UX Journal

 For good UX Design, I thought of my headphones that I use mostly at the gym or when I am doing yard work. They fold up for easy transport in their case to the gym. They connect to my phone via Bluetooth so I can listen to music and they have easy access buttons on the side to help with playback or answering phone calls so you don't have to even get out your phone. They are very convenient for the user and there really isn't a feature that I wish they had, the designers did a good job of thinking through the most user friendly functions to include.

  For an example of bad UX design, I thought of some grill tongs I have at home. It's not necessarily bad as it is not as useful as it could be. A lot of other tongs I have in the kitchen or have used, have some kind of way to lock them closed with one hand. This particular pair, you really need two hand to operate because you have to pull the end to lock it. It is frustrating and inconvenient to me, especially when grilling because I don't have counter space to set them on outside, and leaving them open and finding a place to set them isn't ideal. They would be better if they had some sort of locking device I could use with my thumb or something so I could operate them with one hand as the other is often holding food or other things when grilling.

 I remembered this site from when I tried to order pizza once. I clicked around for a while and was never actually able to figure out a way to place the order online so I didn't end up getting anything. To start, you click on the red button that says to order delivery. Then this screen comes up so I clicked to view restaurants even though I was on the site I wanted to order from to begin with. It's a little confusing because there are two styles of lists for all the restaurants in town but not all of them are included in each one. When you click on a restaurant, it pulls up the menu but the only option for ordering is that same red button, which, if you click it, pops up a window with the beginning blue screen again.  I couldn't find any way to get out of this endless loop and no real option for actually placing an order online. It's terrible UX design because it's confusing, there is no clear solution to the problem, and leads to frustration to the user.

  An example of good UX design I think it the TopGolf app. The home screen has news and offers but you can also see how long the wait time is or make a reservation if you want to go play. You can look up your past game scores if you want but there isn't a lot of unneeded features or other stuff in the app. It is easy to navigate and straightforward as to what information is offered.

 For an example of good UX design this week, I think the Planet Fitness app is great and very user-friendly. You can check-in when you get to the gym by just scanning your QR code. You can add your workouts to keep track of your weekly or monthly activities if you want. You can even watch some training videos right on the app if you need help or ideas for your workout. You can also see how busy the gym is before you go with the "crowd meter" feature which is nice.

 I was watching Netflix the other night and the automatic preview feature when you hover over a show really annoys me. Maybe if it didn't have sound that is way to loud it would be better. But you can't even just read about a show or movie without the preview starting to play and I don't want to watch the preview most times, I just want to read about it. I think either not having it play automatically or to not default to playing with sound would be better. It's hard to tell in the pictures but it's playing trailers while the show is "selected".

 This might not bother some people but it really bugs me. The fact that the Whatsapp app tells you a message was deleted I don't think is very user-friendly. It seems it should just actually delete the message without telling you it did so. I think this sort of "deletion" just leads to frustration, and some paranoia about what the user sent that they deleted, etc. I don't understand the reasoning behind the app letting everyone know a message was deleted.

 One of my favorite tools I got to help me reach my fitness goals was a scale that measures a lot of different health statistics. You can either use it as a normal scale, or, with the available app, you can save weigh-ins to the app to help track your progress. This is what the scale looks like and the sensors will display the weight on the screen like any normal scale. If you want to record your weigh-in to the app, then you just simply open the app while standing on the scale and it will sync after a couple seconds. This is an old weigh-in, but then the app will show the details from that weigh-in. It tracks everything from BMI, body fat %, bone density, etc. It might be more details than some people care about, but I love it. I think the more information I have, the better health decisions I can make. The whole data screen. You can also see your progress over time. You can see weekly, monthly, or yearly progress to see how you are doing over time. Everything from the setup to th...