Designing a great user experience requires a lot of attention to detail. As a user experience consultant I’m often picking apart all of the small ways in which an interface or experience falls short. So it’s refreshing to see interfaces that show thoughtful attention to detail. Here’s a quick example.
I was recently looking up the hours of operation for my local library. My initial expectation was that the library website would be poorly designed. And to be sure, I noticed a number of ways it could have been improved. But I was pleasantly surprised to see the following display of hours:
This table of hours is fairly clean and is relatively easy to read. What impressed me though was that the designer went to the trouble of adding a dynamic component that highlights the current day (it was Wednesday when I looked at the website). By highlighting the current day, they’re designing for a probable use case – a user coming to the website and wondering “What are the hours today?”. Even if the library webmaster simply grabbed this table from a code collection, someone along the line took the time to think through how people would want to use a table of hours. It’s nicely done and a good example of helping users find what they’re most likely to need.
Photo credit: kekremsi. Creative Commons licensed.
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