#uxthoughts

The look of a happy UX designer during a field trip where we got to observe our products in action - at a hospital! 🥰

In a world that is not predictable, improvisation and evolution are more than a luxury: they are a necessity. The challenge of design is not a matter of getting rid of the emergent, but rather of making it an opportunity for more creative and more sustainable solutions. User-centered and participatory design approaches have focused primarily on activities taking place at design time. These approaches have not given enough emphasis and they have provided few mechanisms to support systems as living entities that can evolve over time. Metadesign is a unique design approach concerned with opening up solution spaces rather than complete solutions (hence the prefix meta-), and aimed at creating social and technical infrastructures in which new forms of collaborative design can take place. This approach extends the traditional notion of design beyond the original development of a system to include co-adaptive processes between users and systems that enable the users to act as designers in personally meaningful activities and be creative. 

The question comes up again and again - when is the appropriate time to use sliders in an application? Sliders are an interactive element which can be useful in certain situations. There are three main considerations.

Dynamic Results

One reason to use sliders is to interact with a set of results. If the results can’t be updated right away when a slider is changed, sliders are not a good option. An exception is when the slider is acting as more of a button bar with a small range of numbers.

Limited Range

Sliders don’t work well for large or very specific ranges. It isn’t as easy to select a specific number on a slider compared to entering a number into a field. Similarly, if a slider has a large range, the user won’t be able to choose a number as readily. Text fields aren’t as appealing as sliders but they’re more functional depending on what you’re filtering.  

Interactivity 

Is the data even something that the user wants to experiment with? Or do they have a specific number in mind? For the latter, they just want to type a number into a field and be done. They don’t want to mess around with a slider to get the exact figure that they want.

Kayak is a popular example of a website that uses sliders in their search filters. They use sliders for the departure time which is something that most people are flexible on. People are less flexible on how much they want to spend on a house which is probably why Trulia and Zillow don’t use sliders to choose your max price.