A few days ago, I searched for people that worked in the marketing industry via Linkedin. This kind of search is one of the most effective and efficient ways to meet some new faces for business needs. When I did so, I found a tricky UX issue that caught my eye. Despite it just a small feedback-problem, I highly recommend you to learn about it. I think it can be insightful to anyone, especially if you are a UX/UI Designer or a Mobile developer.
So What Is The Problem? Let's find it together. On Linkedin, when you search for people, you can filter the results by their industry. When you do that, you will see on the filter screen all the commonly-used industries that you may want to filter by, and you can also add new industry into that list. Before we discuss the primary problem, I'll say that, in my opinion, this page is far from being perfect in UX terms. However, there is one specific problem that I liked the most and worth discussion. When I choose industry (i.e., "Marketing & Advertising"), the feedback is a blue V icon that appears on the right side of the selected industry. So what I want you to take a minute and think by yourself, what is the big deal with that feedback? What is the big problem here? * note: it's important to mention that there is no touch-start-feedback (during the pressing on the item nothing happens). This lack of touch-start-feedback by itself is a UX problem, but I am looking for something else.
So yes, we might agree that the V feedback isn't perfect (maybe too small and thin, and perhaps touch-start-feedback was useful here). However, none of that is a UX problem but UX optimizations. The problem caused because of two main factors: the V positioning and the fact that there is nothing else happen elsewhere except for the appearance of the V. To understand the problem, we must deeply understand the user. I think this sentence is enough to describe what UX is all about, but in this case, we got to have a new level of understanding. Not only understand his feeling and desire but also take into account his physical action. God gave us ten hand-fingers, but for handling our smartphone, most of us use only 4 of them. The most commonly used by far is the right-thumb, then the left thumb and then the right-index-finger and the left-index-finger.
This fact is important here because if we think about it, a lot of users (if not most of them) will choose the wanted industry using their right-thumb. Now, consider the position of the V and the fact that nothing else happens on the screen. The result is that the user will be very confused to see nothing happen - that's because his thumb probably will hide the V while it is touching the screen.
How to fix this?
The challenge in this problem is to find and understand it. After doing so, the fix is straightforward - add another feedback besides the V icon.
The Importance of Feedback
UX is a complex and variant world, rich in lots of topics such as Information Architecture, Labeling, Colors, Animations, and even System Performance is part of the User Experience world. But none of those critical as the feedback is.
The feedback is one of the most crucial and fundamental topics when talking about UX because it is so intuitive for us to get feedback after an action.
If we thought about it, feedbacks are everywhere- you press a button and the lights are turned on, you clap your hands and hear a noise, you stroke a dog and feel his soft fur.
In UX terms, there are three main types of feedbacks: 1) Visual feedbacks such as color-changing, elements-resizing, and loading-spinner. 2) Voice feedback, such as clicking-sound. 3) Physical feedbacks, such as haptics and vibrations. Good feedback usually uses more than one technique; for example, the iOS keyboard feedback for typing. When you do so, the typed-letter block will resize, and change its color during the pressing (visual feedback). Also, it plays a typing noise (voice feedback) and haptic (physical feedback). This feedback helps us work faster, improve our memory muscles, and, most importantly, make us feel comfortable with the action we did.
On the other hand, lousy feedback can cause a lot of confusion and even increase anxiety. It can also affect and cause a mistaken use in the feature or the app itself; if nothing changes from the user's point of view, he might try to do the same action again (which cancels the previous one).
What can we learn? This issue is tough to monitor before publishing, especially when it's part of a giant website with hundreds of screens and features. It's normal to make mistakes like this, but the big question is, how can we prevent this in our next project? And the answer is clear, usability-testing; I bet that all you need is few users to try the feature for monitoring this issue. That is one of the cases that is much easier to find it when using than when planning.