Last week I went to the US Post Office to send in my passport for renewal. While checking out, I made an error: I selected the wrong option on the screen. This meant the checkout process had to be reset and I had to start from the beginning. The funny thing was, since I was only 2 questions in when this happened, I wouldn’t have thought anything of it if the clerk behind the counter didn’t take it so much in stride. She had a whole ritual for it, as if she’d delivered her speech 10,000 times.

“Okay, you answered ‘yes’ to question 2, so we’re going to restart the process and do it again. This time, press ‘no’ to question 2.”

“Do people do that a lot?”

“All the time.”

What’s being judged here

When checking out, the user interface looked like the following (not my photo).

I was primarily interacting with the touch screen portion, so we’ll ignore the keypad. I wish I’d taken photos of the screen, but since I didn’t, let me recreate them.

Here’s the first one…

(I put a placeholder where the words were)

This is an easy “Yes.” No one reads this stuff.

And the second screen, an identical design…

And this is where I accidentally pressed “Yes.”

What’s the problem here?

The correct answer on the second screen is “No.” But it’s designed like a secondary button. The problem is the secondary button design signals to the user based on every pattern they are using on their phones and computers that this isn’t the primary path.

“Well, I’m here to mail something, just like everyone else who comes here,” the user thinks subconsciously, “so obviously I’m pressing ‘Yes.’”

Well, too bad! Because now you’ve just told the USPS that you shouldn’t be allowed to mail something. And now you have to start over.

The verdict

This is an “Out” for me.

I also noticed that the clerk asked me, verbally, if I had any firearms, bad batteries, etc, before I went through the screens. So when I hit the wrong answer, she knew I’d made a mistake and could quickly reset it — without any worry of her having directed my response. I wonder if she’s added this to her process intentionally. It would be even more time consuming if she didn’t have my verbal response.

“Wait, do you have flammables or not?”

“No!”

“But you said you did…”

It’s a bad pattern here. I’m not surprised that she told me it happens all the time.

Imagine how much time is wasted, over the course of a year, because of users making this predictable error.

And when I was at the USPS, there was 1 clerk handling every customer who walked in. Wasting time is even more of a problem, when the office is understaffed.

Quick redesign

Here’s my initial pass at a redesign of this screen.

Make “No” the primary path.

However, I could imagine the concern might be the USPS doesn’t want to direct the user too much — doesn’t want them answering questions like a zombie. Are they intentionally trying to trip users up to get real responses?

I’m not sure. But even if they are wanting more mindful answers, I’d still advise a change. Make the design like this…

Don’t suggest a primary path at all.

They also rate quite well.

If I’m judging the headphones as a whole? Easy. In.

However, today I am not judging the headphones as a whole.

What’s being judged here

Today, we are looking at the headphones in order to judge the power button.

How does it work?

You can see it in the photo above, the single button above the power label. In order to use this power button, you hold it down for 1-2 seconds. Optimally, you are wearing the headphones when you do this, and you hear a female voice say, “Power off” or “power on,” depending on the current power state. There’s a blue light that blinks near the button, but it does so regardless of whether the power is being turned on or off, so it signifies nothing.

The verdict

I hate this feature. Often, my headphones are not on my head when I’m using the button. Often, I’ve put my headphones down for a few minutes and can’t remember the power status (the battery lasts for hours, so I’m not conservative about saving power), and I just want to quickly check. But this doesn’t allow for that. Instead, I’m forced to hold my earphones to my ear and listen for the voice: “power on” or “power off.”

The most frustrating thing is when I want to verify that the headphones are on, and I turn them off by accident, and have to wait and turn them on again. This is usually what I’m forced to do.

I can imagine Sony would tell me to just wear them at all times when turning them on or off. However, my rebuttal to this is that there’s a second switch near the power button (the “NC/Ambient” switch pictured above), which feels identical. So when the headphones are on your head, you can’t even feel that you’ve located the correct switch. It’s easier just to take them off and look at the button, each time.

Out.

My idea for the fix

Whatever happened to the good, old-fashioned power switch? It’s more tactile, and it’s simple to discern the status at a glance.

Usually, when you use the elevator, you press a button on the wall to call for an unused car. Usually the most complicated this interaction gets is you specify whether you wish to go up or down. However, in this elevator bay of 6 elevator doors, there was no button(s) on the wall.

A different user journey

Instead, I was greeted by this panel. A touch-screen, not a tactile button. As you can see, it’s not even a fancy way to “upgrade” the up/down buttons. Instead, it takes what you normally see inside the elevator and brings it outside: it prompts you to select the floor you desire.

Once I had done that, the screen shifted and told me which number elevator I needed to wait for. Elevator 5. When Elevator 5 chimed and opened, I got inside to a mostly button-less elevator interior (pictured) and was deposited on the floor I had selected on the panel.

Pretty streamlined! A single interaction instead of two.

My initial reaction

Here’s the thing… I kind of liked it.

But after talking to a few coworkers and looking at some comments online, it seems the opinions on this process flow are pretty polarizing.

It makes sense. It’s completely different. Maybe that’s why I admire it. When tech advances, sometimes we’re able to rethink our mental models and get an efficiency win.

The old way versus the new

How did elevators evolve? Well, I don’t know enough to go way back, but I know we used to have elevator operators, people who would stand inside the elevator and make sure the elevator went where it should. That was phased out; buttons replaced them. And now, why not these screens?

Here are things I like about the new way:

• As I said, it reduces a two-input process to a single input.

• It maps more closely to my mental model. I’m often thinking about what floor I want when approaching the elevator bay. The decision of “up or down?” is more relative, not empirical.

• I don’t have to swivel and watch all elevators, waiting for the right one to chime. I’m given clear direction of where to look.

• Once inside, I don’t have to worry about finding buttons, trying to press buttons around people, asking them to press the button for me, etc. I just ride to my floor. The process is more unconscious.

Of course, I wonder what would happen if there were many people using the elevators. Would there be longer lines? Is it only one elevator to a floor? If multiple floors are being loaded into the same elevator, would it create more mistakes with people exiting on the wrong floor?

The verdict

In. I like it overall.

Ideas for improvement

Here’s one idea for improvement: a screen inside the elevator that would let you override the floor you initially chose. Elevators, as we have them now, already allow for this with buttons. I’d hate to force a user to exit the elevator just to correct the mistake.

Another idea for improvement: make it more tactile. In my opinion, tactile is better. (Eventually I need to write up a post explaining why.) Below, you can see a picture of the same experience but with tactile buttons.

The trick is prompting them, of course. But if you get the prompts right? Neat!

This week at my workplace, we’re looking into the idea that we can use LLMs to streamline our UX content generation. I’m the lead of documentation for our design system, so “content” falls most neatly under my umbrella.

What content do we wanted generated? This sort of thing…

Success states, error states, etcetera. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been working through wireframes and I realize I need to write something up for these. I wish we had an *official* content writer, I think.

In the last year, one of my colleagues created a guide for how to come up with the content for these modals. No, not AI — he created a document, with his own human hands, which outlined types of modals and the structure for organizing them.

Here’s a basic example (one I came up with just now — his document has much more detail):

Header: Invalid Type

Body: You entered [this]. Please enter [object] that is [that] or [the other].

Backstory: It’s because we’re looking to make this document “official” that we decided to pursue the AI question.

So we’ve thought through the prompts…

It’s not lost on me what this document is.

It’s a way to prompt humans to generate content. So, could we load this into AI and let AI generate it instead?

And more importantly than can we… should we? Will this help our workload?

(It’s important not to use something just because it’s there!)

Automation in software development

Over the weekend, my friend in software development was telling me about how he leveraged AI. He said that 80% of his job is finding code that already exists. Some of this is human-made; some is AI-made. He says the other 20% of his job is making sure the code is right, that it’s going to work. His manager is basically asking him to do UX work with this 20%. (And it’s his opinion that they should just hire someone to do that full time, since it’s not the sort of thing you want to rush.)

Do you hear that? He’s saying the UX work is not the automation. UX work is less similar to software development and more similar to curation and quality control.

That’s been my experience too.

In fact, it seems that one theory for why UX Design exists is because, as software development becomes more and more an assembly line, someone needs to look out for the user. Someone needs to make sure the software works for the context.

If we try to automate UX design, are we truly doing UX design?

What if humans are — for the foreseeable future — always superior to AI in judging what makes sense to other humans?

It’s not black-and-white, of course. We don’t need to be all-or-nothing. It may be that there are some aspects of UX Design that we can streamline.

So is AI the right tool?

Tomorrow I’m meeting with colleagues to discuss this situation further, but I have an initial thought.

I’m aware of how exact our prompts will need to be to generate 1-2 sentences of precise content. By the time we’ve figured out the prompts, are we 95% there to writing it ourselves? Is the guide that my colleague created really all we need? Is it worth expending an extra 40% of labor to generate that last 5%? (My percentages don’t add up, but I think you get me.)

It would be different if what we needed to generate was a long piece of content. But we don’t.

Hmm…

Verdict

In the end, it’s important to keep an open mind when it comes to burgeoning technologies. If the future isn’t here now, it may arrive shortly. I’ve heard that LLMs are hitting a conceptual limit, and that newer AI models may be based not on a mass conglomerate of content, but on teaching AI to think similar to how humans are able to think: by learning, by layering knowledge on top of itself.

Those models could go much further. Those models may truly offset our workload — by doing the analysis, the prompting and the content generation, all in the blink of an eye. Cool.

AI content generation? In our out?

For us, it’s TBD.

Out:

• I just needed an appointment before the end of 2023. Being forced into the “Soonest available appointment” or being forced to pick a specific “by” or “on” date — confusing. Just show me everything you have.

• I wasn’t sure what “# of appointments” meant — I just wanted 1, yet I wanted to see the maximum amount of options. The 2+, 3+, etc, options didn’t make sense to me. If these are for users looking for appointment clusters, why not more clearly label that? If I’m the biggest use case (and I’m guessing I might be), make this an opt-in option.

• After all of this deliberating, I learn there aren’t any appointments available anyway.

I took to Google to figure out how to find an appointment, and I discovered Appointment Scanner.

For $30, Appointment Scanner would scan the available appointments and send me an alert when one was available.

The UI makes a lot more sense.

In:

• Choosing the days of the week I want. I think of my near-future in terms of days available, not dates available.

• A date range indicator that makes more sense.

• A clear explanation that I’m not going to be charged monthly. I love a company that avoids that Dark UX pattern.

• Multiple options for receiving alerts (browser, email, text).

And now I’ve got my appointment for next Friday.

That’s good UX! I wish Global Entry (et all) would start incorporating features like this. Why not make the UI more clear? Why not let me set alerts when appointments become available?

It makes me wonder if this data is connected to anything, saved anywhere. Where do the inputs go? Is the sign meant to make one feel better just for being asked? Is it like how we ask people how they're doing in real life, even if we don’t really care?

In this post, I’m not grading the product as a whole. If I did, I’d certaintly keep take the above into consideration.

What I’m judging

What I’m interested in judging here is the smiley face rating system. I think it works well here. As I said, I didn’t need to speak the language to understand exactly what I was being asked. This clarity makes for cleaner data.

The verdict

There’s no need to make this more complicated. Simple rankings people from most cultures would understand, and easy to use tacticle buttons. In.

Bonus judgement

However, these airport bathroom ranking touch screens? Gross! I don’t want to interact more with germs when I’m in the airport bathroom. Also the touch screen, not as fun to operate. Out.

When you hover over a link and it changes color, that’s pliancy at work.

During this class, we got to design app prototypes in InVision. One of the frustrations I encountered was the inability to use hovering cues. “Hovering cues” is what I knew them as then, but now I know what they’re actually called: dynamic hinting, but more on that in two paragraphs.

According to our lecture, pliancy expresses itself in four types.

There’s the kind of pliancy, as when you hover over a link, that changes the link itself (called dynamic hinting). Then there’s the kind of pliancy that will change the cursor (called cursor hinting). In Medium, you can see this when you hover over the logo in the top left corner… your mouse changes into a gloved hand. At least, mine does.

The interesting thing about designing the app prototype? These types of hinting were not available to me! As of yet, hovering on a touch screen is not a thing. The only hinting available to you is static hinting… like the skeuomorphism I talked about last time — hinting via the design itself — although there are other ways to statically hint.

Finally, the last type of pliancy is response hinting. It’s when you begin to click on something, holding down the cursor but not releasing, and you see a state change. To see an example, go to Google, click and hold the button “Google search” and you’ll notice the outline turns blue. Being the curious sort — and let’s be honest, I have a post to write — I checked to see if this worked on my phone as well. I held down on a podcast and it highlighted blue, but I was able to scroll away without the podcast beginning to play — without the action taking place.

So there we go. As far as I know, touch screens cannot do dynamic hinting or cursor hinting. But they can do response hinting and static hinting.

Huh!

Pliancy. It makes interactions both more obvious and more satisfying. And I like having a name for it now.

One of our lectures has informed me that this is an example of metaphoric design. More specifically, skeuomorphism. Skeuomorphism is “the design concept of making items resemble their real-world counterparts.” The reason skeuomorphism came about isn’t difficult to understand. When society started shifting its work medium to digital, designers used metaphors of everyday objects so that average Joe could intuitively understand how to process information, and how to navigate it. Remember the paperclip helper? … because paperclips are… helpful….?

From our lecture:

[But Skeuomorphism] leaves a lot to be desired: namely being restricted by clumsy, dated and non-scaling depictions of three dimensional industrial objects.

Dated. Clumsy. Non-scaling. And, as I said earlier, cluttered.

So is skeuomorphism all bad?

Then I found this article, which says skeuomorphism is a good thing. It says instead of all my folders and stick-it notes and scribbly font being clutter… they’re more like clues. When they’re used right, that is, which I decidedly was not doing with that “tactile” website. And what’s another word for “clues”? Affordances!

When I first heard the lecture, I was ready to condemn skeuomorphism as antiquated and prone to misuse. The latter, I still might be right about. But this article has me waxing nostalgic about it again.

What if skeuomorphism isn’t some outdated trend? What if instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, we can learn from our mistakes? Well-used skeuomorphism can be another tool in an interactive designer’s toolbox.

[Skeuomorphism is] like a spectrum, or a color palette, that designers have at their disposal. At one end, we have gross misuse: Fake wood, fake leather, fake shadows. At the other, we have thoughtful use of perceived affordances: A digital clock face that looks a lot like a normal watch, because it’s easier to read.

Good interactive design should assume that users are smart enough to know how to navigate a web page without literal folder tabs. But, it should also know how to tastefully evoke these metaphors to good effect.

Affordances exist in nature. As a species, we’ve interacted with them since the beginning. In fact, every species has…

One example from our readings was a cliff’s edge.

“When we see the brink of a cliff right in front of us we directly recognize that it affords falling off and immediate action (or inaction) is needed to avoid the danger” (source).

But affordances can also be designed into objects so that the objects are simpler for a person to learn how to use. For this, our reading used the example of a Holmes stereoscope.

The handle lets us know that we are probably meant to grab the object. The positioning of the image and the contour of the viewing area lets us know that we’re probably supposed to put this thing over our faces, with the nose fitting into the bottom slot. And trying this out, we receive feedback via the merging of the two images before our eyes that we have been successful.

This week, I’m going to think about ways I can use affordances in my app design. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel here, so I will probably focus on standard good design practices for apps. (1) Making the menu easy to locate, (2) making navigation intuitive (aka, based on how other apps usually work) and (3) structuring the information in a logical way. Already I know I want to rework my calendar so the affordances are more obvious… and I’m going to need to research and experiment with app calendars to find what’s best.

I know I’m only scratching the surface of what affordances are in this post. I highly recommend the documentary “Design is One,” which shows the masters at work, breaking down design to its most basic components. The Vignelli’s directly speak to the concept of affordances, though I can’t remember if they use the term or not.