usability – Design and Code

Interaction Design

Poorly Designed Interface Makes Oven Hard to Use

We talk a lot about the designs of mobile apps and websites. Companies, start-ups hire the best designers to craft the best UX for their digital products, but we seem to ignore the UX of physical products. User interfaces of a lot of home appliances, such as oven, stove top, dish washer, washing machine, are often not intuitive and hard to use.

Recently I moved into a new apartment and tried to cook. I was confused by the buttons and knobs on the panels of an oven and ended up spending much time trying to figure out how to turn it on.

Please, Don’t Replace the Bar with the Drawer

The bottom navigation bar in Material Design, which I will call the bar, also known as the tab bar on iOS, is the area at the bottom of the screen that allows the user to quickly switch between sections of an app. The navigation drawer, which I will call the drawer, is typically a side sheet that displays different app sections and is triggered by tapping the hamburger menu icon.

Both the bar and the drawer can be used for navigation purposes. Many apps nowadays seem to get rid of the bar and rely purely on the drawer, especially on Android. Without careful consideration however, this can lead to usability problems.

A bottom navigation bar in Material Design

Interaction Design

Get Rid of Dropdowns

In a project, we may be tempted to use dropdowns to give the user a bunch of options to choose from. These options could be countries, languages, genres etc in a form or a setting page. After all, that’s what we are used to seeing in a lot of apps and websites, right?