UX arrogance

Red Alert

Following on a rather ranty post made on the Evernote forum, I was wondering about developer's recent thinking on what I'd call "user experience" arrogance.

For example, what's wrong with "Yes" and "No". Why do we suddenly need "Yep", "Yes please!" and "No thanks!". Just as I don't converse with my friends by saying "cat /var/how-was-your/day", I similarly don't see the need for pointless spoken idioms to make their way into GUI elements.

Similarly, why does just about every site and app now invariably force a tour of some new feature on you when you open it. Evernote are at it, Dropbox are at it, and countless others. This should be best left to marketing e-mails - and I've unsubscribed, there's a reason why. I just don't want to know!

Am I overly sensitive about this, or is this trend actually becoming tiresome? And is it driven by Developers themselves or by other pressures such as Marketing / Design?

Aswerty

Yes it has a lot to do with marketing. But then everything in a business including the products developed are part of marketing. The general idea behind changing y/n into more antropomorphic phrases is to create a more humanistic human-machine interface. In this way users can become more attached and comfortable with a product. Also such phrases as "Yep" and "No thanks!" convey a casualness which tells users regardless of what they press things will still be okay. On the flip side tools such as GitHub do the opposite when you are doing something dangerous. If you try to delete a repository things become very formal, explicit and dangerous looking.

All this has nothing to do with arrogance – can you explain how you consider it to be so?

Also as to the feature tours; I'd be interested to see some data on their usage. I expect people in our industry would never use them since when you build software your intuition with regards to how other software works is very good. On the other hand the technical competence of the general masses can at times be head bangingly frustrating.

All in all though the rise of UX in the last decade has been a very positive thing in my opinion.

Smoggy

Red Alert wrote: »

Am I overly sensitive about this

YUP !

Edit : Or should that be YES ! ?

Atomic Pineapple

Aswerty's post is very good and I agree with it. Everything you have ear marked as arrogant (I dunno why arrogant?) would be to me a positive thing and something to embrace, the better and more human an experience you can provide for consumers the better results you will see.

Trojan

All of the stats show that the hard part is to actually get someone to start using your app, once they do that they'll stick around.

Many users never get around to actually using it even if it's dead simple to use and thus don't stay on past the expiry of the free trial, or upgrade, or whatever the retention step is.

The logic of the email sequence + SaaS tour is simple: the email sequence is designed to get inactive users to sign in. The tour is designed to walk them through actually using the functionality.

tricky D

The move beyond just Yes and No is reflecting the trend towards speech to text interfacing available in devices eg. Voice Search, Siri, Ziggy, Cortana, etc. This is also affecting copy on sites, with more formal expressions like Location being deformalised to copy like Where to Find Us which better targets voice-based queires. In a nutshell it's language usage becoming less formal and more conversational due to newer interfaces.

As for feature tours and the like, it's simply a case of much better conversion than email newsletters.

The Corinthian

In a previous life, as it were, I worked in the PSMS industry. There marketing is everything and with good reason; revenue is made on the basis of a few cent per SMS, over literally millions of transactions.

With increased regulation, requiring users do things such as a 'double opt-in', it meant that encouraging users to do so with a 'call to action' message (limited to 160 characters) became critical - literally the choice of "yup" over "yes" or the order in which options were presented would affect your conversion rate by precious percentage points, which in turn meant thousands or tens of thousands in increased, or lost, revenue.

Likewise in the app stores, 'friendlier' UI's are often what makes the difference between a user opening your app once before deleting it and they returning to it again and again. The difference between a one star and four or five rating. The difference between an app that is successful and one one of the multitudes of apps that were designed solely by techies who sneer at such 'arrogance' and have fewer than a thousand downloads.

So as much as it may offend the average techie, such marketing 'arrogance' is what ultimately pays salaries. So suck it up or move back in with your parents if you don't like it and don't care about making a living.

gargargar

I like the friendly approach but sometimes the language should be more formal.

I worked on an application in the financial space. We embedded a 3rd party help tool into it. All fine until the help widget had a problem. Instead of some generic 500 error it returned the words "Bailout needed." Not the greatest thing in a finnancial application. We got on to the 3rd party company and explained that we wanted a more formal error. They said that they strived to make their applciation more friendly. We removed the tool.

DublinWriter

Years ago as an undergrad in TCD I spent a whole year doing a module in 'HCI', or Human-Computer Interaction. It's a neglected branch of computer science that really needs to make a comeback.

Bascially, HCI is groovy-modern speak for UX-design.

Years ago a remember getting a spec from a complete numpty who had bluffed his way into a BA role. It was a data-entry application. He had specified 'wizards' to be used for the data entry part of the application. He prototyped the app using MS-Access.

Wizards are all great and good, but if you're a lowly data-entry bod and entering 100's of transactions a day, it's the last thing you want to do.

I revised his spec, reduced 30+ wizard steps down to one data entry form.

The rules of Occam's Razor apply in designing user interfaces. The simpler, the cleaner then the better it is for all concerned.

beauf

Red Alert wrote: »

...Am I overly sensitive about this...

I would say it depends.

I think depends on the market. If its a novice, infrequent users. Or its a
frequent expert user. Also depends on the content being delivered.

I don't really have a problem with , if I can skip it, and their is an expert route instead. If there isn't I'll just find an alternative.