Traditionally an in-person event, bringing together a group of passionate designers in one spot, this year, the conference will be taking place online on July 9th, from 1 PM to 5:30 PM EST.

The online conference will feature the same quality of great UX content we know and love from previous FITC Spotlight UX events.

There’s something for every UX professional in this lineup.

We’re excited to hear from the great speakers who will be giving talks at the event, including:

Jared Spool, Center Center
Scott Jenson, Google
Catt Small, Asana
Kate Moran, Nielsen Norman Group
Jessica Moon, Adobe

Spotlight UX is sure to be jam-packed with insights for product and UX designers to expand their skill set, all from some of the best-known designers in the field.

We encourage you to take this excellent opportunity to learn from these designers and grab a ticket to the event!

View the full conference schedule here.

Save 50% with discount code mediatemple and catch this event for just $20.

Get tickets

Experience design as a foundational skill

If you’re looking to level up your product strategy and experience design methodologies and execution, we’re here to help.

Get in touch

The post FITC Spotlight UX: July 9th, 2020 appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Across digital products and interfaces, as well as service models, users of a product or service may interact with complex internal systems. This can include trying to navigate organizational rules related to data handling, security, access, language, and documentation. This can lead to a complicated user workflow that makes it more and more likely someone will get frustrated, complain, or move on.

It’s precisely in the face of these complex requirements that a simple, intuitive interface becomes essential to provide valuable, rewarding access to otherwise complicated systems.

Abstracting away complexity

While abstraction is a core tenet of computer science, rules-based and engineering-led products and services often fail to deliver compelling, usable interfaces due to a lack of abstraction.

Here’s how you can identify a lack of abstraction which limits the value of a product or service:

• organizational requirements are front and center, with complicated user workflows and language in place to prevent behaviour.
• users are asked to do all the work, instead of the product or service providing increasing value with every interaction or engagement. e.g. providing intelligent recommendations, helping organize information, or other automations or valuable outcomes.
• navigation models are unintuitive to users as they have to learn industry terminology or organizational processes instead of using familiar terms and supporting common, everyday behaviours.

The more complex your system, the simpler your interface needs to be.

The bottom line is: users aren’t interested in muddling through the complexity of your systems, but how a simple, intuitive interface can allow rewarding interaction and outcomes for them.

Achieving an effective user experience

Simply put: it’s the responsibility of an organization to translate complex organizational processes into a simple, intuitive, and ultimately seamless user experience.

It is okay for your organization to have complex processes, use language that would otherwise be confusing to your users, work within limitations or follow best practices that would not seem familiar to your user base. However, if you force these requirements on your users this will lead to confusing and frustrating products and services that will limit adoption, engagement, and use.

It is crucial to therefore find the balance between the complexity of the organization, rules, and data, and providing a compelling experience for your users.

The challenge: in most cases, there is always an alternative to your interface. Whether it’s taking up costly time at your call centre, requiring hands-on support, or, worse still, switching altogether to a competitor. The cost of a poorly executed interface is both measurable and profound.

This is where exceptional service design and product strategy expertise comes into play.

Succeed by making your product or service a rewarding alternative for users

Here are three rules to live by in shaping your organization’s products and services:

1. Users have a variety of ways of solving the problem you’ve designed your organization and product around. If your way isn’t a better way, you’ll lose them.
2. Users will work to follow the processes they’re familiar with or without your organization, including through competitors or their own methods. Your job in designing a product or service is to provide higher value for your user over any other alternative method of solving their problem. If not, you limit the incentive to try and continue to use your product or service.
3. Remember, the familiar is always easier. Your way needs to be more efficient, enjoyable, or informative than any current user process, or you end up wasting your investment in providing a product or service.

Simple and intuitive wins over complex every time

If you’re having challenges translating business processes into a seamless user experience, we’re here to help. Learn more about our approach to service design and product strategy.

Get in touch

The post Complex systems require simple, intuitive interfaces appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Users are familiar with the idea that they can scroll down to reveal additional content that is hidden off the screen. But it’s not expected that a page might load in the middle, allowing the user to scroll both up and down for additional content.

In our example below, we want users to know that they can scroll up to reveal previous dates in the month. A simple way to achieve this goal is with content hinting—revealing a part of the hidden content to imply that more content is available just off screen.

If we just started with Today, or Yesterday as the top row, there is no indication that a user can scroll up to reveal previous dates, even if that functionality exists.

By cutting the February 14^th date in half, we’re giving the user a hint that there is additional content hiding above that’s just an effortless swipe away.

Hint at unexpected interactions

Hinting at interactions helps users quickly understand how to use your product in unexpected and rewarding ways. This quickly turns new users into more engaged power users who understand and utilize the full capabilities of your product.

Looking for more product design insights?

Sign up for our mailing list to be the first to learn insightful tips, case studies, and more.

The post Turn new users into power users with content hinting appeared first on Say Yeah!.

While I appreciate that iOS 7.1’s update saw the shift key match the colour of the rest of the keyboard when it’s turned on (everything goes white), rather than changing to another shade of grey as in iOS 7.0, Geoff’s absolutely right that this is not clear enough for users to understand when the shift key is active.

Let’s explore this in more detail.

Android 4.4’s Current Keyboard

As Geoff pointed out, Android solves this by actually changing the keys on the keyboard. Personally, I find this practice of changing all the keys on the keyboard quite jarring. Particularly because this change happens so frequently (including every time you start a new sentence) in order to highlight the capitalized first letter of the first word before shifting to lower case for the rest of the sentence. Here’s how that shift looks every time you start a new sentence:

iOS 7’s Current Keyboard

However, it’s clear that iOS 7’s more subtle approach is not enough. Here are the current states in iOS 7.1 for lower case, shifted, and caps lock.

The iOS 7.0 keyboard, by comparison:

Neither of these is clear, and both suffer from odd choices, including the removal of the outlined arrow from iOS 7.1, and the lack of clarity between shift and caps lock in iOS 7.0. More importantly, in both cases, there’s a lot of effort required to understand whether or not that shift key is on or off.

Geoff’s Proposed Keyboard

In Geoff’s article, he worked through to this proposal, which maintains Android’s shifting keys and reverses the shading of the shift key to imply it’s a button being pressed to activate it, but still leaving out the hollow arrow for the unpressed key:

Lee’s Proposed Keyboard

I think it would be enough to retain iOS7’s three states: grey, white, and underlined white (for caps lock) along with two visual adjustments. First, some reverse shading to imply the key is pressed down (as Geoff introduced). Second, returning to the use of an outlined arrow to imply off and a filled in arrow to imply on (which is how the shift key looked on previous versions of iOS, as noted by Sean O’Sullivan).

These two visual additions would eliminate the jarring adjustment of all the keys jumping from lower case to uppercase found on Android, while keeping the more easily read all caps letter keys we know and love from our physical keyboards.

Here’s a look at the minimalist approach I’d prefer: inactive grey, with an outlined arrow vs a depressed active white shift key with a filled in black arrow.

But Matt here at Say Yeah is still not comfortable with this, instead preferring more distinction between the white active shift key and the white default keys, which are white and all caps at all times. Matt’s thoughts:

Consistency is fine (white to match the other keys), but not at the expense of clarity. By making the shift key distinctly different from the rest of the keyboard, it becomes obvious what’s happening so you don’t have to think about it.

Previous to iOS 7.1, the shift key lit up in bright blue. Something along those lines is Matt’s preference. Filip Truta agrees, stating in his article The iOS 7.1 Shift Key Is a Disaster:

iOS 6 was spot on, change wasn’t necessary

From Jason D O’Grady:

Above: In iOS 6, the Shift key is gray when disabled and blue when enabled, which is much easier to discern than with the iOS 7 keyboard.

What’s your take on how Apple should solve this notable issue?

The post iOS 7’s woefully unclear shift key and what can be done about it. appeared first on Say Yeah!.

From the initial iOS 7 beta:

As reported by MacRumors, today’s iOS 7 Beta 4 corrects these issues, with an updated lock screen sporting a right facing arrow.

Better still, Apple has prioritized the key function of sliding to unlock and prevented arrow fatigue by doing away with the up arrow in exchange for a flat bar to indicate access to the settings panel which slides up from below. Now, the only arrow on the lock screen is next to the action which gets you into your phone.

Finally, to make these interactions even easier for fumbling hands, the slide to unlock text now sits further away from the bottom of the screen, preventing any accidental activation of the settings panel or the camera when you’re moving your thumb to unlock the phone.

Here’s how these welcome improvements look:

The post Slide To Unlock, Obvious Once Again appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Following Apple’s iOS 7 announcement earlier this week, there’s been a lot of discussion around the default icon set (pictured above, right). Detractors have focused on inconsistencies, concerns around a lack of cohesion between icons, and a general disdain for the colour palette and icon styles. Designer Leo Drapeau’s taken a stab at addressing some of the more moderate considerations with his iOS 7 icon refinements (pictured above, left).

He offers some nice takes on both simplifying some of the icons (Camera, Game Center, Stocks) and differentiating others (Reminders vs Notes), but I don’t agree with his decision to go back to the iOS 6 corner radius (where icons appear smaller inside their rounded corner squares).

The new, larger iOS 7 icons have a beautiful playfulness and resonance with the smaller padding. Resetting them makes them appear less touch-friendly.

Update: Neven Mrgan wonderfully illustrates an issue with the larger icons based on their varying weights:

And yes, you need to scale to ensure lighter weight icons are not overwhelmed by their fuller cousins.

Now back to Leo: I fear he’s lost the plot in the dock, with a more complex Phone icon, under-styled Mail and Safari icons, and a thin, more conservative musical note which almost disappears when compared to the other icons.

For me, there are five concerns that stand out with the iOS 7 icons.

1. Game Center’s reflective bubbles, which are incongruous with every other icon.

2. Music’s vibrant red/orange, which is outside the colour palette of the other icons (or at least appears to be because of the dark to dark gradient, rather than light to dark gradients of the other icons).

3. The Reminders icon, which has no charm, particularly in light of Leo’s wonderful reworking.

4. The overly complex Settings and Compass icons.

5. A Camera icon that shows something that isn’t anything like my iPhone. I’m sure they still aren’t using a floppy disk as a save icon, right? The previous camera icon was a lens. Perfect.

Some minor efforts in finding consistency will resolve most of these issues, but there’s no doubt these new icons better suit the expression and the experience of iOS 7’s overall redesign.

Icons aside, the most important concern stemming from this redesign is found on the lock screen, where ‘slide to unlock’ has lost its arrow, trough, and the block that slides through it from left to right (pictured below).

Certainly some visual cues need to be added so you know how the heck to unlock your phone. I bet 50% of people try to slide up, rather than from left to right:

The post Refining iOS 7’s Icons. And What To Do About A Very Confusing Lock Screen. appeared first on Say Yeah!.

One of the primary goals in our design work is to understand how a user can best flow through an app, from the moment they dive in to the moment they’ve accomplished what they set out to do.

While navigating through a digital product, it’s this sense of place that allows you to focus on the task at hand, and not worry about next, previous, or missed interactions.

Depending on a user’s goals, and the tasks required to reach those goals, the path through an app may lead across multiple screens. Our efforts always focus on first reducing the depth and complexity of this journey and then helping users understand their place throughout the journey.

The understanding of place is vital for people navigating a digital world, where anything is possible and disorientation can become a profound distraction.

In the digital world, your sense of place is defined by product structure, layout, navigation, movement, and layers. And this is further enhanced or detracted by any competing elements outside of your product’s control, including an operating system, other application windows, and physical buttons.

It’s no wonder then, following Apple’s reveal of the latest version of its mobile operating system yesterday, that we’re excited about designing apps for iOS7.

With this iteration of the operating system, we’re starting to see long standing issues addressed. For example, easier, more intuitive access to sharing and settings that otherwise took you out of your task flow and threw you onto a whole other path. This is all part of a new visual language throughout the operating system that will help users feel grounded and focused on the task at hand, even if they are required to jump from app to operating system and back again. In Apple’s words, “a new structure that brings clarity to the entire experience.”

Specifically:

Distinct and functional layers help create depth and establish hierarchy and order. The use of translucency provides a sense of context and place.

John Gruber elaborates on this:

In hardware, design is limited by physics: weight, density, size, connections, seams. Software doesn’t face those design limits. The old design of iOS 6 took advantage of that lack of limits, to its detriment. In iOS 6, you open a folder on the home screen, and linen is something you see underneath. You pull down Notification Center, and linen is something see over. It’s both over and under. Hardware doesn’t work like that, but software can, because software can show you anything, conceptual logic be damned.

The design of iOS 7 is based on rules. There’s an intricate system at work, a Z-axis of layers organized in a logical way. There is a profound reduction in the use of faux-3D visual effects and textures, but iOS 7 is anything but flat. It is three dimensional not just visually but logically. It uses translucency not to show off, but to provide you with a sense of place.

iOS 7 is available to developers now and will be released to the public this fall. With 90% of compatible devices now running iOS 6, you can be sure the majority of users will be upgrading by year end.

Ready to talk iOS 7 and what’s next for your app?

If you’re looking to bring fundamental product strategy methodologies and execution to your team, we’re here to help.

Get in touch

The post The importance of sense of place while designing digital products appeared first on Say Yeah!.

In the screen shot above the current temperature is 41º but the low is listed as 43º.

This is lazy work that shows a contradiction to end users because last week’s predictions (highs and lows) are mixed in with current data (current temperature and the hourly report).

Neven Mrgan:

Apple’s (weather) app gets its data from Yahoo weather, but I’m sure I’ve seen this behavior in many other weather apps, websites, etc. They show the historical predictions for the high and low, failing to update them as the actual data comes in. If the low was predicted as 50º, it doesn’t matter if a freak storm should drop the temperature to 32º—the app still claims that “today’s low will be 50º.” The app is lying.

The flip side to this is, a degree here or there doesn’t make a real-world difference. And while I don’t like showing inconsistent data to users, Matt at Say Yeah takes a different attitude to this discrepancy:

In this case, who cares. Weather is never accurate until you’re in it, it changes throughout the day, and a degree Celsius or two degrees Fahrenheit doesn’t matter. If this was forecasting revenue in thousands of dollars, it would be equivalent to a $10 discrepancy.

For a forecast, that’s fine. But if you’re showing current data, don’t also show contradicting forecasts without identifying them as such.

In other words, if there’s value to comparing forecasts to actual information, do so, but visually identify the difference between the data points.

And for a weather app on your phone that shows it was last updated the minute you checked, the data should be current.

The post Don’t let your data lie. appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Make everything that CAN be alike as alike as possible. Let the differences between stuff jump out as accents.

The post Make everything that CAN be alike as alike as possible. appeared first on Say Yeah!.