Mark W.rites

UX

The front cabin of a futuristic concept car. It's mostly white with electric blue lights near the dashboard, console, and manual controls.
Concept car for Jaguar

UI design takes on an entirely different meaning when the UX doesn’t include a screen. That’s a lot of what automotive UX/UI design is all about.

In the early years of my career, every user experience I was designing comprised a single modality and a single visual UI. As my career progressed, I was able to work on an ever-expansive ecosystem of modalities, including products with smaller UIs, and even without UIs at all.

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Collage of segments from bill-pay designs explained in this article.

Good design is holistic. It considers the journey your audience is on well before they ever interact with your product. It guides them from start to finish, even if your product only touches the center of that path. It also means understanding their emotional state, which in turn impacts their mental state. And their level of tolerance for whatever UX you’re about to put in front of them.

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Illustration by Storyset. It’s a wall of layered UIs with two nicely-dressed people looking at and discussing them.

I’ve been designing and using digital interfaces for well over two decades. In that time I’ve seen a handful of mistakes that we keep making, over and over again. They’re the UX faux pas that I love to hate. 5 of them, in particular, are especially egregious. Let’s avoid all of these at all times.

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Looking down at an antique Favorit typewriter with a piece of paper sticking out of the top of it.

One of the most prominent dark UX patterns is hiding paths to exit doors. Faint unsubscribe links, ambiguous language, and even forcing people to call a phone number to opt-out of digital products. The intention is the same every time: retain customers.

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Lou Ferrigno as the Hulk from the 70s TV series with his arms raised while flexing his muscles and growling.
That’s Lou Ferrigno, not my father.

I think I was six, which would have made my brother four. We were avid fans of The Hulk TV series, starring Lou Ferrigno. My dad, like most 70s dads I suspect, had a crush on Lou because he was manly and buff. For my brother and me, though, we just loved that he was green, wore purple pants, and beat the shit out of bad guys for doing bad things.

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