Computer voice
UX podcast episode 284.

[Music]

Per Axbom
You’re listening to UX Podcast coming to you from Stockholm, Sweden,

James Royal-Lawson
Helping the UX community explore ideas and share knowledge since 2011.

Per Axbom
We are your hosts, Per Axbom,

James Royal-Lawson
and James Royal-Lawson.

Per Axbom
With listeners in countries and territories all over the world, from Singapore to Oman.

James Royal-Lawson
And, before we jump into today’s show, we’re going to share with you all, a new thing we’re doing.

Per Axbom
A brand spanking new thing.

James Royal-Lawson
Which is kind of an old thing, but it’s new thing. We’re still recording the show! But we’re going to be doing our interviews to a live audience in collaboration with “Ambition, empower”.

Per Axbom
Yep. And “Ambition, empower” is a continuous learning programme for professionals. So Ambition Group is offering this as a year long learning experience where you can decide on tracks to follow. And there are different topics for those tracks. And there is something to do every week, and you decide how much you want to do. And one of those tracks is now UX Podcast.

James Royal-Lawson
I actually thought you’re gonna say one of those tracks is you, Per.

Per Axbom
One of those tracks is also me. Yes, I have been since last year also doing a “Design ethics” track within Ambition, Empower. And you’ll also find Kim Goodwin, Chris Noessel and Susan Weinschenk as well, doing tracks and more to be added.

James Royal-Lawson
And so far I think all the tracks are actually people we’ve had on the show. So it’s a really good sim, is it symbiosis? Is that how you say?

Per Axbom
Symbiosis.

James Royal-Lawson
When he’s kind of two things growing together, or merged together.

Per Axbom
Oh, it’s great fun!

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. So there’ll be a link… you can search for Ambition Empower. And if you do sign up and use the code, UXPODCAST, because you will get a discount.

Per Axbom
A quite substantial one, if I may say, so.

James Royal-Lawson
There’ll be links in the show notes. But you can always search in Google, or other search engine of your choice, if you can’t find the show notes.

James Royal-Lawson
Today, Per…

Per Axbom
It’s a link show.

James Royal-Lawson
A link show. And those of you who are familiar with the podcast, will know that what that means is that Per and I amongst all the millions of articles that we read constantly to keep ourselves up to date with what’s going on in the world of design and UX. We’ve pulled out two that we particularly liked or particularly sparked our brains into action.

Per Axbom
Something to think about. The first one out is Colin Wright’s newsletter, I think. The one you found, his newsletter is called “Brain lenses”. And the articles about additive bias.

James Royal-Lawson
Correct. And the other article we’ve got today is “Mobile UX trends, the current state of mobile UX”. Which is an article that was published, I think it was published last spring, wasn’t it, on Baymard?

Per Axbom
Baymard Institute, yeah. They have this section with free UX research that they publish. It’s really good.

Per Axbom
So let’s start out with additive bias. What is that? Is that something people should know? What it is James?

James Royal-Lawson
Well, first of all, like you said in the intro, this article is “Additive bias” by Colin Wright. which I did pick up from Collin’s “Brain lenses” substack. And Colin himself is a podcaster, like us, an author, like you, but he’s got four podcasts, Per. Four podcasts!

Per Axbom
Oh, that’s a lot.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, it’s quite a lot. I mean it takes enough time doing one, I have no idea how you do four.

Per Axbom
How do you keep track of that? Who am I today?

James Royal-Lawson
Well, you have a big team helping you I think. And ColinIsMyName is his handle on Twitter.

Per Axbom
I was like, what? It’s not your name.

James Royal-Lawson
James is my name. But ColinIsMyName is Collin’s handle. I know this is gonna be weird. Anyhow. So it’s this one, this article. So I’ll read the first paragraph: “There’s some evidence that when presented with a problem, will tend to favour solutions that involve adding something new of a solutions that involve the subtraction of some existing element.” So he also says: “It’s not that we have problems processing, understanding solutions that involve subtraction, taking things away. But we find the suggestion of adding things more obvious.” But Colin goes on to say that: “This effect appears to be amplified when problem solvers are under heightened cognitive load.” You’ve got more on your mind, you’ve got more going through your head. And people in one of the studies referred to, they could still see value in subtractive solutions. But interestingly, they were less likely to see or notice the shortcomings in additive solutions. So they’re kind of blind to the downside of adding stuff. And they were actually, they were aware of the downsides of taking away stuff. Which is very interesting.

Per Axbom
Ok, that’s a good point. So that’s also alluding to how. I mean, if we’re not working, sometimes we say that we need to go for a walk, we need to spend some time thinking for problem solving. But it’s not visible work, which is why we are wary of actually doing that type of work, because people will start complaining, what are you really doing there? I’m thinking, but thinking isn’t even valued.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, things you can’t see or not valued as much. But it goes on to explain some of the reasons maybe behind it. And I’ll read another quote from it: “We may be biassed towards adding more things, more resources, more rules, more habits, more responsibilities, rather than the opposite, which in some cases could worsen the problems we’re trying to solve.” The explanation for that is the sunk cost fallacy. You know, where you, you basically, you keep investing in things you’ve already invested in, rather than limiting the losses and walking away from something else not working. But I like to then say that I think you’ve got situations where things already exist, then it’s a system that already exists, of supporting an existing solution. So not only is there a sunk cost fallacy, but there’s this is like a degree of protectionism. People want to protect the known. And they add to what’s known, rather than remove it and enter the unknown. So located what you’re saying about visible or not visible Per, I mean, we have whole systems that are built up over a long period of time, people’s jobs are around the existence of certain things. And then if you come with a suggestion, which is “Remove it!” then people might go: “Oh, my God, yeah, but if that’s gone, then so does my job!”. Or “What am I going to do? Or what does that mean for this?”

Per Axbom
How do you how do you measure that? I mean, because if previously you have been measured on how many things you produce or make in a day, if you start taking things away, that’s like contrary to what even the belief system around what work is, supposedly is.

James Royal-Lawson
So that’s, I mean, that’s when we can zoom out. So we’ve got on very different levels here. So, on a larger scale, you cover entire systems that kind of get disrupted when you suggest that removing some would be better, and then it gets potentially complex and difficult to remove the thing. But we can also zoom, we can zoom into micro level on these things and say: “Okay, we could be talking about a word, a text, a drop down a button, a kind of stage in a process”. I mean, it could be a very small interaction, not just something a societal level. But in both situations, it’s the same kind of bias that we are biassed towards adding rather than taking away. And I think it’s one that he goes on to mention towards the end of the article that added organisational aspect of this is how additions get recognised by peers and managers and bosses. He said about producing, I mean, if you’re producing stuff, and this is exactly connected to that, like if you can show that you’ve added something. Imagine your stand up when you go: “Look, here’s our interface from the last sprint, and here’s our interface from this sprint!”. And you’ve removed a lot of stuff. It’s kind of, even now I’m describing it, it feels a bit deflating. When you’ve taken stuff away,

Per Axbom
That actually makes you think, I did a talk many years ago now around how interfaces themselves are actually standing in the way of achieving my goal. Because it’s positioned between me and my goal. So the more stuff I put between me and my goal, the harder it’s going to be for me to reach it, of course. And that’s the way I do believe we need to think about interfaces and our websites and our apps. That they are actually not they’re not, we intend them to be helpful. And then we start adding more and more stuff, to be even more helpful: “Well, they could also use that this filter and that button, and this text.” And in essence, we’re just adding the complexity that they have to go through to get to what they want to do.

James Royal-Lawson
So I think this one aspect is communicating subtraction, that I think you’re going to be, you’re going to need to think about how you communicate to your organisation to your peers, the benefits of subtraction in a particular instance. But then on top of that, and this is Colin’s closing sentence from the article: “It may be warranted to invest a bit of additional time and attention, when we’re in problem solving mode. Less we overlook potentially better, less cumbersome solutions.” So what he is prescribing there, recommending there is, like you said, we take them walk in the woods or whatever we did that walk outside, or have more time allocated, when we’re problem solving, to actually look at the things that are taking stuff away, rather than always adding,

Per Axbom
I think we also we need to become better at explaining how adding stuff can actually be dangerous and how it can cost money in the long run. And be not beneficial to the user. I think I have an example, I think I mentioned on the show before about sunk cost fallacy, where I’ve been in a project where we invested a lot of time in building a WYSIWYG editor, close to what medium’s approach is where you actually just edit in place on the screen, which turned out as we learned when we were doing user test, it’s not very intuitive for a lot of users. Which meant that, that investment, which was done by a guy who was obviously very proud of his work, meant that it was partly non intuitive, which meant that it would take longer for us to educate people on how to use it, we didn’t have access to doing that education.

But also, there were not enough people going forward that were able to maintain what we have built. Because there was this one, obviously a genius, because he built that thing really, really well. But not enough people actually knew how to also go into the same code and maintain it, if we had to change something, if we discovered bugs, we were dependent on him. So we could build this whole case for actually, this thing we built, it’s going to be a problem going forward. So in so many years, this is going to cost this much well, the cost we put into it, let’s scrap it and build what people expect instead, which also more people can build and maintain. So we had to build this whole business case around removing something that we hadn’t actually put a lot of money and effort into.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. And that’s because you I guess you uncovered the shortcomings with the existing solution with the thing that was there, because you can see it, you can touch it, feel it and those shortcomings were not immediately obvious. And you can, I guess you can critique something that exists, and ignore it?

Per Axbom
Yes. That’s a good point. Because this is really saying we need to critique something that doesn’t exist yet. Because we’re saying that this thing that we want to build, we may not, we shouldn’t build it because the alternative of not building can actually be more beneficial. It’s such a hard argument.

James Royal-Lawson
And this is the kind of argument and thought process that really attracted me to this article that it’s, you know, when you look at how you work and look at what we do, you can see really how we fall into this constantly and how pulling yourself out of it involves many other biases and problem situations and challenging moments of communication and moments of discovery.

Per Axbom
Oh, now I’m thinking of more and more people should put into their portfolios. The things I’d never built? Because I mean, people sometimes ask me if I have examples of ethical design that I say, it can be really hard to give examples, because a big part of doing the right thing is often removing things and sometimes not even building things. So if you can have examples of stuff that you actually did not build, that would be a fantastic conversation starter.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. A portfolio of stuff you scrapped? Yeah, I like it.

Per Axbom
“Mobile UX trends, the current state of mobile UX” with 18 common pitfalls and best practices. And when we say current state, we mean actually the current state as it was described one year ago, in April of 2021.

James Royal-Lawson
Which, now there’s a problem, Per, because the study itself span over two years.

Per Axbom
Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
So yes, it’s a year old, but it covered a period of more than two years, and it’s built on even deeper research than that.

Per Axbom
Exactly. And the reason I chose it was because I was looking through it and I realised, well, all of these things, I see all the time, constantly. And they’re so obvious. A lot of them have to do with accessibility as well I realised, without the word accessibility being used in the article. But it’s just when you read them, it’s like, oh, that’s so obvious. But I can also see why people ignore them or tend not to see them or actually think that they have sold something that they haven’t.

James Royal-Lawson
Should we can do a background on the size and scale of this test.

Per Axbom
Oh, yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
Or do you want me to do that for you?

Per Axbom
If you have it up. 12,000 mobile usability scores, right?

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, the different points they have. But the study itself is 289 testing sessions, include “think aloud” a “one to one” moderated lab sessions. And those 289 sessions were span across 58 different company sites. Across those tests, they found over 2500 UX and usability issues. Which I’m not surprised.

Per Axbom
And they put all this stuff on a beautiful scatterplot. So there’s this diagram you can look at as well. But I mean, there’s an immense amount of work that has gone into this. And I love the way they’ve summarised it.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, and that scatterplot is actually really interesting. Because straight away, you can see how every dot in it is one of these websites for one of the 31 criteria. Because all the 12,000 we talked about, they bunch them into 31 topics. So general topics, and then plotted each of the companies 58 websites on one of these 31 topics. You can see it’s more red, it’s more to the left is more to the poorer end of the scale, than the good end of the scale. And that’s really obvious from the scatterplot.

Per Axbom
Exactly. But what I love, of course, is the details. And looking at each of these 18 different points that we have for what mistakes are these websites doing. They’ve actually also told us how many of these websites are making these mistakes. And they’re broadly categorised into the homepage, the search the on site search forms, and mobile site wide features and elements. And to be even more clear, this is about mobile e-commerce. But just looking at these examples, I can see how they apply to not just e-commerce, but all the different websites out there. And I’m thinking even about government agencies and municipalities, which I work a lot with, I see the same types of mistakes being done across the board.

James Royal-Lawson
You’re absolutely right, Per. I mean, a lot of them are completely applicable to all sites. Some of them, of course, are very much connected to products and e-commerce but no, there’s a huge amount of takeaways that you can apply generally.

Per Axbom
But this first one is, when I looked at it, it seemed obvious, but then I looked at the number of websites making this mistake, that’s the highest number for any of these points is 95% of mobile sites make this mistake, they have ads in primary areas of the mobile homepage.

James Royal-Lawson
When you say ads now, you mean basically their internal campaigns, I guess, taking this exact image when you land on the sites.

Per Axbom
Right, exactly. And this is something I mean, a lot of people complain about, it’s so hard to get to the content when you have all these huge banners, right up in your face as soon as you enter a mobile website, because they take take so much of the screen, space from the screen. And it’s hard to get an overview. It’s distracting. And sometimes they are full page or pop-ups or overlays. And it’s not even obvious how you close them. Which is of course a huge problem if you want people to actually start using your website.

James Royal-Lawson
Well, this is really interesting, though, because this is something where a lot of organizations are going to really love this real estate on the start page. And they really want to push, you know, their shiny thing or their campaign in, you know, in that space. Whereas what we’re seeing here is that it’s counterproductive in many situations.

Per Axbom
What’s interesting, what I still see a lot of companies doing is that they demo all their websites in the desktop version. Whereas I see and not enough people actually in leadership positions I think are aware of this. That I mean, people don’t use the desktop website anymore. Really. It’s so much…

James Royal-Lawson
Careful.

Per Axbom
It’s so much mobile.

James Royal-Lawson
You are generalising, Per, you’ve got to be careful.

Per Axbom
Of course I’m generalising, but the shift from desktop to mobile is huge. Which is why we’re getting these types of studies.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, exactly. I agree. I mean, if I look at the analytics stuff that I work with then. I mean even in non e-commerce websites now, so the public sector wants to work with, then the shift of mobile is continuing, and it’s well beyond half of the audience now, even on those websites.

Per Axbom
Yeah, exactly. That’s what I mean, within the public sector websites I work with, It’s I want to say it’s over 80%.

James Royal-Lawson
That is depending on what they are, I’m not saying, we’re somewhere…You can tell that they are desk working people, they use it as a resource while working at their desk. But you’re right. I mean, there’s so many sites now, I can’t think of many sites I work with where desktop is in the majority anymore.

Per Axbom
But my point is that really, in a project I’ve been working on, and recently, actually, they decided that all demos have to be of the mobile website, which means we installed mobile simulators on desktop computers. To actually give that simulation of this is the mobile website, this is what it looks like. Because too few people look at that most people look at their own websites, on their laptop or on their work computer. So they’re very familiar with that version of it. But they rarely go to their own websites in the mobile for some reason. But that’s my experience. I’m generalising again, James.

James Royal-Lawson
Good, didn’t have to tell you off that time.

Per Axbom
But so that’s that’s one of my actually takeaways that and recommendations from this is that, try and demo both if you want, but don’t ignore the mobile website in demos. It’s so important to actually show that because in demos is also when you pick up on these types of mistakes.

James Royal-Lawson
I mean, I want to say that don’t ignore it either. Desktop and mobile I mean, they are different and they often do have different… They lend themselves better to different tasks. You might find that the desktop version actually brings more goal– task completion, or conversion, or whatever. So it could be more valuable the desktop one than the mobile one.

Per Axbom
The reason it could be bringing more conversion is because you’re making all these mistakes.

James Royal-Lawson
Could be. You know, Per, it’s complicated all this.

Per Axbom
But yeah, so if you’re so if you’re not demoing the mobile website, there will be fewer people to actually catch up with that. So the second point is also about the homepage, 57% of mobile sites fail to provide the full scope, and the link text of suggested paths. This might be an e-commerce thing. But it’s, let’s say you have a, H&M, club store, whatever. And you go to see the women’s selection, there’s a men’s selection, women’s selection, those are the two buttons on the homepage. What you don’t see is there actually a small heading there as well, “new releases of shoes” or something. So you think you’re you’re clicking an ad or a banner for shoes, and you go into men’s and women’s, but actually it’s already filtered for you. So it’s not conveying by filter. So you come to that page, and it’s like, “Oh, they only have two pairs of shoes in this store? That’s weird. I’m gonna leave, I’m not interested in those.”

James Royal-Lawson
So you’re narrowing it down. So you’re basically narrowing your search down effectively or filtering things down too quickly.

Per Axbom
Exactly.

James Royal-Lawson
So that you don’t realise that you’re part of a smaller scope, than you were looking for.

Per Axbom
Definitely, exactly. So you get this tunnel vision, and you don’t know, where am I in the scope of the full sight. And that point actually made me realise how we often talk about when people come to these websites, from search engines often. And that’s something that I’ve also experienced a lot is that when you come from a search engine into websites and mobile websites, especially then, it’s very hard to see where in the navigation am I? What filters are activated? What am I really seeing in front of me? So I think a lot of times needs to be spent on on exposing that type of “where am I” information?

James Royal-Lawson
And doesn’t that lead us nicely into the search points of this report? You said this, what is this? I think there’s at least, is it five or six different points to do with search. And I think this is connected to what you said there as well will scope. Or rather, I suppose understanding intent. Because when you coming from Google, that’s a search thing in itself. So you want to interpret and understand the intent when you’ve gone from there to your website. Whereas a lot of these points, this section of the report, relate to how you would maybe help people if they are going off track. So one of them.. I have hijacked your article a little bit now Per, sorry.

Per Axbom
Go for it.

James Royal-Lawson
So one thing would be alternative queries. So if you miss spelling, so suggestions. If you are misspelling something then you make sure you would offer suggestions that had matches that were close to that one, or in the case of scope, you would actually match against categories rather than just products. So if you are searching for shoes, then it wouldn’t just match the products that include shoes in the name, you also would suggest: “Oh, look, we’ve also got this category.” So you can allow people to jump straight to the category scope, instead of just the, the specific products.

Per Axbom
I really like these search suggestions, because as I was saying before, almost all of these have to do with accessibility, the ones you mentioned, with autocomplete, and search suggestions. It helps people who have a hard time spelling and who don’t know the right words. They are helped by the search engine helping them.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. And also the… we’ve seen, you can see about testing that some people… well, search is very different from person to person. And when you guessing a word, so you kind of if you locked on to a particular phrase for a type of product. I mean, I have this problem in Swedish, sometimes, if I’m thinking of a certain product, I might think of it in English. And then I need to find it on a Swedish website. And if I sometimes just directly translate it, then I might not find any products whatsoever, because it’s not, it’s not the right translation. So I’m really helped sometimes by fuzzy search and different suggestions and categories and stuff, because it allows me to, to play a little bit easier with a search and get the real name for the category, the real name for the product in Swedish, which might be way off to what I it might not be something I understand or realise. So that’s really helpful.

Per Axbom
There was actually an example there as well of the search engine, you put in face masks in this in the search engine, they had a whole section with face masks, but the search results were like double the amount that were in the section called face masks. So they’d already done the categorization and sorting, but the search wasn’t good enough to actually pick that out. It brought instead a lot of content that wasn’t relevant to the search.

James Royal-Lawson
And when you say face masks, it actually meant beauty masks.

Per Axbom
Exactly.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. So that’s a really interesting one for recent years how that’s become a very complicated thing to search for.

Per Axbom
Such a good example.

James Royal-Lawson
I like as well, the the the point about making sure that your search that you’ve performed, persists on the results page.

Per Axbom
Yes, exactly. So that means that actually this what you search for is still in the search box. So if you want to change just one word or back up, you can do that.

James Royal-Lawson
I was surprised to see how many. What was the, what was that one? Is 42%. They don’t persist the search query. So they kind of maybe show what it is, but you can’t, you can’t keep on foraging. You can’t move on from your search result. It’s a dead end that you’ve got to go backwards. And when I read that one, that was one of the ones I went: “Oh yeah, that’s annoying.”

Per Axbom
Exactly. You realise you see it so often that they don’t do it. It’s always like: “Oh, again!” But then you realise, how easy wouldn’t it be for everyone to just persist it?

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. Which is a good point, Per, when you can think about all these. I mean, I think the average new general, if you look across all of these results. Wasn’t it mediocre was actually the average result for all these 58 websites. There was none of them were more perfect. At least in US and European, I think it was. But none of them were were very poor or broken, they pointed out that. But it’s interesting that we’ve got enough all this stuff that is relatively simple to fix. And we don’t do it now. I don’t think that’s down to lack of ability from designers. Or is it just, is it that it’s so I mean, this has got like, 12,000 points or something. So you’ve got an element of it’s so many things to think about and consider, you know, a team of people can’t possibly consider them all at once.

Per Axbom
It could be, yeah, exactly. You’re dealing with so much it’s hard to fix everything, it always is. But it’s also about defaults and design systems and not anticipating stuff within the design system. So that we build it the same way without realising that we haven’t listened to the feedback enough to to change the things that are in the design system, especially with larger organisations, you’re stuck. These can be dangerous as well. But sometimes I do think it’s also not realising or not understanding. So I highlighted this specific point, which is in the next section of forms, because it’s sort of blew my mind when I read it and surprised me, although I’m frustrated by that, because it shouldn’t surprise me I should be aware of these things. And this point is about as I said forms, and the way it reads is that 62% of mobile sites don’t dynamically change form labels from above the fields to left aligned and landscape mode. So if you’re filling out a form, and you tilt your phone to horizontal view, because what happens is, and the way it’s explained in the article is that people use landscape mode, because the keyboard is larger, so it’s easier for them to type. But what that means, of course, is that it reduces the visible part of the forum by 73%, which means that they are suggesting here that so you can move the form label left aligned to the left of the form field, which means that you can actually see more of the form when you have the landscape mode.

So this was really interesting to me, because I realised: “Well, yes, of course, that makes sense.” Because people have a hard time typing on phones, and they want the larger keyboards, people actually do that. But also, there’s this aspect of, if you’re in a wheelchair, for example, and you have this holder for your phone, sometimes those folders won’t allow you to change from portrait to landscape, and vice versa. So you have to decide on one. So if you have it in landscape, maybe because you’re watching movies, and you then have to fill out a form, you will find a lot of people in landscape mode, that is something so that actually made me think well, so don’t only look at your website, in portrait mode on your phones, but also demo it in landscape mode and see what happens.

James Royal-Lawson
I reacted to that one, too, because you know, the general advice is that you position labels to the left of formfields, English or Western websites, on desktop, and then you would move them to above the form field on mobile. So this is actually highlighting the the critical responsiveness, so the breaking point of your site. And when you switch, and that you should make sure that your form changes to a more desktop like layout, maybe not exactly desktop, but you need to be thinking about where your break points are. And there should be one to that landscape switches the labels to the left to increase, so reduce the horizontal space it takes up to make room for the keyboard, which is interesting. I didn’t think about that, because I normally just kind of spit out: “Oh, yeah, label should be above on mobile.”

Per Axbom
Yeah, exactly. And this is such a perfect example of something where, because I know a lot of designers will have a hard time accepting this because it’s one of those: just because you would never ever do something in landscape like that on a mobile doesn’t mean an insignificant number wouldn’t.

James Royal-Lawson
Exactly. And I think this is looping back to what I said about keeping everything in your head all the time that we’re often as designers expected to know what’s supposed to be done. And you point situations where you, you maybe can’t do research, or maybe you can can’t find the research quick enough, or you’re having to scramble to find an article somewhere on the internet to back up what you’re trying to say. And you get a lot of pressure put on you to be an infinite oracle of information and UX patterns that you know, all of them instantly and when they’re all applicable. And it’s hard. It’s hard all this.

Per Axbom
To be honest, the other points they have about forms actually for me are not specifically mobile, they have to do with error messages, having address validate or address lookup, and marking required an optional fields, I’m betting all those would be similar on the desktop website. So for me, it’s not like, well, that’s specific to mobile.

James Royal-Lawson
No absolutely not. The required and optional, that’s a really good one, I really recommend people to search more, but if you don’t know much about it, because it’s a really nice pattern where you highlight the things that are optional, rather than highlight the things that are required. So you flip the form. Yeah, although they’re recommending you do both. But I know that optional is something that’s pushed as a more usable way of dealing with forms in many situations.

Per Axbom
Exactly. My go to design now it’s gonna be revealed how it is, but I actually put optional in parentheses behind the label that’s my go to. Then of course, you have to test that and it’s not the always the solution but it gives an example of how you possibly could do it if you’re not doing it that already. And just finishing off on that article, I just want to mention that even those mobile site wide featuring elements they actually apply sort of to accessibility as well. Not providing load indicators, which means that people actually don’t know what is happening as they’re waiting for content loads. For example, when you type in a search engine and press Search, is it doing anything? Are the search results going to come up? You have no idea because there’s nothing indicating that something is going on behind the scenes. And the other one is placing tappable elements too close to each other.

James Royal-Lawson
And too small.

Per Axbom
Yes, as well.

James Royal-Lawson
And we have an entire show about this, don’t we?

Per Axbom
We do.

James Royal-Lawson
Target size.

Per Axbom
Lots of good stuff too. I mean, just go through that list and start talking in your teams about “what are we not thinking about?” I’m pretty sure there are lots of insights that will come up.

James Royal-Lawson
Given given the percentages, they say, are mediocre or don’t live up to all these points. I mean, you might argue that who are Baymard to say that we should be doing these? But they’re a great resource. And the are doing a lot of research. And they’re not saying you shouldn’t test yourself.

Per Axbom
Exactly.

James Royal-Lawson
But they are doing a lot of testing. And they’re showing a lot for free. Yes, they’ve got even more that you have to pay for. But they do show an awful lot for free and is an excellent resource.

Per Axbom
And I mean, that’s always the disclaimer. Yeah, I mean, these are all good points. But it’s more ideas. These are things that you should look out for and test yourself. And so it’s ideas of what could possibly be going wrong.

James Royal-Lawson
Recommended listening. Now, I’ve already just mentioned “Target size”. Which, oh, it’s normally me that remembers the episode numbers, Per. So I can’t remember the episode number.

Per Axbom
245. Oh, “Target size!” Oh, no I’m sorry.

James Royal-Lawson
266. 245 is the one that actually pre-prepared as recommended episode.

Per Axbom
That was the one I was looking at the card I was reading.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, that’s “Cognitive bias” with David Dylan Thomas. So now we’ve got one recommended episode for each of the articles. 245 for the first article we talked about, and 266 for this one we’ve just talked about.

Per Axbom
And remember, if you want to get in on the action of watching us record a show in front of a live studio audience and you want to be in the audience, remember that we are doing the “Ambition, empower” track, and check out and search for “Ambition, Empower UX podcast”, look at that. And if you use the code, UXPODCAST you might get something off.

James Royal-Lawson
You will.

Per Axbom
Remember to keep moving!

James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.

[Music]

James Royal-Lawson
What do you get when multiplication, division, addition and substraction, don’t shower for a month?

Per Axbom
Oh my God. I don’t know James, what do you get when multiplication, addition, division and substraction, don’t shower for a month?

James Royal-Lawson
The odour of operations.

Per Axbom
Oh, my God.

James Royal-Lawson
It’s that too geeky?

Per Axbom
That is very geeky. Does everyone get that?

James Royal-Lawson
No.