Although counter-intuitive, the best way to understand the strengths of anything is to fight against them. In that spirit, one way you can take a big leap forward in designing better things, is to learn how to design worse things.
It may not be as easy as it sounds.
The most amazing thing, to me, is when people try to pretend that they have expertise when they actually know very little. This is an epidemic in UX. And like any good vaccine, I have to infect you with a small dose so you can kill it in real life. So here is my guide to how it’s done.
There are a lot of “UX Patterns” floating around; some are good, some are just common. But I think it is more valuable to learn the “sub patterns” that seem universal through all apps, sites, and products.
“Create, Edit, Delete” is one of those.
Learn it once, use it forever.
Regardless of your methods, you need to validate your design decisions somehow. The problem is that many people think research and validation are the same thing.
When designing registration forms or checkout flows, one thing you will often hear in UX is that you should reduce the number of pages in the flow. This is true. Sort of.
A button seems like such a simple, common thing, and yet when they are being created we suddenly forget everything we know about clicking buttons, and presume that our users are the most curious people ever to exist.
They’re not.
I stumbled onto a post about pairing designers and developers and it got me thinking: why stop there? Is that the only important pair of competencies?
If you are a digital professional of any kind, it is only a matter of time before you’re in a meeting and somebody says, “Our goal in this project is to increase [any statistic] by 25%.” When that happens, stop everything and start talking about a new goal.
It is tempting to think that spreading our content to every corner of the internet is the best way to create a viral effect, but it isn’t. In fact, it’s the worst — and the most expensive.
It is often tempting to create something from our own perspective rather than the users’, and the main menu is the most common way to make that mistake. A main menu should be a list of what the user can do, not what the site can do.
