UX Song of the month: No Surprises

Many thanks to Bruce Davidson for this suggestion. Always nice to meet another Radiohead fan.

Now, being a Radiohead song, there’s nothing peppy here. The song’s protagonist is clearly in some distress, singing about “a job that slowly kills you” and “a handshake of carbon monoxide.” The video(this will open in a new window) features Thom Yorke in a space helmet that slowly fills with water – Obviously, it’s all about usability.

Usability? Of course. Consider the chorus:

No alarms and no surprises please.

The poor wee soul in the song just wants to be free of the surprises that poorly designed websites can bring.

(Also of any audio that plays automatically when a page loads, but we’ve largely solved that problem in the 18 years since this song was released.)

One of the main things we look for in user testing is that the content of a site matches users’ expectations. One area where this point is particularly relevant is search: do the search results users see correspond to what they are looking for? Computer users may perform dozens of searches for information every day, so those expectations can be pretty well established. We probe for what users expect to see, and then observe whether the site delivers. No surprises, please.

We’d love to hear your suggestions for our monthly entry to the UX playlist. Contact us to give us your thoughts and song suggestions or let us know on Twitter with @uservision or by using #UVUXplaylist.