Keep a journal. paper or digital, whatever.

Assignment

Every day, write down 1 positive and 1 negative UX “thing” that you noticed. Include a photo or screenshot if you can We will do this for the first 3 weeks of the class, sharing our “things” every friday.

Examples

Positive

• I start a podcast on my phone, then shove my phone into my bag. Later, I need to pause it. I do this from my watch, and it just works.
• My car’s cupholder is situated that I never need to look down to grab it and grab a drink
• When I tie my shoes, and I pull on the end of the laces and they all tighten evenly; it is visually satisfying.
• When I get into bed, I can mumble “siri, turn off all the lights”, and then all the lights turn off.
• The ‘readwise’ app has support for paginated reading, and with some tricks, I can turn pages with the volume buttons. I find this a more pleasurable way to read long-form articles on mobile devices.
• The Kindle oasis (and boox page) let me move the device from one hand to the other (moving the page turn buttons to the other side), and it just auto-rotates the screen.
• In blender, right-click+drag will let me sever noodles (node wires). I do not need to be precise, and this aligns with how I naturally arrange groups of nodes to often be useful and satisfying to sever a handful of noodles at once.
• In DrRacket (Code IDE), hovering over any symbol will point a faint light to where that symbol was defined.
• The Canon 5D DSLR camera body has it’s grip and center of balance just-so that it can comfortably dangle on my fingertips without fear of me dropping it.
• Firefox account lets me “send tab to device”. I often use this instead of bookmarks, letting me send work-related things to my office computer, and forget about them until the next work day.

Negative

• Sometimes when I play or pause on spotify, the button updates and it looks like it is playing, but the music does not start. I stare dumbly at the device telling me it’s playing, as it connects to the network, and I start checking my speakers.
• I do not know when to get to the movie theater before a movie. I do not know whenn the movie will start, and I want to use the restroom as late as possibe, because the movie is long. Do I go now and miss the start, or will another trailer play? Has the movie started yet?
• Every time I switch from my code editor to my IDE, it has to recompile. It takes a long time, and I have to do it before entering play mode.
• I do not remember which side of the theater my assigned seat is closer towards, so I only guess at which side will disrupt the fewest people.
• I do not have a convenient way to save where in a PDF I was. Wherever I start reading, I have to continue reading on that device.
• The sleep on my kitchen scale is just a bit too short
• The apple vision pro uses gaze to help determine which button you are pressing, but often places semantically related but functionally distinct buttons adjacent to each other.
• I am looking for a file on my iPhone. It has been saved to my iPhone, I think. where is it.
• When I satisfy a 2FA request with microsoft authenticator, the faceID will trigger when the app opens, then immediately again when it confirms the request. It makes me feel like it is less secure, and just security theater.
• Spotify’s three-button menu next to a song forces you to scroll in order to “go to album”. I almost always want to “go to album”, and find it insulting that spotify places ‘Start a Jam’, ‘Share’, and ‘Hide’ (whatever that does) above it.
• Being a windows operating system user has become an exercise in opting out.