8 - When Good Design Goes Bad: Our Top UX Design Fails
Ever been frustrated by a poorly designed app or system?
You're not alone! In this episode, we dive deep into the world of user interfaces and user experiences.
We share stories and discuss the importance of considering more than just the happy path, all so we can highlight the crucial role of usability testing and user feedback.
Tune in to learn what NOT to do, and how good design can turn a frustrating experience into a satisfying one!
Transcript
When you mess up on an app, on some level, you're like, " I feel so dumb for just standing here and not being able to do this simple thing of paying for my parking."
[: [:We bring you practical, actionable advice to help you improve your UX design skills. You can find detailed show notes and more at www. everyonecan. design.
In this episode, Matt and I get together to complain to each other about bad UX design. It was a really fun episode to do, since we got to chat about all of our pet peeves. But hopefully these stories show you some of the things to look out for when you're designing experiences for other people too. If you have any bad UX experiences you want to share with us, please send us an email at info at everyonecan . design. And now, here's our conversation.
Hey there, Matt. How are you doing?
[: [:And a lot of times things go wrong, or the way that it's designed, it just gets under my skin. And I'm sure as a UI designer, you feel that way sometimes, too. You encounter something in the real world and you're like, "Ugh, why is it designed this way?" Right?
[:And so I tell that to anybody that I teach design to, of like, "Congratulations, you will now become insufferable to the rest of us as you..."
[:adds just....
[:Yeah. I mean, it's a new layer of insufferable. In a new way.
[:Uh, and it's a good point, right? There's, I think in terms of real world sort-of technology that I keep running into is parking machines. The pay parking, where you have to take your ticket and then before you go to your car, you have to pay for it.
And there's one in particular that I have to go to every so often, and it is just so confusing and they've obviously tried to improve it by adding more signage. So there's just more things to read and more arrows, and it just makes it worse. And I just don't understand why this is so bad.
[:That was always a fun example of like, "Yeah, when you've failed, here is what your user interface will look like." And I mean, let's just be honest, when you're doing hardware, it's really hard. Because if you don't get it right, and you haven't user tested it, which happens, I think, too often when you have hardware. People are just like, "Oh, well I'll just build the hardware. I know the hardware." And then they put it out in the real world, and then you realize, "Oh, no one knows how to use this thing."
[:So anyways. This is well, obviously you can tell one of my little pet topics, bad experiences with UI design. And one that happened to me recently was I went to buy an app, or download an app from the App Store.
And I don't even remember what it was. It was something very small. And the very first time that I opened it, I got the little popup that says, "Do you like this app? Would you like to rate it? Rate us five stars!"
[:Like, my finger was coming down to hit, "Okay, purchase this thing. I'm giving you my money." As I'm doing that, yeah, a thing popped up, but it's like, "Hey, would you like to rate us?" And I was like,
"What do you..."
[: [:Which one I think is more important to you? I would assume it's the money. How about you wait until I finish?"
[: [:That's a whole 'nother like fun, corporate political drama of like, "Hey, you know, what's a better way of changing the results you're getting on your NPS survey?" For those that don't know, Net Promoter Score, just horrible, I hate it. But like, you know, what's a way to game that? Asking people that have purchased something versus asking people that haven't.
Or asking later. So if someone's been using it for longer, it most likely means they actually like your thing. Versus if you ask it earlier, you might have more people that haven't signed off yet. There's always like, little things like that in how people game the statistics that they get back from their in-app surveys or whatever.
[: [: [:And I don't know how many times I have just missed submitting that thing. And that to me is just, you know, it's one of those things where you kind of need to use it yourself and realize, "Oh, it's so small."
And it's the type of thing that it's so innocuous, I'm not going to complain to the vet when I go there. It's kind of... it's a minor thing. But it's the type of thing where, if you make it too small, then it's hard for people to find, it's hard to get the information that you need. Which is what you were just talking about, in terms of ratings and feedback. And it's tough to get people to give you feedback.
So you want to make it as easy as possible for people to do that. The other thing that I also hate is when they send you the form, you find the little submit button, and you fill it all out, and then you send it back. And then when you get to the vet, it's clear that they haven't looked at the form.
[:There's a fun one that I, I've run into in the past few years as someone who used to use-- and I mean, I still do use it for personal stuff-- but used to use Mac Mail for the longest time. And Mac Mail has a thing where like, if you are sending an email, if you hit Command-Shift-D, it will send the email. So. So-- which is no-- which is good. Again, like instead of having to go and say like, "Send," you know, you learn your Mac shortcuts. I mean, you probably see where this is going.
So, Command-Shift-D is "Send Email." And which again, I got very used to doing. Okay. Type your email. I get to the end. Signed Matt, Command-Shift-D. Send. Here's a fun tip. Um, if you use Gmail, Command-Shift-D is, "Delete Draft." " " " Now here's the extra fun of that, right? Not only like, you're like, okay, well that's just, okay, deletes the draft. But you know what the experience is like when you send an email in Gmail? It just goes off the page and you don't see it. You know what the experience is like when you delete a draft? It just goes off the page and you don't see it. The exact same experience.
[: [:Uh, yeah. That's my, that's my fun one.
[:So I use my thumb on the Command key and my other finger on the L and it was like, "Ah," like every time. Like, "Ugh!" No, I just have trained myself out of like-- "Just do not reach across your body to touch that other side of the key, like ever. Just don't ever do it."
[:That's my theme of the two that I picked here. And the first one is, it's not Apple Music itself. It's a specific app on the phone if you are an artist and you have music on Apple Music, which I do. And if you have, you know, music on there, you want to get stats, you want to see if people are listening. My band just launched a new EP. I want to see if people are listening and that kind of stuff.
[: [:So it's not that there's that many people using it, and it's only artists. It has a lot of the same similar things as the web app. But like, one of my biggest problems with it is that on the main page, the first half of the screen you see is the picture of your band.
And you're like, "I know my band. I don't need to see my face, take up half of the screen. It's my band." Like...
[: [: [: [:So if it's, four weeks is the timeframe, it says you know, you've had a hundred or 200 or 300 whatever plays. Right? But then, it has these little tiny bar chart things at the bottom to show you like, okay, how many per day? But you can't click into it. You can't actually see what any of those numbers are.
It's just a bunch ran-- there's no. There's no on the side. There's no scale on the side. It's just this-- it's just this small little thing and says like, well, here's the total number you've had over this timeframe. And then you see the ups and downs.
[: [: [: [: [:And of course, nowhere on the screen can you actually see where you can delete the plan, right? So they were kind of hiding it from you to begin with. And so not only that, but there's nothing that ,that gives you any clues about how you might be able to cancel it.
[: [:So then I'm like, "Okay, fine." So then I had to update my password, right? And then I was finally able to edit the billing and payment to cancel my Adobe stock plan. But it didn't end there. It kept-- screen after screen-- every time I would say "No, thank you," it kept offering me different versions of what I could do.
And I guess it works, I suppose? I guess there's enough people who are like, "Oh, maybe I want this other thing." But it was like, three times or four times of saying, "No, I don't want this. No, I don't." And I, every time I clicked "No," I kept getting slightly more irritated, you know? And, I have seen other chit-chat from other people online complaining about Adobe's UX for canceling plans.
And I think this could be considered a dark pattern maybe we'll have another episode about dark patterns. In effect, it's a pattern that is preventing the user from doing something that they want to do. And so, normally we try to make it as easy as possible. And this pattern is actually actively trying to stop you from doing the thing that you're trying to get done. Which is really-- I guess it's not immoral-- but you could say it is somewhat nefarious.
[:'Cause some of them can be very gray, but in another example that certain places have started to call out is the pattern of like, "Only one left in stock!" Like, "Limited supply!" Let me put a timer on to say how long this sale is going for.
And, those kind of things are right on that edge of like, it doesn't make you feel good about it in a certain way. You don't want to feel like you are pressuring someone into doing something that they don't want to do.
[:It's just something that they put on there. And, uh, countdowns, I can kind of understand like, if your sale is going on for a certain amount of time, you know, you want to create some urgency, you want to promote people to buy at a certain time when sales are not great. And so you're using sort of some amount of limitation, time limitation to encourage that.
But I get your point. Pressuring the user into making a decision so you can make more money-- it does seem unfair. There's so much information coming at us as consumers and so many decisions that we need to make, that all these little things can erode the amount of control we have over our decision-making and we just say, "Okay, fine, whatever." But it does feel shady when you're trying to tell them exactly what you want, and they're trying to argue you out of it. It just feels very aggressive. But I think also, you know, people don't like that. So your company reputation can take a hit if you're known for that kind of hard sell.
[:And it's funny though, because it was actually better than I expected. It still wasn't good. Still wasn't fun-- still took a lot longer. I needed to call someone and talk to them. And still have to like, you know, listen to their stuff. I tried to do my best to be ready for it. You know, they want to keep me and they're going to sell me on all these things to like keep me around.
But I already had my new internet service set up. So all I had to say to them was just like, "I have already had a person come to my house and set up a new service, and I've already paid them. So do you think I'm going to keep paying you, though I've already started paying someone else?" That was the logic I told myself of how I'm going to get through this as quickly as I could. I, I think it worked a little bit, but not a ton.
[:Haha.
I was like, "I'm not buying it. Because there's no way that you would spend money on a sales call to me if it was truly going to lower the amount of money that you were going to get from me at the end of the day."
I was replacing these products with these other products. I'm like, "I'm not buying it." But I mean, we've veered off into something other than UI at point, just sort of consumer things. But just to say that there's a lot of business that's transacted without necessarily talking to somebody.
You know, we're talking about things that are automated and the UI is doing the speaking, in effect, for the company, and it is representing the company to the public that's interacting with it. So just a side note is to be careful about what you do say and how you do structure these experiences, because people will get a message from it.
And you have to ask yourself, "Is that the message that I want to be sending when people are interacting with this? Is it representing my company in a way that does credit to it? Or is it frustrating them and making my company look bad?
[:As an example, if we're thinking of Service Design, right? I think I've talked about Service Design before on here, where you're thinking not just of the consumer or the person that's out there, the customer, but you're also thinking of the person that's doing the work.
There's someone that has to be on the phone taking that call and dealing with the person that's trying to cancel, or you know, do something. And in many cases the system that's in front of them is stopping them from even getting to what they need to do, right? Like, their system might not let them even hit "Cancel this person's subscription," until they've done a number of steps. So, not only are we doing a dark pattern for you, the consumer, we're doing it for the person that is at--
Really, they probably just wanted to do the cancel for you and get it over with. They don't care that you stay or not. They want you to cancel too. But they have hoops that they have to jump through in their own systems. And someone designed and built those systems, just as much as they've designed anything else, you know?
[:And sometimes, like you said, it's a UI, but sometimes it's a script, sometimes it's just a set of hurdles or whatever-- the gates that have to be passed in order to achieve a certain goal, right?
I think there's a whole area of transportation, you know, car rentals, paying for parking, all that kind of stuff, that is particularly bad. We have a parking app here in Toronto, which they redesigned, and I thought the old design was better than what they have now. It was a little bit easier. Now, I don't recall exactly what the steps were, but now it feels kind of strange and it's not clear.
But I think you have an experience about a parking app too...
[:But then where the execution fails is in unhappy paths, which is a lot of what your design has to be is like, "Okay, when something goes off the rails, how do I deal with this?" Or like, "When something's a little bit off and how do I deal with errors and other things?" And so what happened was, they had redesigned their app and I don't think I'd used it for a while.
Maybe, I think it was pandemic stuff, right? You know, I wasn't going anywhere. I wasn't parking for a while. I started using it again and they had redesigned the app and they made it super clean and everything is white and you're making different steps along the way. It's very nice, right?
It's looking very nice and clean. And then it would let me get all the way to like, "All right, now, make a payment," right? And I would get to make a payment and it would be like, "Your card's expired." And I was like, you knew my card was expired...
[: [:First, I can't now because it's so clean. Everything's so clean, and I'm in a flow. I'm in a wizard flow. I can't get to the place to edit my card information. I gotta back all the way out to go back to the main screen and then I gotta go into the thing and I go in and then I like, okay, "Let me edit this, 'cause I don't want to have to reinput my card, I just have to change the expiration date." It won't let me change the expiration date.
[: [:And then it's like, "Nope, the Internet's not going to work, and we're not going to let this go through."
And I'm like, "Ugh...."
[: [: [: [:And when you save things for the end, versus when you know them as an application, it's not a great experience. You know, the closer you get to the end of something and then you stopping and being like, "Nope, things are wrong." And now I have to like, redo everything. That's, it's horrible. I hate it.
[:So, I think in the situation with your parking app, you're really talking about feedback. So there's a lack of feedback when something is going wrong and it isn't giving you the instructions really, when you need them. And then the tolerance part, which is when there's an error, when something goes wrong, it's not smoothly handling it and allowing you to proceed to the next step.
It's kind of stopping, it's putting up a roadblock and just kind of ending and then not really thinking about the consequences of the fact that you're partway through a process, and then this problem might happen, and then now what, right?
That's why we need to do usability testing because you don't necessarily encounter those things when you're just building it out and you're focused on the happy path and you don't necessarily encounter all of the problems.
You have to kind of really experiment and try to break it, essentially. But sometimes you need more data in order to do that, sometimes you need the actual users to try it out. Because I find when I'm building something, I get on a certain mental track, right?
A certain idea I have of how it's supposed to work. And that blinds you to other possible ways that it could be done. And that's just a facet of humans. That's just how we work. And so you need those other people to have that reality check and to see, "Oh, does this actually work in all of the circumstances? And have I handled all of the different cases?" Because you may or you may not have, right?.
[:And you're like, "Yeah, but could we think about this more holistically? Instead of in these individual silos, of someone building a flow and being like, "Okay, well I'm building the flow of someone making a reservation or making a parking payment or whatever." And then they're like, "All right, now's the time that I'm showing them the card and payment. And so that's the time that I do it."
That being probably a different team than the team that works on, "How do I store my payments, and what is that experience like for me to store my payments?" When you have these different teams working on different aspects and not connecting together, that's in many cases where design needs to interject and say, "Hey, we know this information way earlier than whenever we think we're showing it to them. Is there another way we can handle that, and let them know at a point where they can easily fix it, versus at a point in which we are now making it very difficult for them to fix it?"
And actually, oddly enough, I've been dealing with this in my own work these days. That feedback element of stuff of like, "When do people need to know the stuff that they need to know, and how can we give them fast feedback loops on stuff to get them through it?" Because the longer you wait, the harder it is.
[:And so you either think that they just disregarded the first time you put it in, or that information never got through to where it supposed to go. Maybe they asked for it for one particular purpose, but then if you went to the trouble of asking for it, don't throw it away and then make me redo this whole thing again.
Because for me, I've already done this. I've already done what you asked me to do. That also brings me to another point, which is, it doesn't just make people frustrated when they follow your instructions and then it still turns out wrong. It also makes them feel stupid,
When you mess up on an app on some level, you're like, " I feel so dumb for just standing here and not being able to do this simple thing of paying for my parking." And even though you might not internalize that, it's still a negative feeling. And you wanna be careful about how you give that feedback, and make sure that you also phrase things nicely.
Not like, "Oh, you idiot, your credit card's expired!" And I don't think anybody would really say that. But when you have an impersonal message of, you know, "Error 603, Expiration Date Missing," versus, " Hey Matt, you need to put in your expiration date," or whatever, you know, a nicer message.
That makes a difference too, as we were saying before, it's speaking for you, right? So what is that conversation that the app is having with the users? You try to try and make that as positive as possible and when there are problems, handle them as gracefully as possible. And I think that's really important to hand off the information, if you have that information. Don't just make the user do it all again if you don't have to. Use it, you've got it, right?
[:And then also like, taking some of those principles that you said, and turning them into rules. Or standards. These are standards that we're going to now enforce in the experiences we put together.
And some of those standards will be things like, "Never ask the person for something they've already told us," you know? And standards around how you handle transfers, and what options you give and to that point of like, if someone wants to talk to a person, just let 'em talk to a person. If that's what they want, if that's what they need, fine. Don't then get in the way of it, create dark pattern. Again, more dark patterns of like, stopping people from the thing they want, because it is detrimental to our business. We don't have enough people to answer the phone, so we're going to try our hardest to keep people off of the phone and keep them in IVR from talking to an actual person.
If someone wants to talk to a person, just let 'em talk to a person. Give them the agency. So yeah, I've been lucky enough to work with some amazing people who have tried to set some really good design standards around that kind of work. Because again, that can be designed, just like anything else.
[:And so I was stuck in this kind of loop of, he didn't have a driver's license and he didn't have any other photo id. But anyway, I went to the passport office and I had realized, since the last time I was there many years ago, they had really improved that experience. It used to be before, that you would go with your papers and you would sit and you would wait. You take a number, and if it's busy, there's a lot of people and you wait, sometimes an hour or more, and then you'd get to the front and then they would take your application.
What they decided to do was actually have a line that screened whether or not you had the correct documents for the thing that you were there for. And so it was a much shorter line. And I think they had obviously been in a situation where someone had waited for one or two hours, only to get to the agent, and they would tell them, "Oh, you mean you don't have your photo id? You have to go back and you have to come back another day."
So they had improved that to the point where, okay, now they have a set of people whose only job it is to make sure you have all the correct stuff, and to help you figure out what you do need if you don't have the correct stuff.
And that made a huge difference. And I have to say, they did eventually help me get that passport in record time. This was, you know, pre covid. And actually that reminds me of one last thing, which, I don't know if you heard about this, but Canada just issued a redesigned passport design. And the government did a little presentation of the new passport design, and they made a giant version of it, and they put it on an easel, and of course these pictures hit the internet. And I was just reading an article earlier that said, "You know, that's going to be a little hard to put in my pocket, don't think?" People had like, a big portfolio, so, yeah. Anyway, so people love to dunk on the passport office.
[:It's easy to dunk on those kind of things, whenever there's a big showing of something, right? But I do love that of like, "All right, yeah. Let's assume that this is actually the size of the passport.
[: [: [: [: [: [: [:Thank you so much for listening to the first season of Everyone Can Design. We've had so much fun making this, and are so grateful to all of you for the wonderful feedback so far. Just to let you know, we'll be taking a break for a bit, while Matt and I get busy cooking up another batch of episodes for you. In the meantime, to get in touch with us, please email us at info at everyone.
can.design. Maybe you have a question you want us to answer, or you have some examples of bad design you want to commiserate with us about. Whatever it is, just let us know.
Again, it's info at everyone. can.design. Talk to you again soon.
