Hot answers tagged workflow
29
There's a million things that you could to do to grow your skills and make yourself a better UX designer. Here are some ideas off the top of my head:
Talk to your manager about how you can grow your skills to help the team out.
Conduct a baseline usability study on the most recent version of the product that you designed and determine whether users are ...
15
You should have the buttons at the bottom right because:
The standard for modals is to have the buttons at the bottom, so it is likely where people will look for action buttons
It is a more natural visual flow reading in a Z pattern, and one that has become entrenched.
A button on the right is typical for a submit button as it has the feeling of moving ...
14
If the war room is for making a tight deadline, then I'd say the comment from @Roger-Attrill is perfect. Especially the coffee. Don't forget the coffee.
However, if it's used for brainstorm sessions, there might be some other components you can use for an effective and most of all creative brainstorm session. Make sure people inside the room don't get ...
13
This answer applies to most presentations, not just UX ones.
A good presentation is like a story, where you take your audience on the journey that you want them to experience. If you send the presentation to them ahead of time, you lose the ability to take them on that journey.
There are other potential negatives as well in that your audience may start ...
11
Try shopping anything on amazon without logging in first.
Browse -> pickout the item -> add to card -> proceed to check-out -> log-in -> continue with address selection and payment.
Amazon can easily be the top player who needs to worry about user flow and logging in :) So, YES, login should just be a step outside the flow and back in i.e.
find ...
10
Is it even neccessary to show how many children are left to be approved at all?
How many administrators will be doing the approvals? If it is more than one then the task will probably be split up anyway (please correct me if I'm wrong) so instead of showing the progress bar you could do one of the following:
on approval of one listing ask the admin if ...
9
The Previous button should not act like the Back button. The Previous button means "go to the next-lowest numbered step"; the Back button means "go to the screen you were on before this one". In any given context they may have the same effect or different effects.
So here are two paths the user could take.
Step 1 Next→ Step 2 Next→ Step 3 Previous→ Step 2 ...
7
The Right Information
Firstly, make sure your displays show the information the user needs to make good decisions and input. The use of a color-coded matrix assumes that your user is trying to achieve a certain pattern of assignments, such as a certain number of people in each duty type per day (e.g., have adequate coverage when some are on vacation), or ...
6
This is my second answer; posted after the OP updated the question with more info.
The left suggestion gives you the option to "download files" by pressing a button for each list item. Once the files has been downloaded, an icon indicates that. The text on the button is enough to make the following states understandable, no matter your exact choice of ...
6
Cancel buttons can be extremely useful. For example, in the screenshot below it gives me peace of mind in knowing I can successfully exit the process at any time.
Especially useful with forms requiring multiple steps. Closing the window on a page/step 2 can cause confusion as to what will happen with the data you have already supplied. This is where I would ...
5
In describing a place where "where they sit and and brainstorm" the term think tank is perhaps more appropriate. The term war room originated as a term to describe the command and control center to wage a real war. The English war rooms that Churchill used in World War II are an example.
A key characteristic of any war room is the need to keep all ...
5
Update: This answer is no longer addressing the intended question, since the OP clarified.
Is a calendar ever worthy if it is sometimes only displaying a subset of all the events?
Here are some quick sketches on an all-or-nothing approach. Instead of having to decide to take action for each and every meeting/document, the list of items has a top bar, ...
5
Being able to do things using different ways is a good thing. People discover parts of the application differently and follow different paths towards a goal, so if you provide them more ways to get to the same result, it makes life easier for your users.
One example of an application that does this well is Word 2010.
To align my text, I can either use ...
5
I follow a similar process but with an extra step - flow design.
I prefer, as I'm the UX person, to know what it is the user needs to achieve. I like to either use pre-written (or I write them myself) use cases based on what the stystem needs to help the user achieve.
To use a website example:
As a customer I want to be able to add an item to my basket, ...
5
Present a warning to the user about the consequences of deleting item X, i.e.,
download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups
The 'consequences' could be a cascading delete (as I've shown above), or dereferencing X from the various related items (i.e., "Item One will no longer know about X"), depending on your use case.
5
All private shopping sites that I know of don't even show their content to anyone that is not signed in. You could choose to show your content to everyone, but then it's simply a shopping site.
Asking someone to sign up or log in to your site is a barrier that has a chance of pushing them away. So you should present the barrier at the time when you have ...
4
I would like to see a solution similar to that of JOG. That you instead of "cherry picking" which calendar items you want to have visible in offline mode, the user has the ability to download ALL items.
In my design the list items has a checkbox next to them. The checkbox control can be in three states; checked, unchecked and disabled. The disabled state ...
4
I would push back on the recommendation in this case unless the person can give you a business case or user story that specifically requires a cancel button.
If the primary method of navigation to this form is via bookmark or in a list of internal tools/links that people bookmark, and the form is not clearly part of a hierarchy or other discernible ...
4
Short answer: the previous button should not act as the history's back button (if I understand your term correctly). Next and previous should navigate up and down the numerical sequence of steps.
In scenarios like this, you should generally try maintain consistency in the user's expectation for how the system will work. In the case of a linear series of ...
4
The reason many registration emails include a code as well as a link is that some email applications break hyperlinks. The alternative method is what a user can do if the hyperlink method fails. AOL's email client was one of the most popular to fail in this manner, but it is hardly the only offender.
4
Do you start with wireframes or with a couple of rough design sketches to direct the interaction designer.
Yes, and no. Its important to be able to move between design visuals and not constrain yourself to a waterfall model (1-2-3-4) without the ability to redo previous work. A good examle of this is Jesse James Garretts 5 elements, where you start at ...
4
In my own experience, low-fidelity mockups are rarely clear to the people who are not familiar with wireframes even if they're accompanied with a full description or comments, so I don't think you should send them ahead of your demonstration because it may introduce wrong assumptions and expectations (as it was already mentioned by @JohnGB).
But, taking ...
4
I follow a 3 step process:
Photograph or scan the paper prototypes and back the images up.
Place all the paper prototypes in a sleeve or box.
After the box has been idle for about 6 months, I usually throw the contents out. I only work with paper, but if I were working with physical prototypes, I would store the box with them in some cheap storage. In ...
4
You might think about confirming the user's action to complete the task after they've clicked the button. For example, using a lightbox style overlay:
download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups
Of course you could choose to use another treatment than the lightbox, the main thing being the user has a confirmation that ...
4
User experience design is a comprehensive role and it is not limited to UI or interaction design alone. If you are looking to expand on your skill-set under UX umbrella and contribute to your organization more, you might want to look into following aspects to take its User Experience a level up further. Consider following points
Do user-testing with ...
4
Why is it wrong?
OpenID has several drawbacks:
You're actually going to a totally different website in order to register or authenticate. This is not how things work ordinary. For years, registration and authentication for a website was done on the same website: the user was moved to a different website either because he wanted to, or because he was ...
3
The user should go to wherever they’re going to do work next in the normative task flow.
If they’re going to continue editing the saved form, then leave them on the form. This is the primary window model of save, such as you see in windows for editing documents. It would be typical if the form were especially long and complicated, and users typically save ...
3
I'm probably a bit messy here; I just have a folder in my browser bookmarks called 'inspire' where I dump links. I browse through it in quiet periods and rename the links to relevant tags so I can refer back to it whenever I need them. Nothing more complex than that for me though.
I'm in my browser all the time anyway so it seems the best way of doing it. ...
3
At SmartyStreets, we just revamped our checkout experience and went through the same questions you are asking. Quick intro: To use our service, an account is required, so users must either login or create an account on-the-fly as they go through checkout.
The top part of the checkout form (see an example), users are asked to login if they already have an ...
3
I'm not sure about a user signing up "other users" for an application. Maybe you can send a registration link to a page (that could require a secret/unique registration code) to the other users to sign up.
Let's break this down.
First user (the main one, let's call her the "admin user") signs up with her company details and agrees to T&C and all that ...
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