12 Oct 2024
"I am not a fan of"….
Blog
Intentionality
Evidence
Language
I had this professor..
Mondays meant design critiques. Now, this professor wasn't a design expert; she taught narratives and interactive storytelling. There was one thing I found eccentric about her - her hostility towards the word "Intuitive" - first class she herself warned us to not use it, or we be ready for her wrath.
The word was banned for its lack of specificity. If "intuitive" was off-limits, imagine if we said something like "good," "bad," "nice," or, of course, "not a fan of."
Four years later…
"Intuitive" is still fine, but "I like" and "I am not a fan of" is infuriating. It is infuriating because..It's not an evidence, it's not scientific, it's downright lazy. And it's not helpful to the person seeking feedback and vice versa.
If the guiding force is our likes & dislikes then the critique has right there ended because we've put the participants in a very uncomfortable situation to critique our personal preferences rather the work.
Starting point is we should at least get rid of the following words from our dictionary, while giving someone design feedback or explaining your decisions.
Here is what we should do…. take it with a grain of salt.. this is me thinking out loud
1
Just ban the following, these are absolutely unhelpful things to say both for the person seeking feedback and people present in the room.
It looks good
I am not a fan of
I like..
I would prefer ..
Modern
Minimal
Simple
Easy
Clunky
2
Focus on the human part in human-computer relationship, design language manifests methodology.
I was working on this project where we had fewer ways to test prototypes, and I remember resorting to cognitive principles and meta-thinking. I was weighing my decisions against these principles.
In that whole process, I realised how we describe something depends on what we see, how we see, and those in return are a reflection of our own experiences, thoughts, knowledge and learnings.
Imagine a person that has never seen a donkey but they know of horses, when they see a donkey for the first time they will describe it as a type of horse, another person who knows about donkeys would call it a donkey, but if they had a zoologist next to them they would say "The 1st person is not completely wrong, it's a donkey but like horses, zebras they belong to the same genus called Equus.
Design is science, or scientific approximation. If it's something else other than science, it shows in the language.
3
There is just one thing and one thing only at the core :
what is our design borrowing from our user's cognition and physiology, for the design to work.
What is the bare minimum user will have to lend, for our solution to work.
What is it "costing the user during and after the interaction."
4
Ask questions!
What's the rationale behind using "grey background" ?
What's the rationale behind the "putting these fields into the right column"?
Has this been tested?
Or referred to any existing studies?
Some real snippets from the past…
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I feel this grey background is an aesthetic choice, you don't need this
Grey background is being used to create a common region to group the information and create hierarchical relationship between the trigger button above.
2
I don't like this right column, we will have columns encroaching the space in the middle from all sides..
These 5 rarely used global fields currently occupy the prime spot in the F-pattern of visual scanning. To enhance usability, I've relocated them outside F-pattern, giving priority to pricing sets which are accessed more frequently.
Additionally, I placed these 5 fields in a sticky right column to visually distinguish their global nature from subset fields. This ensures they remain visible as users navigate through pricing sets.While user sifts through the apr sets, these fields are fixed, unchanged in their peripheral vision.