Feedback from Users is Valuable

by Tom Brown
March 7, 2012

I have been chasing good UX/UI for months now, and I have realized two things. 1. Good UX/UI is not easily developed, and 2. I am not a natural at good UX/UI design. I have started looking to others to help guide the UX decisions, and my best insight so far has come from watching people use livebytransit and getting candid feedback.

This morning I had an hour to kill, so I found some wifi at the Starbucks at Diversey/Southport and fired up the laptop to knock one or two items off the laundry list of things that need to be done to my website.  After about 30 minutes I had a UX decision to make, so I leaned over to the woman sitting next to me and asked if she would be a test subject on my website, and she happily said yes.  She started out confused and right away asked some questions that revealed the source of the confusion:  too many choices.  To be fair, people have been saying this to me for weeks, including my wife, the UX class at Code Academy, and my friends, so I have known this is a problem.  But there is something about watching a person struggle with your site to really drive a point home, not to mention my test subject was particularly candid and had some ideas on potential fixes.

One of her comments was to hide all of the search options until a user identifies how they want to conduct their search. She said, once someone clicks one of the search choices, then the other options should pop up.  This is exactly what my wife had said about the home page, and although my data set is only two people, I convinced myself it needed to happen, and I pushed it live earlier this evening.  So now there are only 4 options on the home page.  Search by Map, Neighborhood, City, or School.  After a user clicks one, the other choices pop open (thank you, javascript) including a choice to live near a train station of course.  Please go try it out, and hit 'contact me' to send me an email if you have any thoughts, good or bad (especially bad).

One UX problem I still struggle with is the Map Search, which is powerful but I think still confusing for users.  Here is an example of a powerful search:  if a user zooms out to say, all of the northern suburbs, and chooses the 'within 1/2 mile of a metra station' option.....the results display only properties within 1/2 mile of any Metra Station in all of the northern suburbs.  Not even your realtor could do this effectively! 

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