This week we looked at how all the different aspects of user interfaces can tie together to create a complete product.
Kyle began the lecture by informing us that we have a critique next week for our music player project. In doing so he reiterated the importance of design fundamentals in regards to UI. Elements of design such as padding, colour, depth, type and icons can often be overlooked for a project such as ours. I have found myself straying away from these fundamentals lately, getting caught up in the conceptual side of things, when in reality the thing that would essentially tie my music player together will be a solid framework comprised of the fundamentals. Going forward I feel as though I should be paying more attention to these aspects and less so the ideation of it all.
We touched on how when products/apps have metaphorical functions they become more intuitive to use. This is something I have developed for my own project but never considered it to add to the user experience in this regard. Features like sliders and switches aren’t actually sliders and switches, labelling them and presenting them as such create a familiarity that allows people to use them confidently, further adding to the user experience. In my own project I have a dig feature, the naming convention of this suggests that it’s maybe a search function but perhaps a little different, and that is exactly what it is. It’s interesting to note the connotations of language in this instance, it is something I will be much more considerate about moving forward.
“Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.”
We discussed Jakobs Law last semester but it feels much more relevant to the content we are covering in this class. Whilst it feels like a bit of a given, to me, it begs the question of how do we innovate? How do we implement Jakobs Law whilst creating something new. Of course it is possible as it has been done time and time again but many designs fall flat in my opinion perhaps by placing too much value on Jakobs Law, to the point where designs begin to look the same across industries.
You can see an example of this below.
“The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.”
Fitts’s law gives us the relationship between the time it takes a pointer to move to a particular target in order to interact with it in some way.
