How to improve the UX of your life
During my studies of Content Strategy, I found several connections to my personal life: Doing content audits of my laptop, telling the most trivial stories in a fascinating way by using storytelling archetypes, or reorganizing our storage room by thinking of our Information Architecture course. Lately, the course that helped me the most outside of studies was User Experience & Interaction Design.
During the course we discussed two approaches of user experience testing or inspecting: Heuristic Evaluations and Thinking Aloud Tests. In the professional world, the latter is done by 3–5 potential users. The first should be performed by experts of the field, and who is a better expert on your life than yourself? D’uh.
(Partly) Heuristic Evaluation of life
In the course we focused on the 10 general principles for interaction design by Jakob Nielsen. Normally you would discuss all of these looking at an app, a website, or some other interface. Looking at life, not all of them are applicable. But some couldn’t fit better:
Visibility of system status
The user should always be informed about the current status and should not be left clueless and without feedback.
In our everyday life, one of the most irritating issues is that we have to guess what other people are trying to say or not to say, and how they are feeling. With clear communication considering our wishes, feelings, and thoughts, we might prevent misunderstandings and encourage our partners and friends to join us.
Match between system and the real world
Designs, phrases, and words should be familiar to the user.
When there is something we are passionate about, it could be related to work, studies, or hobbies like sports or music. As true enthusiasts, we probably use jargon that our talking partners might not be familiar with, such as KPI, UI, arête or Ronnie Van Zant, which might make them feel uninformed and even stupid while listening to you. So next time you talk about your favourite climbing technique, level your vocabulary to your opposite.
User control and freedom
When an action is made, the user should have an easily findable way of undoing or redoing it. Simple ways to go back and forth gives users a feeling of freedom and control.
Making mistakes is easy. Going back and apologizing? Not so much. Admitting a mistake makes us feel vulnerable and often we are afraid of rejection. Just like in UX, we should be comfortable to share our feelings and thoughts, say sorry if we’re wrong, and most importantly, forgive if others messed up.
Help and documentation
Ideally, users should be able to complete their tasks without support. However, helping documentation should be provided — just in case.
This evaluation point concerns rather self-help than communication with others. As mentioned in this article, I tend to overthink things. Even though I should be able to complete all my tasks alone, I often overcomplicate them and make it worse for me and (sometimes) everybody included. Providing helpful documents such as to-do-lists, possible-to-do-lists, or even worst-case-scenario documentation, can be a big relieve to an overloaded brain and help get the tasks done without overthinking them.
Error prevention
It is always the goal to prevent errors in the first place. If the prevention is not possible, good error and warnings messages are important.
What is an error when it comes to communication? This can be interpreted in a lot of different ways. The one I chose, concerns triggers or topics we are sensitive about. We all have certain issues that we don’t want to talk about with everyone in every circumstance. So instead of letting the conversation go into a direction we are not comfortable with, we should clarify that we don’t feel up to talking about this topic right now.
But this could also go the other way: Shortly after my family suffered a great loss, one of my best friends kept asking me when we met: “Are you comfortable talking about it today?”. This way I could choose if I want to keep to lighter talking points, but I also knew that I would be safe to share everything, once I’m ready.
Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
Phrase error massages in a plain language the user understands, explain the problem and suggest a solution.
You didn’t do enough error prevention, it wasn’t heard or took seriously, and someone overstepped your boundaries? Communicate with a clear, (if possible) unemotional tone that they disrespected you or your wishes, what exactly the problem was, and that apologizing and not repeating the mistake would be the best way to solve the issue.
What remains online
As you probably noticed, I couldn’t link all of the 10 princibles to the real world. I’m still missing the connections to consistency and standards, recognition rather than recall, flexibility and efficiency of use, aesthetic and minimalist design. If you’re up for a challenge, I’m waiting for your connection theories in the comments!
All images by © pch.vector / freepik.com
