This week’s readings really helped me better understand what user experience design really is. I have a friend majoring in computer science, and he was always telling me how important UX design skills are in today’s job market, and that it is worth learning. I can see why now! Employers are always looking for new ways to make content online more interactive and build engagement with their users.
I visit multiple websites every day because I’m constantly reading random articles that I see shared on Twitter/Facebook or links sent to me from friends and family. I’ve had my encounters with really good websites with amazing user experience design, and others, not so much. Often, I stay away from returning to websites that I found have terrible user experience design.
One of the things I automatically consider to be a bad user experience design involves videos on the page. I love watching videos. I would rather watch a video than read an article most of the time, but when a page requires me to watch a 20 second advertisement before being able to move on OR automatically playing an unrelated video next to an article, it turns me off as a user. News websites tend to do this a lot. I understand this can be an advertising situation, but I feel like there can be better ways to incorporate advertisements onto a website. The Guardian used to do this a lot, but they recently updated their user experience design to be much better than in the past.
On the subject of videos, they have become a really important form of multimedia that is becoming more commonly used in websites. It’s one of the best forms of communication in today’s age. And also, it’s really important to think about how multimedia is presented on a website. I think Ben Shneiderman’s, “Eight Golden Rules” made me think about how important it is that multimedia follow these golden rules. Because you are adding more elements and structure to the website. Therefore, whoever is designing the website must pay attention to consistency and ease of using the site. I almost feel as if there should be a 9th Golden Rule that pertains to how the page is designed for multimedia. This is especially important now as websites become more and more interactive and complex as different elements are incorporated into the website. As Jesse James Garrett mentioned in his, “Elements of User Experience” presentation, user design is all about the human experience. Whenever I encounter sites with bad use of video user experience, it ruins it for me.
Source: http://faculty.washington.edu/jtenenbg/courses/360/f04/sessions/schneidermanGoldenRules.html