341: Counterintuitive User Experiences

This week, we talk about counterintuitive user experiences that designers regularly design for in our day to day work. Let us know what we missed! As always, we catch up on feedback, tweets, and share our cool things of the week: a blog post explaining how to polish an interface, and a YouTube series about first-time reactions.

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Follow-up:

• Samuel Bernhardt shared some more Figma file organization tips – thank you!

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Tweets:

• Thijs Bremeesch thinks our podcast is GOLD. We like gooooold.
• Elvin says we're contributing to ongoing sanity – glad we can help a tiny bit!
• Ben Dunn is a new fan from New Zealand - welcome to the pod!
• Katarina Blind says last week's episode made her day. Katarina also bumped us up to $1.28 on the Patreon – you're the best!

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News:

• Apple accidentally leaked AirTags, hopefully coming soon!

Listener Question:

• Paweł Sysiak asks: "Could you list some examples of common mistakes when creating experiences? What are some UX mistakes that are counter-intuitive and prevalent?"
  • Stateful icons
  • Two choices on leaf pages
  • Primary actions placed in a navigation bar, which are harder to reach
    • Samsung's One UI is doing an interesting job of moving actions closer to the bottom of the screen.
    • The HIG recommends placing destructive actions far away from a person's fingers.
  • People don't read full screen interstitials
  • The introduction of change is as important as the change itself
  • Typographic hierarchy overrides structural hierarchy
    • You will read this first
  • Buttons are better than gestures
    • Gabriel Valdivia's tweet shows a great example.
  • Iconography and colors aren't universal
    • Watch Wired's video: Airport Expert Creates the Ideal Layout for LaGuardia Airport
  • Data visualization colors should vary by brightness, not hue
    • Read: 5 tips on designing colorblind-friendly visualizations
    • Uncharted 4 developers explain why they added accessibility options to the game
    • Throwback: Red vs. Blue

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Cool Things:

• Brian shared Cleaning up form UI, a blog post by @nikitonsky which describes step by step how to polish an interface using grids, spacing, typographic hierarchy, and color.
• Marshall shared Holden Hardman's YouTube series, My Friend Watches. In this series of video, Holden introduces a friend to new movies and captures the reactions for the internet to en...