Good UX takes using the app

This morn­ing I made a great advance in the user expe­ri­ence on Alias TTS. I’ve been work­ing on this app for about six weeks and every day I have anoth­er lit­tle insight on how to make it bet­ter. My self-imposed dead­line for a V1 is basi­cal­ly now, or actu­al­ly tomor­row, because this app is being sub­mit­ted for a hackathon, which is due on Mon­day, August 3^rd.

But every time I think it’s done and ready for the judges’ review, I have anoth­er insight. That insight is built out of my actu­al use of the app. I think hav­ing built a lot of web apps def­i­nite­ly helps with cre­at­ing a usable web app expe­ri­ence, but there’s no sub­sti­tute for get­ting in and actu­al­ly using the app. (This is often called ​“dog­food­ing” your app.)

I want to describe today’s UX update for you as an exam­ple of what makes me so hap­py with this app. I think the eas­i­est way for you to expe­ri­ence it is to look at the video I’ve added to this post. Let me describe what’s going on. The arti­cle you’re see­ing is made up of 147 sep­a­rate small chunks of audio that are stitched togeth­er.

And the user of the app, in this case that would be me, will review the final prod­uct by play­ing the con­cate­nat­ed ver­sion of the audio at the top of the screen. The UX update I’ve made today ties the scroll posi­tion with the point in the audio play­back that is going on in the play­back area that is pinned to the top of the screen.

I find this incred­i­bly help­ful for very long pieces of audio because oth­er­wise you don’t know which chunk to make a cor­rec­tion in as you’re lis­ten­ing to the ful­ly con­cate­nat­ed piece of audio. The oth­er added bonus for this abil­i­ty to tie togeth­er the scroll posi­tion with the point in the audio play­back is that it also works now in reverse. That is a small play but­ton next to the chunk num­ber.

You can find any indi­vid­ual chunk on the page and then press this small play but­ton at the top and it will jump the play­head in the con­cate­nat­ed audio to the cor­rect point. It’s just a nice UX and now that I see it in action, I can’t believe it took me this long to think of it.

But that’s why you have to use your app to under­stand how it actu­al­ly func­tions.