to anyone who uses Drive. 

Image from Google Drive's blog.

But I, as a UX designer, will propose to make it even more useful for a case.  

1. The Case: When an activity includes big number of file changes it is easy to get lost.  In these cases a user tend to see all items in the activity. The only way to do it is to click "show all" link. However show all opens a big list without seeing the collapse link unless you scroll all the way down to the end of the activity.  
2. The Problem: If the user is able to reach the end of the activity, she could see the "show less" link.  When she clicks it she lost the context of where she was because scroll gets sticked to position of the scroll bar.

Some Possible Solutions

1. Rather than current behavior it would be nice to  make the collapsing animated and take the user back to the beginning of the activity. It will save the context (user's understanding of location) problem.
2. Other solution could be our old and good friend "pagination". As in Gmail email listings, pagination here can safe lives as well.
3. Yet another, but my favorite among three is having a sticky "show less" link on the side when user expands the list. They could close the link waterfall on the go. This solution should be ideal if applied with solution 1. Look at the sample images below.

Adding sticky "show less" link on the side is a possible solution to overwhelming number of changes