Comment on My Bank Recently Changed Their Interface to Move Money Between Accounts
theneverfox@pawb.social 1 day agoYou realize this is actually a field of study? Like, this isn’t a particularly soft science… Companies have done massive A/B campaigns and written papers on it, universities do studies on it… It’s not just opinion
SanctimoniousApe@lemmings.world 21 hours ago
Yes, as it has been for decades. I also learned some about it back in the early days of the '80s into the '90s. It’s constantly evolving along with the tech (and the capabilities of the current majority of users), so there’s never been much of an absolute set of standards that have withstood the test of time. Again, there are a wide variety of people in the world - all with their own perspectives and ways of doing things. As such, the goal of a universally intuitive interface - while laudable - is a bit of a quixotic pursuit, IMHO.
theneverfox@pawb.social 5 hours ago
They don’t teach material design or something, they teach you to look at the interfaces people use the most and copy the shorthand and general layout
Then they teach you what not to do… Don’t make buttons appear and disappear, don’t make interactions move things around… These are basically universally confusing
They get into a bit of color theory, making certain actions “weighty” by adding loading, and all sorts of other techniques
But the most important piece is figuring out what the main use cases are, and making the tradeoffs to make the experience as frictionless as possible. Stuff like minimizing clicks, piching things by default, hiding unnecessary information, etc
It’s like teaching art. You put labels on concepts and make them practice picking apart the composition so they can understand the individual elements at play and how they fit together