Steal Design From Best, but Test It!

If you are designing a common feature it is always a good idea to take Google's solution as a starting point. But you still need to test it! Even Google can get things wrong. Here is an example how.

Our UX company is working for an e-sports company. One of their service is a software that enables individual game server owners to show ads to their gamers and get money for each impression.

An important feature was to show some time dependent data (number of impressions) and enable users to check the data within various time periods.

UX Research and redesign

Then we user tested the designs. Why don't you try it?! Here is the test task:

How would you check the traffic of this month? Where would you click?

Well, you probably failed, just as all users on the user tests failed on this. They all thought that the " Day | Week | Month " buttons will take them to the desired result. But in fact these buttons are designed to set the frequency of sampling of the graph:

Users misunderstand these buttons in Google Analytics just as badly as in our design. After this research finding we decided to add a little tweak that may help: an explanation text. ...user tests revealed pretty fast that this didn't solve the problem. Why? Because people won't read the explanation text if they think they get the buttons right. They have no reason to read.

At this point it is important to note that these buttons implement a secondary feature for our users. This fact together with the other fact that they were misleading led us to the decision to dismiss this feature altogether, for a lighter and simpler user experience.

Here is the final design without the misleading buttons.

Conclusion

If you are designing a common feature it is always a good idea to take Google (or other unikrn) as a starting point. But you still need to test it!

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