UX newsletter — July 2019
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Message from the Editor
Some of you may know I'm a keen photographer. I tell you this because last month I had 5 minutes of fame when some of my photographs were picked up by websites like Petapixel and Bored Panda. The images were of garden birds that I had photographed in my garden on fake 'wild' sets. It was instructive to read the comments. Most people liked the images but some people didn't like the artifice: they felt that bird photographs should be taken only in the wild.
Reflecting on this made me realise that "fake" is pretty much at the heart of what I do in user experience. I don't mean this in the pejorative sense of "fake news". I mean it in the same way that theatre or cinema is fake. Many of the projects I work on use metaphors to help people better understand a system. We may live in a post-skeuomorphic world but metaphors like the "shopping basket" are still used in abundance.
Speech recognition is another good example. Systems like Alexa don't understand what we're saying but are simply running through a stimulus-response look-up table. Yet users credit voice user interfaces with more intelligence than they deserve. This leads them to push the systems beyond their capabilities and reveal the artifice beneath. This month, Phillip Hodgson expands on this with the second part of his article on voice user interface design. I hope you find it useful.
— David Travis
We take a closer look at some unavoidable challenges to effective speech recognition, and we discuss why you may want to think twice before designing dialogue that is 'conversational' and 'natural'. We also offer five important questions that we think should form the basis of any VUI design kick-off meeting. Read the article in full: Talking to computers (part 2): VUI as an error recovery system.
'30 Days of User Experience' is a downloadable PDF to print out and place in your workplace bathroom to encourage people to engage in UX activities. Read the article in full: 30 Days of User Experience — The Bathroom Edition.
What we’re reading
Some interesting UX-related articles that got our attention over the last month:
- Except in extraordinary situations, Dark Mode is not easy on the eyes, in any way. Apple's marketing claims about Dark Mode's benefits fly in the face of the science of human visual perception.
- The 'I'm not biased' bias: People rate themselves as less subject to various biases than the average person.
- The most pernicious impact of a lack of inclusive and accessible design is when disabled people themselves cannot be present in the design work force.
- An accessibility analysis of one million home pages found an average of 59.6 errors per home page. 98% had at least one detectable WCAG 2 failure. PDF, no registration required.
- Well developed habits of observation are more important in research than large accumulations of academic learning.
- Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a crawl of 11K shopping web sites.
- Customer Centricity: The management fad we can hop on.
Like these? Want more? View our posts on Twitter or Facebook.
Upcoming UX training courses
In this fun and hands-on training course, you'll practice all the key areas of UX — from interviewing your users through to prototyping and usability testing your designs — while you prepare for and take the BCS Foundation Certificate exam. Last few places. View the full syllabus: Foundation Certificate in User Experience.
UX quotation of the month
"The hunger for quantitative data—trying to turn everything into a measurement before considering what it means—is at the heart of a lot of ethical issues we're facing in design and technology." — Erika Hall.
Did I mention I've published a book?
It's titled Think Like a UX Researcher. Grab your copy here.
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