Navigation Should Be Boring
allenpike.com
allenpike.com
Unfortunately UX people seem to hate boring and/or simple stuff...
If the mockups are boring then you have done your job well. The problem is that mockups that stand out, are what gets steak-holders interested. Some of my design work involved selling concepts, and the ones that sold were those that broke the UI conventions in some way. Those features that broke the conventions were then set in stone! Instant regret.
Uniformity is bad! They want bright colors, low contrast text, and each page to be unique. If every page looks the same then they obviously are paying you too much. This is how lots of print designers get started in the web-industry, and wowing people is the main objective. UX doesn't come into it.
The other thing that I've found happen, is business requirements sometimes further complicate the UI. We had a simple app that was a report of damages as part of a return process.
This was mandated by the project manager to be displayed as a progress bar. Sofar as a vehicle that was 100% fucked would be 100% complete. I tried to push back with exclamation points for damaged areas, but progress bars were already sold to the customer.
Some of my best clients have never seen my portfolio. Even the ones who start off with "where can I see some of your work" forget all about my portfolio by the time we are done speaking. If you do a proper job of explaining what your job entails, what the client gets out of it and where to focus priorities, you'll likely never need to show your previous work.
Sadly, most junior UX wannabes don't understand this and continue to try and impress people with portfolios. They get the client they deserve. This does the industry no favors, but I could care less. Once that business is butt hurt by a previous designer and decides to commit to a real process, we can talk.
If you are part of the problem, you don't get to complain. Be the one designer who does 80% data and 20% design. Just say "no" to stupid ideas and squash them like a bug. If you are an entrepreneur running a business, you are in charge. Do you tell a plumber how to do his job? No. Then act like the plumber and do things the right way and tell them to thank you later. Results speak for themselves.
UX people tend to advocate for simple, boring stuff because they test. Like you pointed out, UX professionals like Krug, Nielsen, Norman constantly advocate for boring navigation:
"Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know."
- Jakob's Law of Internet User Experience
However, someone simply designing UI will often suggest new and complicated designs, because they don't test. If they don't test, they are not practicing UX. Even if their job title is UX designer, they are just doing UI design.
Disclaimer: Yes I am defending my UX job, which involves testing and face time with users :)
A number of others seem to have mistaken simple and boring for dumb and useless.
What happened to the familiar menu?
UX Designers decided it wasn't simple enough and replaced it with hamburger menus and ribbons because "dumb users".
I'm not saying you are one of these UX designers, but lets not pretend they aren't there cause they run the shop at most places it seems, including a number of places in FAANG land.
So that is not what I argue above. In my post above I argue against the dumbification of desktop apps and websites. Things that were working until UX designers came up with the idea that people are to dumb.
Edit: for those questioning my reply, I’m talking about the logical resolution (what you actually use for layout) not the physical pixel resolution
Resolution will only get you so far; people don't have infinitely acute eyesight and infinitely precise dexterity. Most people can't reliably hit a touch target of less than ~10mm in any dimension, which equates to ~180 real pixels on an iPhone X.
People hold phones much closer than you would sit from an Olden Days CRT, too. It's not just raw area that matters, but something like degrees, as observed by your eye.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/uxguide/gui...
Problem is, it was and is routinely ignored.
Anyway, as you say, it's the Electron era now, and it's the same everywhere. We had our golden age of desktop UX, but we couldn't keep it.
Source: am a UX designer
It’s literally the whole point of the job.
Many years ago I was working on a project for a major UK high street bank, and on the team was a designer who genuinely believed "users like a challenge". No users do not like a challenge. Users like spending the absolute minimum time possible doing their online banking, then they like getting on with their lives.
I believe he later went on to win loads of awards... as judged by other designers. Anyway a large part of why the web sucks and runs like molasses is guys like that.
That's probably true of many professions. Our software architect got us stuck with microservices for example, which we don't need. He did it either because he's bored, or wanted to put something fancier on his resume.
If not managed well, many employees go off the deep end. I admit, I've over-engineered parts of software for the sheer fun of it. But I try to limit my "experiments".
UI is all about minimizing user workload, and NOT requiring people to learn redundant knowledge.
Take advantage of every bit of knowledge that they already have from previous systems.
Every split second they must use to figure out your new way to do someting they already knonw how to do another way, is squandered and redundant.
Eliminate it. Work hard to eliminate it, so that they can focus on your real innovation
Note: even if you have actually figured out some truly better UI controls, they must be not merely noticeably better, but better by a margin that exceeds the cognitive costs of both the new learning & the ongoing disconnect from the main UI (and remember, they don't live in your app the way you do).
E.g., the fad towards 'clean interfaces' with minimalistic or totally hidden hotspots may look prettier, but is a huge waste of user time and generates animosity towards the product. Just the example of Gmail hiding the Trash folder; I don't know how many times I've had to help people telling them that they need to scroll down, click on the "MoreV" word (not even transiently highlighted as a control), then scroll down again... I use it so little I've even had to Google it myself in a rush... That and 1000 other things are not an improvement, they are a waste of people's time for some design conceit.
Of course, if you want to give off signals that your core product ideas aren't all that uniquely useful, and you need to create cute & costly UI differences as distractions, by all means, go right on ahead...
If you have a real innovation, the best thing you can do is put zero redundant learning between your user and your key innovations.
Consider that the user base already has a set of pre-installed libraries and callable routines for most UI functions. These were effectively created by MS and Apple by their design process, and installed in the user base by endless familiarization, then extended by Apple & Android on mobile devices. Those libraries are now well embedded and installed.
Make calls into those existing libraries.
Don't force the user to rewrite and reinstall new libraries (unless absolutely necessary).
If this is not possible, "boring" navigation is the next best thing: it's tedious but obvious and predictable.
Highly creative navigation should be an exception, for art pieces of web design.
Please note that the presence of "boring" navigation does not prevent having "advanced" navigation, which is a faster equivalent for power users. E.g. many sites have efficient keyboard navigation. But that advanced navigation should complement, not replace the easy-to-discover "boring" navigation. A good example is Stackoverflow.
When we did UX testing with real users, and also some users who were given the scenarios, it became painfully obvious about how much of a cognitive load it was, for the users to understand what's hidden behind the hamburger menu.
But we still continued with this design, because we (the organization as a while) didn't have the gumption to revert back to tabbar based design while HB menu was still the rage, and a year later Apple mentioned in one of the WWDC talks that Hamburger Menu is not cool.
Recently, I quit an app company because (in addition to other reasons) they decided to move from tab to hamburger (and I had an another offer).
In that, just like Facebook's "college email only" lock-out at start, it was a feature, not a bug.
[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/jeremy-liew-first-snapchat-i...
Does anyone think that that static links are better than flyouts?
Only end users, but who cares about them?
1) Menu link, one of two important things on the entire site (the other one is hours) is buried in a hamburger menu
2) The menu is implemented as a fixed-size page designed for an iPad Mini (which they use as menus at the tables)
3) Different types of items (appetizers, entrees, pizza, drinks, etc) are in a horizontal bar across the top, with large font size. Since it's a fixed iPad Mini width, this scrolls horizontally. Less than half of them are visible at a time.
4) Individual items are listed by name, thumbnail photo, and price for each size. Want to know what toppings are on their "Eighth Street" pizza? Click on it! Then click to close that and click on the next menu item. Do this for each pizza, then try to remember what the one that sounded best was called, and probably go through half of them again to get back to it. Super efficient way to find which pizza you'd like.
I think the restaurant understands in concept that they should have a website, but I don't think they care to think about it beyond that.
EDIT: I just revisited this and you actually can get to the menu without the hamburger link. It's designed as one of those pages where the content is centered (vertically and horizontally) with a bunch of white space as a full page thing, so it doesn't look like you'd need to scroll, but there's actually more content (including a second link to the menu) if you try scrolling down.
I'll blame this partly on Apple for taking away the always visible scroll bar indicators and partly on this stupid web design trend of giant "paginated scrolling" pages that don't look like there's anything running off screen that you'd need to scroll to.
If the menu vendor had bothered with responsive design it wouldn't be half as bad, but "here's an iPad viewport centered in your browser" must have meet the contractual requirements.
A $10/month Squarespace subscription is pretty damn cheap and IIRC you don't need to know much of anything about web development to set that up.
And the cost of web development has never been lower.
That the cost of web development has never been cheaper is a fact.
That the restaurant website is important -- that's how customers find out about it -- and shouldn't be left behind because of "small margins" is also not very controversial.
If the margins are so small as not to afford some $1000 (or less) for a decent website, then what other corners have been cut?
This is in stark contrast to kitchen-related matters, which they are likely much more experienced at identifying and dealing with.
I think hamburger menus should not be used anywhere except in hamburger restaurants.
Why would a restaurant website need a hamburger menu (UI I mean, not the literal menu of hamburgers on offer)?
Step one is to stop trying to make the same UI for mobile and desktop. You're guaranteed to end up with a result that is insultingly bad for at least one of those segments of your user base.
The worst is when the mobile version doesn't have those additional menu items at all, anywhere, and certain things are simply impossible to do on mobile.
Tossing the lower priority items onto an additional page (hamburger menu) when screen space is limited is often the fair and simple trade-off.
"Don't use hamburger menus" is often coupled with the hand-wavy "just create novel mobile UI that doesn't need it", but the reality is that the items in hamburger menus usually don't need their own top-level button on a small screen at all. That's why they're hidden behind a click. They aren't worth the clutter, but they're still things a user may want to do.
In my experience, seeing that just about everything uses the hamburger menu, like the Kindle, it's a concession users are willing to make in order to use a small device. What exactly is the trade-off here without downsides?
Here's a fix and description of the issue, but yes. The bottom of the screen will take trial and error. I've been messing around with fullscreen modals for interactive content, and iOS is the main problem, 100vh != 100% != position: absolute; bottom = 0; top = 0;
It can be too accessible, see got example the swipe left/right to change articles gestures Blogger had (has?). I could never scroll a long article to the end without accidentally navigating elsewhere.
>many users don’t even find gestures
This is 100% entirely application dependent and in no way guaranteed or obvious.
> on Android the back button is at the bottom of the screen.
That was true for some time. Modern android phones don't have buttons down there anymore.
Since I'm ranting anyway. I wish chrome on Android would put the address bar down at the bottom too, even Microsoft figured that one out. Also, since we know Android dropped buttons to save money for manufacturers, why can't we have some luxury phones with real buttons?
I realize that we're all conditioned from years of browser back buttons that "top left == back" but there's no real reason that it's the case.
How about bottom left? Like Android phones used to do?
Logically, it makes sense to be on either of the left corners because obviously having it in the middle of the screen (even on the side) takes up valuable content real estate. Between the top and the bottom, I'd pick the top every time.
As for ACTUALLY going back a screen, the gesture to swipe from the left is the real UX default. The top left button is for newbies/redundancy.