Nick Wade

 

This morning I was fortunate enough to be part of the team / the audience for a read-out from Human Experience Lab on A/B testing we've performed on the last 2 major versions of the software that I manage day-to-day, and lo and behold: more than one user (almost half of the test group actually) was confused by the use of carets ( ► and ▼) as the visual icon for expandable tree nodes. Several suggested a variant the following: "if you used Windows-like + and – symbols it would have become obvious straight away". 

 

Interesting. My take on the point here is that we have to remain 100% conscious at all time of the audience we are designing for, and ensure that our designs fit them best. And then test it. Improve. Iterate. It works. 

 

So, as to our carets, what should we do? There's a couple of considerations in play for our answer: 1) I work for a large company with a product roadmap that affects 16,000 companies and 30M users. We can't change things on the fly, so a change would take time. Specifically, the "next major release at the earliest" kind of time. 2) Windows 7 has moved to - yup, you guessed it, caret, or ► and ▼ expanders. By the time we make a change the Windows users will be moving organically.

So whilst we could technically change that back to + and – in about 6 months, we're actually on the front-end of a coming change already. This means we expect this particular test score to change when we run it again this time next year, even though we change nothing (well, that's not true, we'll likely make the carets more obvious).

 

Design for your audience (not you), test, improve, iterate. The first part really means you must know your audience first.