I like observing people, and listening to them talk about themselves. So, naturally, I love observing user testing sessions. These are some unrelated (to the user test) notes from some recent sessions.
Like listening to audio books because can listen while doing other stuff… washing, walking, cooking, driving.
I’m emotionally blocked on the idea of listening to books. R loves them. But these are exactly the times when I listen to podcasts or, more recently, radio — walking, gardening, cooking, driving.
Have Bluetooth headphones but forget to keep charging them, so mostly use wired headphones.
Wonder if other heavy headphone users face this too. I’ve heard people saying they prefer wired headphones for audio quality, or Bluetooth unreliability reasons. This feels like a much stronger behavioural reason to me.
Love their Pixel phone – fits in the pocket, fantastic camera, clean, no crap apps. But miss lock screen player notification for Spotify app where they could pause, play and rewind (their previous Samsung phone had this).
This is likely a case of the default privacy settings on Pixel not allowing notification content to be visible on lock screen. A point for the privacy vs convenience debate, and the power of defaults.
Prefer browser to apps for news reading. Love the option to open lots of links from home screen in background tabs and then read them. With apps, can only read one at a time, and then FOMO kicks in – whether something more interesting/relevant down the page will disappear by the time they go back to the home screen.
I’m the same. My wife uses the Amazon app. I use the browser. I can search for something on Amazon, then open all interesting results in individual tabs, read them all, switching between them to compare, before deciding which one to buy.
The Pixel doesn’t have a back button, only a back gesture where you swipe from the right to go back. This interferes with swiping between photos. I accidentally close and go back when I need to go to the next photo.
I love gesture navigation. All my devices have it. I also agree with them. I do often, accidentally, close instead of swiping next. Interference with swipe actions on lists and cards is the same. The edge swipe for navigation drawer is just… dead.
It’s also interesting that they don’t know that we can swipe from either edge, left or right, to go back. Gestures are powerful once we learn them, but really hard to discover.
When looking at photos, videos start playing automatically. This happens everywhere these days. On photos, on Instagram, Twitter… can’t quietly check photos.
Attention/advertisement metric driven features spoiling UX. And yes, I hate this too.