Weekly Topics - Week 9: IT, Risks, and Ergonomics

This week’s topic is „IT, risks and ergonomics”. I’m going to write about two Usability cases: One really bad one (a failure) and a good example.

Usability measures how user-friendly a product is. Usability refers to the extent to which a product, system, or service can be used by specific users in a specific application context to achieve specific goals effectively, efficiently, and satisfactorily [1]. User Experience (UX) extends the usability term with aesthetic and emotional features. It measures the joy that the user gets by using the product.

The Juicero juicer

source: [2]

First, I’ll write about a bad UX example: The Juicero juicer. This UX fail is so bad, that the company closed its doors in 2017. The website Careerfoundry [2] claims The Juicero has been lauded by multiple UX platforms and experts as one of the best examples of bad UX design we’ve seen in the last few years—so much so that it closed its doors in 2017 out of shame “. The UX mistake from the juicer is, that you need a solid Wi-Fi connection in order to use the juicer. You also need to download the app on your phone if you want to make juice. Indeed, you need an app to use your juice maker. This juicer maker is just extremely bad in practicality and functionality.

“Having a long list of ‘conditions’ e.g., strong Wi-Fi, a certain type of phone, an app, etc. just to get the product to function means there are too many hoops to jump through for the product to be worth the users’ time.”[2]

Of course, no one wanted to make juicing more complicated than it should be and the product failed.

Duolingo

source: [3]

Now let’s move to a good example of User Experience and Usability: The Duolingo app. Duolingo is an app, that helps people to learn a new language and to practice it in an easy way every day. It is free (though there are some “pro” options) and extremely popular. It became even more popular during the pandemic. But why is it such a popular learning app? The secret is, that Duolingo breaks topics into small pieces and simplifies the entire learning process [3]. Duolingo also works heavily with visual hierarchy, which means that they ask only one question at a time. The screen isn’t overloaded at any times. This helps immensely with reducing the cognitive load. I can also confirm that this app works really well, since I have used it in the past as well.


[1] https://www.usability.de/usability-user-experience.html

[2] https://careerfoundry.com/en/blog/ux-design/10-classic-ux-design-fails/

[3] https://www.justinmind.com/ux-design/examples

 

 

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