Shining Chrome

desirabilityQuick-UX provides for the rapid, simple and quantifiable assessment of a product’s User Experience (UX). In answering the question of Desirability, “Do I want to use it?” the sub-category of Aesthetics is one of frequent discussion, especially in the latest wave of online products and how they handle content presentation and interaction.

Today, in the same spirit of Quick-UX, let’s take a quick look at an Internet product with an Aesthetic value of 2.

Example: Clean, Sharp, Pleasing and Enjoyable (value = 2)

01_chrome

A good example of the Aesthetic variable value of 2 can be seen in the newly released Chrome browser, from Google. Chrome provides a very minimalistic experience, incrementally revealing more information, on-demand and non-intrusively, right when the user needs it. Chrome also makes sound use of transitions to draw the user’s attention to new events and actions further increasing the pleasingly simplified experience of the product.

As the user types into the single textbox, the browser infers what information and actions the user will most likely want to take – presenting the decisions and options at an appropriate time.

02_chrome_incremental

Opening a new tab, the user is confronted with a simple transition, bringing subtle, non-disruptive, attention to the unique tab region as well as the location of the newly created tab.

03_chrome_animation

Even the “status bar” only appears when there is something to display (e.g. mousing-over a link).

04_chrome_status

Over the course of this series I am providing real-world examples of Aesthetics values…

Clean, Sharp, Pleasing, and Enjoyable (value 2)

Incomplete (value 1)

Overload (value 0)

Subscribe now (click here) to make sure you don’t miss any part of this series exploring the Desirability and Aesthetics of Quick-UX, the quick and easy method of generating quantifiable and comparable metrics representing the understanding of the overall User Experience of a product, as well as other insightful posts from The Product Guy.

Enjoy!

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy

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About Jeremy Horn

I have been involved in founding or managing a startup, non-stop, in one form or another, for the last 10 years. I have a background, as a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University in Computer Science and winner of numerous graphics arts awards that has allowed me to be a unifying force of form and function, business and technology, art and process. Another driving force in creating of this blog, one very personal to me, is that when I started out, a great deal of what I hope to pull together and share via the Product Guy Blog, I would have loved to have known and have had access to when I began my journey in the world of start-ups, their products, and venture capital, and hope many of you will embrace these experiences.

4 thoughts on “Shining Chrome

  1. Pingback: On the Aesthetics of Quick-UX « The Product Guy

  2. Pingback: Ripening FreshDirect « The Product Guy

  3. Pingback: Overgrown Amazon « The Product Guy

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