5 examples of brilliant UX design

Published in

UX Planet

5 min readOct 24, 2018

The foundation of great design is good design. And the foundation of good design is not-shitty design. You cannot have great design if your design is not good, and you cannot have good design if your design sucks. That is the message of the Bad UX Roundup.

If you ever wondered when I would stop talking about terrible design and start talking about awesome design, then you aren’t ready for this article. You should stop reading right here and go back to reading paeans to “delightful” UI animations.

Simply by learning to avoid pissing off or harming your users, you can become a better designer than most of the jabronies working for the 800-pound gorillas. For that reason, don’t discount the utility of learning about bad design. That said, for the truly worthy designers out there, the time has come to give you the tools to go from a great designer to a legendary one.

This series will describe and explain various examples of good UX design, and list some of the well-known UX principles these designs exemplify. These principles include:

Jakob Nielsen — Usability Heuristics

Susan Weinschenk’s — Psychological Usability Heuristics

Bruce Tognazzini’s — First Principles of Interaction Design

Guy Kawasaki’s — DICEE

Gmail alerts you that you need to give permission when e-mailing a Google Drive file.

Gmail lets you e-mail Google Drive files as attachments (or rather, links), and this creates the possibility that you will accidentally send a file to a recipient who does not have permission to view it, making you look like a space case — not a good look in business.

To avoid such embarrassment, Gmail will not only pop up an alert, but let you rectify the problem right in the alert window. As a bonus, all of the microcopy and UI is very clear.

If only they’d send some of the expert designers at Gmail over to the trainwreck that is Inbox.

Applied principles

JN — Error prevention
SW — people make mistakes
SW — People don’t want to work more than they have to
BT — Efficiency of the user

The Stan app alerts you when your connection automatically switches from Wi-Fi to cellular.

Streaming video has this tendency to guzzle data the way Dodge Challenger guzzles gasoline, except that streaming video is actually entertaining. It would sure suck if you were accidentally watching that Michael Bay movie marathon on your phone’s data plan rather than your broadband connection. It would certainly serve you right, both for watching Michael Bay, and also for watching movies on a phone.

Even so, Stan has got your back.

You might not have heard of Stan, but it is the biggest streaming video service in Australia. Its iOS app has a feature that will alert you if your internet connection switches from Wi-Fi to 3G or 4G so you don’t incur heinous mobile data charges.

The best part is that, if you don’t care about wireless charges and you don’t want to be interrupted, you can turn this feature off. Thanks to reader Nicky Silver for pointing this out.

Applied principles

JN — Visibility of system status
JN — Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
GK — Complete

While installing FreeFileSync, it shows you pictures of animals instead of ads.

Most applications show obnoxious ads while they install. FreeFileSync shows you pictures of animals. It’s a small touch, but it makes a difference. The fewer intrusions by third parties into your digital life, the better.

Applied principles

JN — Aesthetic and minimalist design
BT — Aesthetics
GK — Elegant

Siri will clarify what you mean by “tomorrow” before scheduling.

Every now and then Apple does something that makes me think they must still have someone with a functioning brain lurking around, sneaking into their giant cyber-donut building at night and inserting good UX into their products like some sort of digital elf. This is one example.

If you ask Siri to schedule something for “tomorrow” and it is past midnight but well before sunrise, it will ask whether you meant tomorrow as in “after I wake up” or “the calendar day after the current calendar day”. Hard to believe this is the same company that won’t even tell you how long until your alarm goes off so you don’t accidentally set it for the following evening.

Applied principles

JN — Error prevention
JN — Consistency and standards
GK — Deep

SmoothScroll will send you an e-mail before your subscription renews and even includes the ability to cancel.

In 2017, all of my GoDaddy hosted WordPress sites suddenly broke down after I installed a new instance of WordPress for a new site. I used GoDaddy’s built-in WordPress installer, so it was clearly their problem, but they required that I pay something like $80 for a package of 3 tech support calls to fix it. After I grudgingly did so, they took several attempts to actually fix the problem, and then never were able to fix the SEO damage caused. That would be bad enough, but then I discovered a few months later that they had been charging me $80 every month for what was supposed to be a single purchase. It took some serious threats to get them to reverse the charges.

SmoothScroll dispense with all of that nonsense. They will e-mail you well in advance of your renewal to let you know it’s coming up. Better still, the message even contains a link to cancel your subscription and instructions on how to do so. They must have hired Good Guy Greg.