Title: How Bad UX Makes Users Blame Themselves
Context: Unless your design task is to “make users feel stupid”, you are going to need to work very, very hard to succeed.
Synopsis: We’ve all been there. Staring clench-jawed at a computer screen, wondering what is it about our stupid, stupid brain that isn’t letting us understand the doubtlessly simple set of actions that will elicit the behavior we are desperately trying to trigger. Of course it’s our fault. This machine is the product of countless hours of effort across generations of people way smarter than us. The software has obviously been conceived, designed, and tested by teams of specialists whose years of education make us look like a pre-school dunce in comparison. But just as certainly this universal human bias is invariably wrong. Even the presumption that I the user am, or need be, at the mercy of an object rather than the other way around is bonkers. Now everything we interact with isn’t going to be as easy as pie the first time out, but nor should it be as difficult as calculating pi to its terminating decimal place.
Best Bit: “Design isn’t about pushing pixels. It’s about advocacy. As designers, we can make it clear that it’s not about the user understanding technology, but about the technology (and those who create it) understanding them.”
via blog.uxpin.com
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