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A very big design challenge for news organizations is performing user tests on users who represent a large portion of their readers who reside outside the urban cores. jbenton/1032628701282881537?s=19
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To be blunt DC and NYC obsessives who love Axios don't interact with webpages in the same ways that even people in the suburbs of those cities do.
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Having designed and run user tests myself I can pretty much guarantee that the demographics represented by someone who can take a mid day break to participate in city-based user tests have a significant differentiation in style of use.
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There are a while bunch of bad design patterns that come out of web-based organizations not considering demographic--especially class--factors in their user testing.
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*whole
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A fun example of this: the more web-savvy a user the less they care about the carousel UX. That's not to say that the heavy-web-users liked it, they just didn't notice it enough to object to it! And because they knew the pattern, they interacted with it.
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But when I tested carousels against some less heavy web users in the suburbs they were *actively frustrated* by the user experience. This is just one, relatively small test, but large scale studies seem to prove it out. shouldiuseacarousel.com/
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This is just a minor difference in the audiences I was testing on. There are way larger demographic differences that never get tested on but absolutely have an impact.
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Just one more example of how the classism common in news organizations is actively harmful to their business.