What is UI/UX?

Definitely one blog post is not enough to explain everything regarding it. However, let’s make this an elevator pitch.

Talking of Elevators, let’s see few scenarios.

Check in to a huge hotel

Imagine you go to huge fancy hotel, at a very odd time. You are very tired and want to just go to your room and take well deserved rest.

Once you have gone through the check-in process, you are allocated your room. Obviously, no hotel rooms would be on the ground floor. And this is a hotel with many floors, you need to take an Elevator. Also, Since this is huge hotel with many floors, the lifts would also be very busy.

However, when you reach the lift lobby, there’s already lift already present on the Ground Floor. How? Only one lift, but it’s ok. What are the odds?

How ever, there is a feature in the lift. The moment you take the lift to your floor, another lift automatically moves down to the ground floor, without anyone using the lift.

This is User Experience. There is a high chance for you to have a lift always waiting for you, at the ground floor. You never need to know how it works, you did not do anything special or different. It’s just a lift/elevator. You have used elevators many times before, and you know how to use or call a lift, but things are extremely great and easy for you.

New user for lift

Now consider other scenario, some one who have not used Lift many time. (People from developing or under developed countries, this is not rare)

You are on 5th floor, and a lift is on Ground floor. And there’s an up/down button on the lift, what would this person do?

They Call the lift. They would press UP button to call the lift towards them. After repeated use, they realize you need to press the button for the direction you want to go.

What can we do different here for the new user?

  • Use button for destination floor numbers.

    • Good but costly.

  • Do not show which floor is the lift. So there’s no CALL action. The only thing the user should now press is “DIRECTION” where the person wants to move.

    • How would person know that the lift will take long time to reach or it is just few floors away and would reach soon.

    • This would lead to anxiety. Is the lift coming or not? Is the lift working or not working?

  • In order to remove anxiety, show the floor only when the lift is moving.

    • Still other issues listed above remains.

  • Write a note what the person has to do to explain and help them? e.g. Press up if you wan to go up, else down if you want to go down

    • Can we do this on all floors? For multi lingual country how many languages would you use? It is a very big sentence.

  • Let’s keep things as we have now.

    • Over a period of time user will get self trained, and things would get better.

All above are various UI Options. How you interact with the user. What information is shown to shown to them. What actions they are allowed to take and what feedback is given to them.