One of the qualities of good user experience (UX) is that people don't notice good UX. They'd find the product good, but if you ask them why they like a product, they can't tell you. Because they don't know. They don't know because they don't care. Most people don't care how a product works[*], but they care about what they can do with it.
I wrote a simple program that lets my friend Nags post pictures to her photo blog. Yesterday I made two tiny little changes to the UI. She probably noticed one of them, but I doubt if she would care enough. (Now that I have talked about it, she might go looking for it and she'll find it.) When I make such changes I deliberately don't tell her about it: she doesn't have to know. People notice it immediately when the experience gets slightly worse, but when it gets better, even if they notice, they soon forget about it.
I wrote the first version of this program about 5 months ago. She has posted probably around 130 pictures to her blog using the program. If the program saved her 2 minutes for each post, it's a saving of 2 hours over 5 months. That number doesn't look great[**], but not everything is quantifiable. I don't know about her, but I get demotivated easily with repeated manual work. If I had a similar blog, I would have soon stopped posting without a helper tool. I'm sure my program makes her photo blogging experience a bit more pleasant, and that's a lot more valuable.
PS: I started writing this post with the intention of writing about what I have learned about UX, but apparently I have failed in that. Maybe it would take some time before I can think clearly about them.
* Unless it annoys them. I had an iPod for a long time. If I want music, I'd press the play button; I didn't have to think about what all it did internally. We had a Creative player that would eat up all its battery in 3 hours because it would keep the screen on when it's playing. My brother found a workaround to turn the screen off, and thus improve battery life. The Creative player forced him to think/care about how it functions.
** I spent maybe around 20 hours on getting the program to the state it is now. Spending 20 hours to save 2 hours is not the wisest thing to do, obviously.
I wrote a simple program that lets my friend Nags post pictures to her photo blog. Yesterday I made two tiny little changes to the UI. She probably noticed one of them, but I doubt if she would care enough. (Now that I have talked about it, she might go looking for it and she'll find it.) When I make such changes I deliberately don't tell her about it: she doesn't have to know. People notice it immediately when the experience gets slightly worse, but when it gets better, even if they notice, they soon forget about it.
I wrote the first version of this program about 5 months ago. She has posted probably around 130 pictures to her blog using the program. If the program saved her 2 minutes for each post, it's a saving of 2 hours over 5 months. That number doesn't look great[**], but not everything is quantifiable. I don't know about her, but I get demotivated easily with repeated manual work. If I had a similar blog, I would have soon stopped posting without a helper tool. I'm sure my program makes her photo blogging experience a bit more pleasant, and that's a lot more valuable.
PS: I started writing this post with the intention of writing about what I have learned about UX, but apparently I have failed in that. Maybe it would take some time before I can think clearly about them.
* Unless it annoys them. I had an iPod for a long time. If I want music, I'd press the play button; I didn't have to think about what all it did internally. We had a Creative player that would eat up all its battery in 3 hours because it would keep the screen on when it's playing. My brother found a workaround to turn the screen off, and thus improve battery life. The Creative player forced him to think/care about how it functions.
** I spent maybe around 20 hours on getting the program to the state it is now. Spending 20 hours to save 2 hours is not the wisest thing to do, obviously.
you spent 20 hours on making the tool?!
ReplyDeleteeither case, the tool saves me about 6-8mins on average (including loading time of flickr, blogger, etc) so you should redo the math.
PS: very honestly, i don't see anything different about the interface :(