Oh, Amazon. It is the site that we all hate (at least, that all designers hate). And, because it is the household-name behemoth that really does have everything we need, it doesn’t have to get any better; we’ll still keep buying there. (A polite word of caution for Amazon, though: Sears & Roebuck used to have the same kind of market power. Now it is a dingy afterthought. No monopoly lasts forever, and sooner or later, Amazon will actually have…
Multiple menus, none of which contain all the things I’m looking for. Vague nomenclature that means I have to click on five or six menu items to find the one simple (simple to me, anyway) thing I want. Hidden contact info. Web forms that allow me to accidentally cancel out after I’ve spent ten minutes entering information. Puzzling visuals that obscure the tools I need. All of these are relentlessly common in digital interactions. Why is doing what I need…
Everything has a user experience. A hammer, a car, a ski lift: using it is easy and pleasant and intuitive, or it’s clumsy and hard to figure out and anxiety-producing, or (most often) it’s somewhere in between. An apartment door is hinged on the outside and you can’t open it fully without backing up and taking a step down the stairs. The SUBMIT button on the web form is on the left instead of the right, and a sizable number…
I want things to be simple. I want fewer features—I just want them to be the features I use. I want visuals to be uncluttered, even sparse. I want to see only the information I actually need. The world doesn’t appear to agree with me. There seems to be very little penalty for an overstuffed interface; it might even be what people expect. When I design things, I’m asking myself not just How do I organize the interface so that…