The Good and Bad Design Flashcards
What is a good design?
- Is usable
Users should be able to learn how to use the product easily. - Is aesthetically pleasing
Good design is aesthetically pleasing to look at. In fact, users will even tend to feel a design is more usable simply because it is more aesthetically pleasing—a phenomenon called the aesthetic-usability effect. - Delights the user
The design brings the user nice surprises. It’s like getting a gift for St. Patrick’s day—you didn’t expect it, but you’re happy (delighted!) to receive it, or navigate to a website which have a nice loading feedback with a cool animation etc…
How the Nielsen’s usability heuristics - Visibility of system status - works?
The system should provide feedback to tell users what’s going on.
How the Nielsen’s usability heuristics - Match between system and the real world - works?
Words, features, symbols, etc. should be used in the same way throughout the product.
How the Nielsen’s usability heuristics - User control and freedom - works?
Allow users to exit unwanted system states, such as with undo, redo, and cancel.
How the Nielsen’s usability heuristics - Consistency and standards - works?
Words, features, symbols, etc. should be
used in the same way throughout the
product.
How the Nielsen’s usability heuristics - Error prevention - works?
Design the system so users are unable to
make mistakes—or at least make users
confirm before allowing them to do
something that’s prone to mistakes
How the Nielsen’s usability heuristics - Recognition rather than recall - works?
When the user is likely to need a feature,
make it visible to them in order to reduce
the load on their memory in trying to
remember the thing.
How the Nielsen’s usability heuristics - Flexibility and efficiency of use - works?
Make things easy for new users, but also
give experts a way to do things fast.
How the Nielsen’s usability heuristics - Aesthetic and minimalist design - works?
Don’t overwhelm users with
unnecessary or irrelevant information
How the Nielsen’s usability heuristics - Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors - works?
Error messages should be
straightforward, actionable and in plain
language.
How the Nielsen’s usability heuristics - Help and documentation - works?
If possible, make the system intuitive so
it can be used without help; when help
is necessary, make it easy to access and
use.
How to execute a Heuristic evaluation?
Heuristic evaluation is something you can do at any time, with no funds, resources, or help from others, and without following a strict, formal process. That said, you’ll likely get more out of your evaluation if you take the steps outlined in the above video and below:
Find 3–5 experts. These should be people who know about usability principles and are familiar with the product.
Come up with heuristics as a team. You can adapt Nielsen’s heuristics to fit your product.
Identify tasks. What are the critical user journeys? For example: For an online shopping site, one critical user journey could be how to purchase an item.
Conduct individual evaluations. Have each expert evaluate the design separately. You can use a spreadsheet or a doc to track all the issues. List out each issue and identify how severe it is. For severity, you can use a point-system (5 is super severe, 1 is not really an issue) or use “critical” “major issue” “minor issue” and “cosmetic issue”.
Aggregate results. Pool the results from the individual evaluations. What does the team agree on?
When selecting a design problem, what questions we have to keep in mind?
you’ll want to make sure the scope is something specific, narrow, and achievable (given the time and resources you have).
Like this:
Build a mobile app for children who study english-as-a-second-language for school
This includes:
The type of device (mobile)
The exact subject (English-as-a-second-language)
The target user (children studying for school) All of the other answers include some of these details—but not all.
What is the main lesson about selecting a design problem?
when scoping your design problem, it will help if you focus on:
One user group
One core task flow
for example, for an app to trade books, could be ‘Buyers that want to browse, search by courses, look at book details’ as a USER GROUP
And for CORE task flow: ‘’
‘Browsing books and looking at book details’
but could also be :
Sign-up flow, Onboarding experience, Settings & privacy
Is important to focus in one thing, at time, keeping in my the target user with user-centered design
