Top-5 User Experience Fails

Every interface has an energy budget –there is no way around that. Some interfaces cheap out on the design side and save all the work for the user, others absorb that effort on the design side ironing out wrinkles on behalf of the user.

But here’s the thing: Making something complex seem simple requires a heavy pair of usability goggles. Usability goggles don’t come off easily -and once on, you get the joy of seeing UX pitfalls everywhere. Here are my Top 5…

1) Unsafe Exposure
Features that are poorly prioritized, or when appropriate, not tucked away, can result in frustrating mistakes. Unstratified tools that vary greatly in function and importance provide no guiding visual hierarchy. This results in unintended actions, initially, followed by reduced user confidence, ending with user abandonment.

I think of this classic on every flight.

These buttons for coffee and nuclear first strike are unfortunate peers.

Unsafe exposure naturally goes hand in hand with there being too many tools in the first place. This leads us to the big fuzzy monster of…

2) Feature Creep
This application has to do…everything. The law of diminishing returns tells us that every new feature or doodad that is added dilutes the overall value of the others. What’s more, there is an all too easy line to cross whereby each new doodad actually reduces the overall value. Too much stuff!

Looks cool, at the cost of any utility.

Good luck!

3) The Red Herring
Don’t disguise a design element as another type of design element. Likewise, don’t camouflage important or interactive things as otherwise. This sounds pretty obscure but is pretty common.

That octane label is not the button, to everyone's surprise.

Red herrings will almost always result in a funny last minute “fix”, which is the 4th type of User Experience pitfall…

4) The Bolt-On
Thinking through the entire workflow of a design, considering carefully the audience, and testing thoroughly will, I assure you, lead to cost savings and reduced headaches down the road. Bolt-ons are expensive, and they usually fail. In many cases they serve only to hilariously highlight what the original problem was.

Who likes touching a restroom exit handle? Impromptu wastebaskets man posts next to bathroom doors all over the world.

This drive-through's bolt on was erected hastily to counter the sidewalk that deposits customers directly, and blindly, into departing cars.

Bolt-ons are symptoms of a failure to plan and, usually, the dangerous assumption that the folks you are helping are defuses. Which leads us to the 5th and most sinister User Experience pitfall…

5) User Contempt
Sometimes, in an effort to make something so simple that everyone can (and must) make sense of it, the result is something so verbose, regimented, and tedious that nobody can. Contempt, or at least the blanket assumption of dimwittedness, of users is a horrible trap. It’s easy to slip into this mode, but don’t let condescension (which is really fear) rule you. People are smart; designs that treat them like imbeciles are not.

@JohnNelsonIDV