Blog - Page 19 of 31 - Rachele DiTullio

Is the term UX meaningless?

Rachele DiTullio5 July 20167 February 2021Op Edux

This week, a video of renowned usability expert Don Norman of the Nielson Norman Group discussing the term “UX” garnered attention when he noted that, in his opinion:

Today, that term has been horribly misused. It’s used by people to say ‘I’m a user experience designer, I design websites or I design apps’ and they have no clue as to what they’re doing and they think the experience is that simple device, the website, or the app… No! It’s everything. It’s the way you experience the world. It’s the way you experience your life. It’s the way you experience the service… It’s a system that’s everything.

I’m on the bandwagon here. Nearly every day in my work, I hear someone try to justify his or her decision by claiming that whatever they like or don’t like is hurting or helping the user experience without ever speaking with customers or observing them interact with the organization.

UX has become the go-to scapegoat and savior. We can see this in the progression of how we refer to people who work on websites, going from “webmaster” in the 90s to today’s “user experience designer.” But it doesn’t take much digging to see the numerous customer experiences being developed right now that tenuously adhere to anything approaching universal design.

Interviews, persona development, usability testing, and interaction design continue to take a backseat and are often the first tasks eliminated as projects scope-creep beyond deadlines. It’s rare to find business leads who understand the holistic nature of the user experience and who value finding out what their customers want and how their projects influence the customer’s experience with the entire organization.

I’m hopeful more companies will embrace the true intention of user experience as an end-to-end, ongoing process, not a buzzword.

Should websites underline links?

Rachele DiTullio21 June 20167 February 2021Website

I had planned to do my own write up on the subject of whether links should generally be underlined within body copy, both for accessibility and usability, when I found this excellent write-up from Adrian Roselli who provides a comprehensive outline of research and recommendations in six sections:

I think links should be underlined in most contexts because it’s a clear visual indicator of what is a link, and it’s the default browser behavior. Please give this one a read and let me know if you agree!

Read ‘On Link Underlines’ by Adrian Roselli

Fitbit Dashboard Changes are a Win

Rachele DiTullio14 June 20167 February 2021MobileiOS

Last week, the Fitbit iOS app introduced an updated dashboard that more closely matches the UI of the desktop site. For reference, this is what the dashboard looked like for years.

Stats are now tiles

The dashboard moved away from a vertical listing of stats to a more friendly tile layout, which allows more information to be displayed at the same time on a small screen. Tapping a tile still takes you to a weekly snapshot of the data point.

Add, remove, move tiles like iOS

After tapping the ‘Edit’ button, you can remove tiles (or add them back) and update the layout by holding and dragging tiles between spots. You can choose between four stats—steps, calories, miles, and exercise minutes—as the main data point displayed in the largest tile at the top.

After tapping the ‘Done’ button, you see the updated dashboard with only the tiles you’ve selected. I’ve chosen to remove both calorie tiles.

Pull to sync your device

Fitbit now employs the ‘pull to update’ pattern to sync your device with your iPhone, which is by far my favorite improvement. This is an easy, one-step process whereas before you had to tap to the sync screen then tap to sync.

Goal statuses

The dashboard still uses green to indicate a daily goal has been met, but it made two other changes:

It now uses a blue color instead of orange to show a goal in progress
It uses a circle instead of a bar to indicate progress

I like both these changes. The orange always looks a bit like a warning and wasn’t very inviting. The circle gives a clearer indication that you’re reaching the end of something.

Final thoughts

I like these updates a lot and they have improved my experience using the app. I hope one of the next updates is separating out the ‘track exercise’ and ‘log exercise’ features. While the ‘add’ button was made more visible by making it part of the app navigation at the bottom of the screen, it still does not provide ‘log exercise’ as its own option even though there is plenty of room.