Since I had some issues that affected my productivity with google applications in Chrome I re-configured my system to use native apps for chat, mail and calendar. Overall I like the changes and the trade off is worth it since I do not have to log into my google account 30 times a day. I miss using one browser (especially with the three finger swipe down that shows me all of my tabs) but I still use it for development and other browsing. Seriously I counted the last day and it was 30 times google asked me to log in in chrome so I don’t mind having all my apps in one place. Oddly, firefox and safari do not have this incessant logging in to google services issue with google services. Weird, I know. But I think I’ll stick with Safari for my work apps accounts for now and use the native apps with personal accounts. This leads me to my point. I was restoring some music to my itunes library and when I dragged and dropped it onto the itunes application I noticed that instead of asking me to choose and drag to Music or Movies, etc; it just highlighted the section around all the Library categories and let me drop. There was no more thinking required on my part. That may be an important part of understanding how to do UX well. First identify the choices a user makes with your system. Then identify the repetitive choices they have to make that require a very low level of thought and make that choice for them. In my case I was dragging music files into iTunes. A while ago I remember I had to get the drag to highlight Music in the Library. Now I don’t, iTunes just highlights all categories under Library and I drop the files off. It makes sense. I know or think I have a file I can add to my Library, They let me know if I can add the files by highlighted all of the Library Categories and then make it easy to drop them off and figure out where to put them and how to identify them. One less low level but conscious choice I need to make.
12/23/2011 ~ 2 min read
