Bad usability. I spent the past two days running usability tests on websites that sell financial products like life cover, funeral policies, and annuities. The target market is lower-income users who access the Internet at least once a day on a desktop at home or work, or on their phones. They are, for the most part, tech literate, and very used to finding their way around the Internet.
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Bad usability. Believe it or not, new electronic systems with poorly designed software are to blame for a substantial decline in Ford Motor Company’s quality ratings. According to J. D. Power & Associates, Ford’s reputation for quality has been declined rapidly in the last 2 years.
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Bad usability. How did all those horrific designs in Myspace come about? Two words: Unconscious Incompetence. Unconscious incompetence is the first of the Four Stages of Competence. In this stage, someone doesn’t realize just how much they don’t know. It’s a blissful state and, frankly a place that is wonderful.
Bad usability. JavaScript carousels are a nice way to show off multiple products or highlights in the same area of the page. But there is one thing about the badly made ones that annoys me: they have no way to pause the thing. Here’s an example of a product carousel used on the Penguin website: Clicking on a section of the carousel will bring that section into focus, but the carousel is still in rotation mode so it will switch to the next one in seconds.
Bad usability. Aaron Swartz in a great piece called Steve Jobs and the Founder’s Pain: Something that’s perfect just feels much, much better than something that’s almost right. When I’m doing something myself, I can just sit there and work at it until it’s exactly right. It’s embarrassing to launch a product with a bug in it! It physically hurts when I realize that’s what I’ve done.
Bad usability. Deception is entwined with life on this planet. Insects deceive, animals deceive, and of course, we human beings use deception to manipulate, control, and profit from each other. It’s no surprise, then, that deception appears in web user interfaces; what is surprising is how little we talk about it.
Bad usability. In the 30+ years I’ve been working in designing online experiences, I’ve met a lot of folks. Good folks, interested in creating really great products, services, and designs. I’ve seen my share of really great designs. However, I’ve also seen many bad designs.
Bad usability. "Find hole below? How far below? Is this a hole? No, that's not it. That doesn't feel like a hole at all! I'll just start sticking the plug anywhere.
Bad usability. The Economist reports that Boeing is moving away its 'call flight-attendant' button from the reading light in the new version of its 737 passenger jet, because passengers kept - unintentionally and to their great embarrassment - calling flight attendants instead of switching on the reading light. Boeing calls this step 'an innovation that is as radical as it is obvious'.
Bad usability. We all know about the importance of web site usability. There are countless evangelists, guidelines, books, blogs, research papers and whatnot emphasizing the importance and need to develop usable web sites. Yet, very often we still encounter web sites that frustrate us when we try to do even the most basic of tasks. The web is full of them and Vincent Flanders does a very nice job in bringing them together on his site Web Pages that Suck.
Bad usability. When the planet Alderaan is destroyed in A New Hope, Obi-Wan senses “a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced”. Now, like another Obi-Wan Kenobi, Harry Brignull has felt a disturbance in the Force and upon realizing that Dark Patters pose a threat to the whole UX community, gives a heads-up to all of us through his Dark Patterns wiki.
Bad usability. Ford Motor Company has just convincingly demonstrated that being an excellent industrial manufacturer doesn’t automatically mean that you are an excellent maker of digital technology. Despite Ford’s improvements in manufacturing quality, their overall ratings fell precipitously this year due solely to the poor software interaction on their dashboards.
Bad usability. South African movie site Ster Kinekor just relaunched their web site to much fanfare. Much of the discussion I’ve seen on Twitter about the new site is about their decision to remain completely reliant on Flash. I agree with all the technology arguments against Flash, but I want to take a slightly different approach here and talk about Flash as an enabler of bad user experience.
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Bad usability. Using a CAPTCHA is a way of announcing to the world that you’ve got a spam problem, that you don’t know how to deal with it, and that you’ve decided to offload the frustration of the problem onto your user-base. As statements go, that’s pretty lame. If you ran a high street store, you wouldn’t force your customers to mop the floor before you serve them, on account of the people who came in earlier with muddy boots.
Bad usability. By Jim Ross Published: February 7, 2011 “If we point out obvious usability problems and provide reasonable solutions for them, why doesn’t someone fix them?” How many times has this happened to you? You’ve finished presenting the results of your usability testing, heuristic evaluation, or other user research activity, feeling great about the positive impact your recommendations will have on a product’s user experience.
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Bad usability. By Jeremy Olson Avoidable design and usability mistakes that can shatter hopes of success on the App Store.
Bad usability. “Form follows function” is a widely accepted — albeit controversial — principle that most designers in a variety of disciplines have adopted since its inception at the turn of the 20th century. On the web, we commonly refer to function as usability which is the ease of use and navigation of a website in order to achieve user’s goals.
Bad usability. It’s great to see that the darkpatterns. org wiki has taken on a life of it’s own. Back in October, a community member submitted Audible. com to darkpatterns.
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Bad usability. Harry Brignull's Dark Patterns is a pattern library dedicated to user interfaces that have been designed to trick users into doing things they wouldn’t otherwise have done. He describes the site he created to address this issue: Dark Patterns .
Bad usability. Image credit: Paul McDonald Normally we think of bad design as consisting of laziness, mistakes, or school-boy errors. We refer to these sorts of design patterns as Antipatterns. However, there’s another kind of bad design pattern, one that’s been crafted with great attention to detail, and a solid understanding of human psychology, to trick users into do things they wouldn’t otherwise have done.
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