UX should talk the Jargon

So when do you believe someone is a Doctor? or Engineer or Plumber? When he talks like the one.

For those who are aspiring to start a UX career : Remember that, in user experience, it is very important you speak like a User Experience Designer / Interaction Designer / Usability / Research guy. Use jargons effectively, but make sure you dont go overboard. Common people may not understand certain technical jargons. So speak in a language that is understood by your audience.

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It is best advised that you keep practicing to use UX jargons (make sure you know what they are, and their true meaning) in your speech meetings, general conversation and documents. This helps your audience to gain confidence in you. Don't be so humble, you need the jargons to tell others who you are. And use them judiciously, and meaningfully.

All new GMail - 30 second review

Let me say - GMail has finally stepped up in right direction. With the new user interface that has clean lines, more white space and big buttons clear shows the impact of iPhone design bug has bitten Gmail too. Some of the obvious things I see here are :

- iPhone style - Clear, Simple and Precise
- White space rules now - no more cluttered, industrial look
- Big buttons for touch friendly devices
- Finally the "Less is more" theory adopted by Google.

I like it! Very soon all web apps from all vendors will move into this direction. The more-white'ish-spacious-big buttoned design trend.

Missing Delete Option in the footer - Yahoo Mail

It is a bit weird. Or did Yahoo's Usability ignored it on some oversight? It is the good old Delete button thats missing. I've been using this all new Yahoo mail for quite sometime and I am really impressed with it. The performance is good, if not awesome. The interface is clean, understandable and tabbed emails are a nice approach to modern user-behaviour.

Tab Limit
One of the major issues I find is - I cannot open more tabs, once the tabs occupy all the horizontal space. That's seriously restricting to me. User like me who receives more than 30 or 50 emails a day will try to open as much as they can. I am disappointed.

Group Delete - Missing transport in the footer

Next comes, the bulk Delete. I usually do the housekeeping once in a  while. I do not use Filters as others. Now, the new Yahoo mail misses the whole transport of buttons in the Pagination's footer. Come on guys, ppl from old school still have the habit of using buttons in the footer. After I do a "Select all" and de-select important ones till the bottom, I have to scroll up to top, and click the delete button. Ugh!


Even Gmail has got it right. They have the buttons in top and bottom, still support SHIFT+CLICK pattern for bulk select/de-select. But the all new Yahoo mail does not have them now.

- UX Assassin

the ebay user experience - Confirm Item Receipt

I regularly buy items from eBay. And for every item shipped, I receive a Confirm Item Receipt email after a week or two. And I am not happy about the interaction further. The email has a link, which opens up the ebay login screen. Once logged in, the User interface speaks too many things.  Just to confirm whether the item was received or not, why the system displays the confirmation in the last bottom end row?

The two radio buttons to confirm the item receipt are shown at the extreme bottom of the user interface, while the current status is shown on the top. In the middle there is the Shipping details, and leaving feedback options. Come on.. I am supposed to confirm item receipt. I know whether I received that item or not. Who will store all those shipping tracking nos for two weeks?


If I were about to redesign it... this would be my first iteration :

How about showing the radio buttons in the "CURRENT STATUS" column itself? would have made my life easy. Notice the green and orange boxes in the UI mock below.

Let's make things simple and easy. If there is a second iteration, I'd hide the shipping and item receipt and reveal them when clicking a link there.