UX Crash Course: Fundamentals
thehipperelement.com
thehipperelement.com
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!
> 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.
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.
I'm really tired hearing people at meeting talking and giving opinions. They're just that, they're never facts. Only facts shows the truth and facts don't need argumentation in most cases.
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.
It should be, but in my experience this is not the case.
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.
Looks like it's a tumblr blog. Maybe it's how Tumblr works, or they picked a theme and din't change the defaults.
My Galaxy S3 has a limit of 16 open tabs, so I was constantly having to close tabs to keep reading.
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 :)
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})();
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).
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for posting.
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.
I was taught that you never start a sentence with a numeral, always spell it out. "One opinion could be completely wrong."