User experience is paramount
Web Design has matured over the last 10 years and has foregone a lot of the whizzy coolness of the early web to pursue a more practical approach to designing websites. This has been through embracing ‘user experience’ as the central tenet of web design. It is a pity then, that user experience is now becoming overlooked in other areas of design.
Over the last weekend I went out a couple of times to enjoy the lovely spring sunshine and was crossing the main road through Shoreham By Sea, the small coastal town where I live. The crossing here is governed by a set of pedestrian traffic lights which were replaced last year with a new type that has merged the button pressing module with the screen showing the green or red man indicating whether it is safe to cross or not. This means that the visual indication of whether it is safe to cross is now on the pavement, next to me, facing away from the road. All well and good except that now when crossing I no longer have a visual indication showing me it is safe to cross. Not a big deal to most, perhaps, but these visual cues add to our user experience and would make me feel a little safer, even if that safety is illusory.
I also went on a bike ride over the weekend and experienced two incidents where I felt that the experience of a user had not been fully thought through.
Firstly we decided to go get a new bracket for my wife’s bike to allow her to use the bike seat we have for our daughter on her bike as well as mine. I had my daughter on the back of my bike on the way there and managed to ride over a drain cover that I had not looked at carefully enough. This drain cover had holes the width of my wheel and the length of the hole allowed about a third of my wheel to disappear down it. The hole went with the flow of the traffic and so I managed to put my wheel down it, luckily I was going very slowly so no harm was done except for me hitting the crossbar in a painful place.
Had the orientation of the drain cover been the other way it would have been no problem. This is not strictly ‘user experience’ as I am not the intended user of a drain cover but I feel it is related. The fact that the drain cover was just outside Halfords which was the bike store we were heading for, seems to be good enough reason to me to consider that cyclists may be using that stretch of road so it should be safe for them.
We managed to get to Halfords with no further mishap and looked for somewhere to tie up the bikes but there is no bike parking facilities at Halfords. Now, I estimate that the bike department of that particular Halfords store is about a quarter to a third of the store’s floor space, so not having bike parking facilities seems to me to be bizarre to say the least.
And there you have it, a small illustration of how designing for user experience could have made my weekend just that little bit better and less painful. It certainly gave me a timely reminder that user experience is of paramount importance to all design work and should be at the core of everything we do. At Juretic we have design processes in place that mean we start out with ‘UX’ (as it has become known), as the first consideration of the design process allowing us to ensure that this is at the forefront of our design work and throughout the project cycle.
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