In your experience, what common misconceptions do clients have regarding web design and UX? Like caring too much about the fold, madly sticking to the 3-click rule.
Btw, there's a good list on Carsonified: The top 10 ux myths.
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Sign up to join this communityIn your experience, what common misconceptions do clients have regarding web design and UX? Like caring too much about the fold, madly sticking to the 3-click rule.
Btw, there's a good list on Carsonified: The top 10 ux myths.
Here are some of the stuff I encounter:
A personal bête noire is the near universal misinterpretations of Miller's "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two" paper. People keep applying it in completely inappropriate ways - like the maximum number of items in a pull down menu. Grrrr!
Another would be people who don't think accessible web design isn't important for them and then wonder why the most important blind user to businesses is ignoring them.
Since I'm a consultant, my client tends to be big corporations or government:
UX is outside the Agile process and just part of something that the business team deals with outside the scheduled tasks
It's all about the user so: SME's are UX experts, best to use for testing and should actively participate in all phases of design
Everything should have a roll-over or pop-up to entice/explain (get this all the time when discussing complex applications)
Offering several ways to do the same thing (multiple-choice) is best for the user
If it passes 508 it's accessible and usable for all (that's all you should test for outside of functionality by QA) and all testing is a QA process, not a UX process
I definitely agree with Mashhoor on all of his points. I deal with every single one of those, especially the Flash stuff. I am not opposed to Flash when it's the appropriate solution for the job, but to them, it seems like it's the appropriate solution to every job. With the powerful capabilities of jQuery these days, most of what we do in Flash doesn't need to be done in Flash. My own company homepage was created entirely in Flash and absolutely doesn't need it. Since it was an internal project and my schedule was booked, I didn't even see it until it was launched.
I think another challenge is the perception that just because someone knows ho to use the tools for UX/IA, they are automatically qualified. Just because my account managers know how to use Visio doesn't mean they should be doing the wireframes or IA.
Some myths that I have run into first-hand:
There's a website, UX Myths, that lists a number of myths regarding UX. It hasn't been updated in some time, but there are currently 33 entries. They are detailed, providing examples and references.