The blog I reviewed this week delves deeper on the topic of design smells and the classifications of some of them in different situations, some of which we had discussed in previous classes and some new ones that prove to be important to know in the long run. this article focus on design smells in the UI/UX side of programming and more specific to this side but still very much important.
The first discussed is “Documentation for Power users” which is the separate documentation used on portals to different sights when users click hyperlinks, or the different section on a Website or application. the issue comes from the formating and the flow of said website many look very cluttered and the flow of information is jumbled up. One specific example that is used for this smell is the Use of Microsoft Excel, the main focus being that it is a universally used application and thus has universal tools that the users disposal, the issue with such a great tool as without distinct tools being separated from the ones a user might not use in order to optimize the users experience it overwhelms them. this goes for all users as there is no case by case optimization, one solution brought up would be to dissect the application into separate products in order to better organize the UI for consumers in different situations, such as one made for educational use and one for corporate.
Another Smell that is discussed and closely relates to the previous is “Excessive Iconography”, this smell focuses on the use of unclear icons to display information in large loads, if we look at the example used in the blog of Xcode on Mac with many of the icons and labels out all on the same display to overwhelm the developer, making the tasks more difficult. the issue isn’t that the Labels or the Icons are not clear, but there are to many options and features present on the same screen. one way to combat this is to structure the application into smaller instances including all features that are connected together, allowing for clearer labeling and better overall experience for users. one personal example of this kind of structure I found was on Jira which structured its features according to what the user needed, allowing for a seemless UI and better experience. it did this but hiding features entirely that were not necessary and clearly labeling its tools.
Yodaiken, Aaron. “Ux Smells.” Medium, UX Collective, 7 Feb. 2017, https://medium.com/user-experience-design-1/ux-smells-fa971feef820.
From the blog cs@worcester – Marels Blog by mbeqo and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.