Internet DNA Podcast
A discussion about the difference between UI & UX, is there such a thing as Dark UI, or is it just bad UX and does User Experience Design really work for small businesses. How can we take UX into the future now it is coming of age to look at the whole picture of us as people not just that instant dopamine hit for a user lining the pockets of giants.
Transcription
(this transcription is written by robots… so don’t be surprised!)
This week we guys, I, as I said, new UI, UX, I'd miss it. Yeah. Both in the same design realm, but they are different disciplines. So Dan, did you want to start out with any questions? When I was researching it, I read a funny thing about UI, which is UI is a bit like a joke. If you have to explain it, it's not working. So why don't you explain to me what the difference between UI is and UX and in fact what they actually mean as well. Yeah, let's start from what is UI and what is UX? I'm going to start with UX. UX stands for user experience and it's the process of designing the user experience. So how our user or customer gets from a to B. Now, user experience or user experience design, which can be called UX. Z is generally about websites, digital products. This process is used in the real world. Say how to get people through an airport better, how to buy tickets, how to lessen healthcare. Wait times is the same process but actually called service design. So I'm going to talk about in this instance, user experience design, which is digital web-based to carry out user experience design. You would generally have a team of people this willing to use it, experience researchers and they are people that carry out user experience research. This reminds me of, do you remember the waiter in Turkey and the to say with his menu and today we have boiled fish and by boiled fish I mean fish that is boiled, but it's a bit like that. They buy a user experience designer, I mean a designer that carries out user experience. One of the things that I found interesting is if something looks great but it's difficult to use, then it's got great UI and bad UX. If something's really easy to use but looks rubbish, then it's got great UX but poor UI, is that kind of what we're saying, the differences? No, I don't think so because there's looking great, which could almost be art, but if the experience is bad, actually the UI as bad as well because the experiments might be bad because you can't find the button now that's bad user interface design. The experience might be bad because you can't find the information. Again, that's bad user interface. Well, isn't that UI, isn't it? The UX is when I click that button, did the thing I expected to happen actually happen? Nope. That's the interaction design. What's the difference between the user experience? Design is actually a process of improving the experience, making the experience more streamlined by the experience. Well, that's fine. I'm trying to tell you, so it's making the process from getting to a to B more enjoyable, less friction faster. If I'm carrying out the process of user experience design as a designer, then I would be looking at defining the problem, brainstorming some solutions, designing it, building it and testing it. It's about removing friction so that our users can carry out the goal intended in a better, quicker and more often way. That might be buying a product. It might be filling out a form. It's removing any block from that process. So it's designing the experience I have as a user. Sorry, one click ordering. That's UX. Yes. Take for example, there's the million dollar button. Now what happened was by moving this button above the fold and putting it before another step in the process, which was signing up for an account men that the company involves increase their sales so much that it made them £1 million. I don't know whether it was in a day, a month, a year. So yes, it's streamlining the process. Whereas use it, interface design is then designing the interface to do what the experiments design has requested of it. The interface design is making sure that the hierarchy of design information is correct so that I can get from a to B quicker. So the interface design is implementing the experience design. So the experience is the process, the flow and the UI is the furniture that allows you to proceed down that process? Yes, it's the visual aspect of that and the interaction is what happens when I click that button to follow. That link happens as I expected, so it doesn't jar my process. Otherwise that would be bad user experience. Okay. So I'm going to give you an example that struck me the other day, which is I use an iPhone, but there's part of me that things I would quite like to move to an Android phone, but my issue is that because I'm so trained, not because Android is not easy to use or any of those things, but because I'm not trained to use Android, I'm trained to use the iPhone. All the gestures I'm used to don't work properly is, that's a funny word to use, isn't it? They don't work as I think they ought to do you see what I mean? How'd you get round this ability of unlocking people from, other than saying use iPhone gestures, which would be one way of getting around it because otherwise we've talked in design that everything's tends towards a norm. Don't worry because that's what people expect. You have to be quite brave and take risks to change anything from what people already know. Is that a problem of UI or is that problem of UX or both? Interesting. Now asking you to change from iPhone to you'll say you're nervous of the justice in that instant. I would almost say it, we're going back to brand. The decision for you to change from one brand to another has to be so strong that you are prepared to overcome. Now in reality you changing those habits wouldn't take you very long but in theory you are nervous about it. So there needs to be something to draw you across to Android that is so strong that you will overcome those and that is a brand issue. Android needs to be giving you so many reasons why it's better that you will overcome this onboarding some windows, which annoys me that for some reason the app signers in the different places. Yes, and I would say that actually the difference between American and English keyboards isn't it? I mean use it experience is so powerful. It's a very, very young discipline to you thinking the web is 30 years old and this is probably only about 15 years old and it has brought in its own problems, but it's so strong at increasing the bottom line for businesses. If you have enough traffic, then moving buttons around changing the way people carry out gestures. If you make these changes and they create more sales in tiny increments, so I moved the button and naught 0.1% more people are able to fill out the form and get to the goal that I'm after. That is thousands on revenue. If you have a large traffic is so successful that this process has been taken into non-creative businesses and offline, it's called design thinking and there are processes and methodologies to streamline your production flow, modernize your business, change your culture, see if new products are viable. And so this whole process is used now across all business types because they can see the benefits of it. It has actually like everything brought in unintended consequences, which could be called dark matter. This is where generally it is a business who is paying for this user experience design and they haven't thought the larger consequences. For example, if I am able to get more bums on seats in an airplane, the longterm effect is I am actually impacting the environment and causing more pollution by doing this, which I hadn't thought of as a business. It was great for me as a business, not great for the world. Sadly. If you think of digital products, they've got more people to stay on their websites more and more by using different practices and the algorithms. The most notable one at the moment is I'm offering you lots more things that you may like to get you to stay on my site. The downside is I'm getting you addicted so you're not doing other things and sadly I might be reinforcing negative stuff. Maybe same mental health you're looking at, so there's always the negative consequence. So actually user experience needs to be a much more holistic approach as opposed to the quick I can pull down too to reload my page. All those gestures that you're saying are really useful for you on a Mac. Well, actually we need to make sure that in the long term they're not becoming so hardwired. They're doing you a disservice anyway. So it needs to be thinking yes about the user but more in our long term picture. So I've got the track that you are. So uh, let's start to those habits probably isn't a good thing and therefore you probably should move to save your fancy. Yeah, maybe not though. I've got two other questions cause that all sounds very interesting, but as a small business where I can understand you, why, how far can I actually go down UX beyond these are my goals and I'm going to do some split testing to Darwinian, only improve with my designer. How much really, I mean I don't want a team of people. I can't afford a team of people. I want one Abby forecasts. So how far are you going to take me down? I can understand you're going to take me down at UI role because as a small business owner, that's kind of an understandable, we're going to make this button interface design will help with the overall good experience for the customer. Suddenly enough, I wrote an article at four net magazine recently and it was entitled. Why UX doesn't work for small businesses. However, really brilliant. This is a big business. If you just don't have the traffic, which a lot of the businesses that I work for don't have the traffic, it's not going to work. It's a waste of money for you to be spending 5,000 pounds or more as a starter for user experience. Design is a waste of money. You got no 0.01% uplift in sales. It's not gonna make any difference to you. You've made an extra 25 P yeah, it's not even in sales. It's in more traffic getting to the desired goal, which might have an even less effect on you for sales. So for that reason, for small businesses, your best bet is to employ a designer, a web builder who is really well versed in user experience design and can use that experience from big businesses just to help create a good experience for your customers. Right? So you need a designer who's got the experience so you're not going to have to go through the whole process cause they kind of know what actually works and doesn't work. What's that? Learn from your competitors. So have a look around at how other people are doing it and if they're quite a big business and are doing it well, they may well have already paid for this type of methodology and process. And so you can learn from that. You can also do testing, you can speak to your customers, you can get five of your customers in the room and give them a lunch and ask them questions and maybe even give them a product or something at the end and they will give you invaluable insight that you could then make changes on your website without having to do a full process. You could do AB testing as you were saying as well. It's not Fastly expensive for you. In fact, look on my website, you'll find the article and I say the different ways in which small businesses can benefit from UX without the prohibitive expense of using us, which could not be value for money for them. Well, what's the URL to your website then? That would bring, go to Phi Abby. Dot. Kurt at UK. And you go to the blog section and look for why UX doesn't work for small businesses but what to do instead. Okay. And then the, the other thing while I was looking at this is dark UI. Yeah. So this is basically not hiding but also creating the option that the you don't want people to take. Right. And this is a really, really gentle way. It's like sign up now as a big green button and I'm not interested as a small gray bar, that's a really light level time. When you experience what you're calling dark UI, it may be that you're trying to download something for free and the link is impossible to find almost. And there's lots of enormous buttons saying download, download, download and you find out they're all ads for things that could be quite scary and you didn't really want, but then you are looking for something free. And so the person who's giving you that free thing is trying to make money. Well, another example is let's say the old style Ryanair booking where it was quite difficult to navigate through and not by extras because some were checked and checked and what some said not and some said yes and so actually if you didn't really carefully read what you were doing, you ended up with speedy boarding and a thousand kilograms of luggage which you didn't want. That's another sort of dark UI isn't it? Where it is and and as simple as signing up for a newsletter using sort of double negatives and things. Yes, I don't want the information and then being opposite. Yeah, so some areas of user experience design such as you have mentioned, and of course it touches on interface design as well because the interface designers implementing the experience, some areas that you have said are dark UI, they have been done on purpose to suck you into buying things that you might not want to bought. The AR, that example of that is finding things in your basket when you hadn't put them there. Now that or you can't find the opt-out link where the form is really big and it tying in at the writing at the bottom and a light gray says, I just want it for free like you promise. I would say there's two sides of this. There are elements of dark UI that were never intended to be dark UI. In fact, they were designed with the best intentions in mind. For example, the pull down that I keep talking about it with your finger, you swipe down, you'll be your notifications, load notifications in themselves that now people go, they are bad. They distract you from life. All these things that suck you into staying on digital products longer. Actually, they were just invented as a, I'm being really helpful. I'm removing, I'm creating good user experience, but because they were so good at what they did, they had been classed as bad experience because there are elements, you know when actually I want a bit of friction in my user experience in my process from a to B because I'm about to buy some new clothes, my avatar for 150 pounds. Really, I need to stop and consider this for a moment because possibly it's not such a good idea, but if the user experience is so good and I've just done it because it was so easy. And then when I think afterwards, ah, help, which is another reason why you have to have 14 days cool off now because of exactly that. So there is elements of it which start off with a good intention but has got so good at being so easy that it is bad and that bad. Then also joins in with experiences of purposely be being built to make you end up with something that you didn't want. This aspect where it can be proved, the UX is being created to purposely make you to carry out things that you may not have intended to do has become illegal. So it is already being legislated against that. You can't create mal intended consequences, which is what GDPR is about. It's got to be very, very clear of what you're doing, why you're doing it. But in fact, I find that GDPR is almost hitting me of unintended consequences, which is now every website has a great big button on it that just says, yeah, whatever. And we've become so blind to it, we just click it. And sometimes, actually if you look what you're actually clicking, what you're actually signing up to, it's a list of hundreds and hundreds of different things that you're signing up to the tracking of, and it's almost become the opposite of what was intended, which is people are just randomly signing up to things because they're so bored of those big green buttons that they're blind to them. Yeah, see, right. The one thing that was meant to protect us from the dark UI has actually become dark. So from my point of view, there is some dark, the UI that didn't start that way, but it has become a victim of his own success. And then there is farmers and companies that actively using processes to do me into something that I might not have wanted to do. Now that's nothing new. Do you remember we went to an auction once. It was very, very clever. They got you so excited about the fact that yeah, hands up, hands up if you want a free walk moment and all these things that you might win or that are actually amazing that in the end you're so desperate not to lose that, that you end up spending so much money on something really dreadful. Like I think it was a tray. So it's always been there and people will always try. I've got three boys and I'm amazed at how effective these games are at relieving my children of their pocket money. Yeah. The the one that's making me really cross at the moment because I think that they should know better is national Geographic's kids. They have a game called animal jam, which they're all very nice. They make the parents agree to it. They always send you an email saying your child's going to use this, and then they say, right, and to be a member you've got to pay five pounds a month and the children are begging you to be a member because you get gifts every single day. And so suddenly having said, yes, okay, my child can use this before school, after school, they're saying, I have to go on animal jam. I have to go on animal jam because otherwise I won't get my gifts. Yeah, I've found even worse, I found my daughter had been obsessed with animal jam for hours, which I badly hadn't noticed because she'd been told to collect four leaf clovers. Now that to begin with, it had been really easy and she was on number 49 and I believe that number 50 did not exist and she went totally loopy because I was asking her to get off the game when she only had one. They have to find, actually to her credit, she finally said, mommy, I'm going to get off because all they were going to give me was an online gift that really didn't mean anything at all and it's using up my hours and making me upset. So there is a game that I think national geographic should have done better, but what a horribly addicted game. Yeah. You think that's addictive, but fortnight, the thing that was amazing about Fortnite is kids are doing the dances in the playground. It became a real social thing and very is strong brand and then pure not wearing the latest encompassing because they have got everyone even when they're not on the computers to be thinking and immersing with Fortnite. Yeah, and if you're not wearing the latest skin than you are new, Oh, you still got last week's Skinner. What I knew now it's like, Oh well I need to buy the new skin for six quid every week. Then I need a battle pass for X amount of time. And then because my parents don't let me play enough, I need to by tears. Just unbelievable how much pressure, social pressure they bring to bear to ensure that you are spending money. Because in my day, back in the old days, you brought a game, it costs you whatever it costs you prevalent probably today of 50 pounds, but that was it. You can play that game forever and ever and ever. They look to games for really good that you at and it's true. They've removed all barriers. It's incredibly streamline. Short term dopamine is excellent. So the UX you'd say tick written really well, but the bigger picture and the long term goals is bad health, losing money. And this is what is also called dark matter in UX that we need to look at the bigger picture and make sure that what we are designing and what we are making. So streamline and frictionless and enjoyable, which is what user experience is. That is actually all those things in the long term, not just in the immediate Oh, so enjoyable that you're not going to do anything else for the rest of your life. Exactly. Exactly. We need a bit of friction to make us think otherwise. We're back to the matrix, aren't we? We always are. Every every episode. Let's be honest. I was feeling a little bit down today, so I hope I haven't brought my down this to this week's episode because there are many, many great things about a good user experiments in life, a good user experience in family life can lead to frictionless. Happy family time about that. What a dream. Well, maybe that's our job to create a reality. All right, well maybe you and I should be setting up user experience for family life, and that could be our new app. Quite well. Charge people for it. That's fine. Every five. So you could be a better parent. Pay five quid. I think we're onto something. I think we'd have an enormous audience quite quickly. Right. I'm going to let you go in all this design stuff. Maybe we can move next week. Two types of websites. What's the difference between a blog and a news PSI and a magazine and a business page site, and what elements you think are important for a website to be successful? Okay. Different types of websites or weights. Do I need that? That's good. That's awesome.
—
Dan & Abi work, talk & dream in tech. If you would like to discuss any speaking opportunity contact us.