UX Superpowers Revealed: “UX Vision”

user-experience-vision-superpower

Also known as “The Squint Test”.

Step 1: Squint.
Step 2: Step back from your monitor.
Step 3: Ask questions:

What one item is more visible than everything else? What gets lost? What looks the most clickable? Are the “chunks” and overall structure of the page discernible? Can you still tell what the site does?

Painter John Singer Sargent used this technique in the 19th century:

He would walk away from his easel to look at his painting from a distance and step back to the easel for each brush stroke that he added…If the whole painting is done while you are only one foot away, the perspective of the painting will often be distorted.
— Improve Your Art By Studying the Disciplines of John Singer Sargent

Instead of squinting I stand ten feet away from the monitor and walk back and forth to see how things resolve at different distances.

Can’t bear to tear your butt out of your Aeron? Then shrink and blur:

web design squint test
Enlarge

Can you tell what websites those are? What they do? Where the headlines are and what’s clickable?

April 8, 2009 / Category: UX techniques

  • Really interesting exercise. I could identify 4 immediately and then once I looked again, 2 more. I know I've got one more but it's more due to guesswork than anything.

    Can you tell what they do if you didn't know from before? I don't really know if I could.

    I am not sure what you mean by "headlines". Are you referring to the titles / names of the websites? If so, I could make out 3 easily and 1 because I know about the site.

    Most clickable: Don't have a clue.

    This concept reminded me of when I used to get documents that I'd written reviewed by my manager. As soon as I was not directly in front of the screen but at the side, I'd invariably find a mistake that I'd missed. I guess "stepping back" can give you a different perspective. I'd never thought about applying it to evaluate websites though.
  • Humans need novelty. We become "blind" when we sit in the same place for too long. Getting up, moving around, changing perspective, all good no matter what your job.
  • Nice, this is a very old technique used from off-line publishers around the world...
  • The older I get the more I cast aside shiny tech tools in favor of pencils, paper, and even *taking a walk* to solve design problems.
  • Awesome, my site passes the squint test. I remember my art teacher telling us to do the same thing for our drawings as well. As we get old we several of us will be more and more blind so these considerations are important.

    Another change in web design that i am seeing is the base font size in our designs seems to be increasing more and more. I think this is largely due to the fact that most web designers are still pretty young on average but just now beginning to move into the next checkbox on customer surveys and such (next age bracket). Very interesting.

    Cheers,
    - Nick
  • Great point Nick. Web designers are getting older, and let's hope wiser. When the web was new it was easy to forget that we still needed whitespace, typography, and good layout in our excitement about a new medium.
  • I always wondered how well an ad with lots and lots of white space and simple message would preform in the middle of downtown Tokyo for example. Peace among the chaos.
  • Check out this post on the Trix cereal rabbit by BlogLess. I don't even like Trix, but in an aisle full of chaos I'd be drawn to it because it's an oasis of calm.
  • Thanks Andrew, good stuff.
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