SouthWiRED 2014

True Detective was spoiled for me after the finale was inadvertently served in place of the opening episode. Listeners experienced completely different emotions when the lyrics “Would you hold my hand?” were sung in different songs. Context is vital and creating great UX takes context into account. We’ll take a look at what these stories mean to UX and how to use context in a way that creates great experiences for our users. 

Goal: We’ll talk about the importance of context in the UX design.

There are three types of context we’ll look at and examine stories from each to see how they affect our users and their experience. 
1.  Personal. I’m a diehard Atlanta sports fan and My ESPN profile helps me access information about my favorite teams quickly. However, their homepage also serves up an enormous amount of content, much of it about stories and teams that I don’t follow or care about. We’ll look at the purpose of pages and how we can use them to serve up deeply personal content when it’s possible and relevant to do so. 
2.  Placement. How upset would you be if you inadvertently watched the finale of True Detective before you watched any of the other episodes? A UX/UI issue caused that very thing. If Amazon required you to become a member before even letting you look at any products would you be a customer today? Some sites are doing that very thing. We’ll look at these issues of placement both within a page and within a site to discover their pitfalls and easy methods of addressing them. 
3. Prose. Platform  9 3/4 presented a conundrum for Harry Potter. He had no idea what would be on the other side and if it was worth him possibly running into a wall. That’s exactly what labels like “See More”, “Click Here”, and “Watch” do to users by providing no information about what they’re diving into. What would you do if a friend handed you a Black Pistol Fire album? What if they then told you that it’s a recommendation based on your Black Keys fandom? Clarity in our labeling can do so much to set up our users expectations and explain the reason for an interface element.  

This talk will go through these three types of context, provide stories and examples of each, and provide attendees with solutions on how to solve for these types of context within their UX.