Surprise and Delight

Gfail

When Gmail implemented its new design, my initial response was fairly positive; I liked the cleaner, simpler look (though it still has a long way to go in terms of aesthetics). My main quibble was that the icons seemed like a step backwards from the text labels. As icons go, they’re reasonably clear, but they still require a momentary pause to “translate” them, something that wasn’t the case with the text labels. Not the best design decision, then, but a relatively minor concern.*

But after a week or so of using the new Gmail, I noticed something odd: I kept hitting the arrow for “Back to Inbox” after writing a reply, instead of hitting “Send.” I assumed this was completely my fault, because the Back to Inbox arrow is orthogonal, clearly indicating a “back” or “return” action—an arrow denoting “Send” would presumably be straight. So it must have been some hiccup in my poor old brain, right?

Not exactly, and in fact, it’s not really my fault. I didn’t notice it until I was writing a rather long reply, but the row of icons, which is anchored to the top of the message, covers up the Send, Save Now, and Discard buttons once you scroll down in your reply, so that you can’t see them without scrolling to either the top or the bottom of the message you’re writing.

So one natural response is to hit whatever button is in the position you expect the send button to be in. My brain was saying something like “I see that icon, and I’m not taking the nanosecond needed to process what it represents; it’s where the ‘Send’ button is supposed to be, so I’ll just hit it and the message will be sent.” Oops.

Now that I’ve recognized the problem, I’m consciously scrolling up to find the actual Send button, but I wonder why, when I’m writing a message, I see less likely actions like Back to Inbox persistently but have to hunt for the primary ones like Send. Kind of a Gfail, I think.

*The metaphor-mixing is also slightly puzzling—some actions have icons and some have text labels, and though that doesn’t trigger a cognitive collapse or anything, it does, again, give just that nanosecond of pause. I’m sure it would have been difficult to come up with an icon for, say, Discard (as opposed to Delete), but using icons for some actions and not others is a bit of an odd decision.

New Poll: UXers and Visual Design

Are you a UX professional? If so, I’m curious about how much visual design you do as part of your UX job, if any. This is for a presentation I’m working on about the role that visual design plays in UX design, and also for my personal curiosity. There will be more polls on this topic coming up in the next few weeks. Thanks!

Surprise and Delight

I recently renamed this tumblog to reflect my new plan for it: as a repository for examples of great user experience, on the Web or wherever. Specifically, I believe that we’ve reached a point where many (most?) consumer-facing sites and other digital spaces get basic user experience right, more or less. You can buy something online, find a hotel or compare airfares, check your bank balance, stream music, look up movie times or sports scores, all without tearing your hair out or spending more time than you’d planned to. In fact, this has been the case for several years now, though it took a while (and a lot of work by smart people) to get to this point. But there are two caveats to this relatively happy state:

• Being adequate isn’t really that much of an achievement; it’s to be lauded, but not celebrated.
• There’s still plenty of bad UX out there

I want to explore the second point a little bit in a separate post, but the first point is going to be the focus of this blog. It used to be a sort of joke question among UXers: what happens when we’ve fixed all the bad and broken user experiences? Will we all be out of jobs? People first started asking that question back when it seemed that there was no limit to the number of bad sites out there, but now it’s a question that can be asked with a straight face, more or less. I’m interested in what comes after acceptable UX, and my feeling is that part of the answer is not just “great UX,” but beautiful UX, or UX that has the power to surprise and delight. I’ve been haphazardly collecting examples of experiences with those qualities for a few years now, and I’m going to start gathering them here.

And what are your nominations? Let me know!