Well I made it. I managed a further week of UX.
And what a week.
To date, I’d looked at navicons, search components and a whole load of stuff from week one. This week was a mixed one with some great results.
Labels
One of my tasks this week was to look at buttons and labels. Boring right?
Wrong!
One thing I’ve picked up in the short time is that wording is key. I’ll be honest, I’ve never really picked up some stuff before but taking a seat back from the coding up and things started to look a lot more obvious. It’s interesting to see how some sites are poorly written for the user around the web. A simple change in wording can have a massive effect, both good and bad.
When looking at the labels, we had a thought about the task in hand and if stats would help. We loaded up google analytics and researched and lo and behold, user data gave us a pattern that suggested what we thought…the label could be improved.
So now we can add google analytics to our UX toolkit.
Just having this data at hand was brilliant. We kind of knew the solution but to have statistical proof to back it up was great and adds to the reasoning for changing the label in question.
Information architecture
Aside from the labelling, I was also getting dirty with some information architecture (this may change as I might have the wrong name for it). The task was to look at footers and headers and see a trend of what is good from a UX point of view.
Now I can hold my hand up here. I didn’t enjoy this task as much as the others. The main reason was that I had to think differently. As a frontender, I normally get given content or something to base a build on. Today, I was defining what the content was. I hit a blank. We talked it through and then it started to make more sense. By the end, I kind of got it. It will come with practise. I’m by no means an expert.
What was good though was again the same as last week. The discussion. Breaking things down into components. I love the bouncing about of ideas.
So a mixed bag really. Some frustration at my skillset more than anything. The last thought on this? Well it’s certainly opened my eyes up towards responsive web design and it’s place in the grand scheme of things.
But that one can wait I reckon.