Good Examples of Bad UX

As much as examples of how to do something well, examples of how not to do things are just as valuable. Something about learning from your mistakes or not repeating history or something…

Stock photos look like stock photos. Well made stock photos have a time and place but should never be used in place of genuine photographs of your product or team. Ideally you could hire a photographer. But even a few well lit and clearly shot photos of your people or items will make a considerable difference.

Take this into consideration — if you are setting up a new website for your company or product, don’t automatically assume you need a blog. If you don’t have a plan in place for keeping the blog updated, then it’s not worth the cost upfront to add it in and it’s certainly not worth the price you’ll pay when it’s stale content works against your credibility.

*the image is actually Joan Collins from television’s smash hit Dynasty but… you get the point.

UI (User Interface) & UX (User Experience) are related but are not the same. Consider Craigslist. This is an example of Craigslist in 2007 and 2017. Not much has changed. Craigslist doesn’t need to be pretty to provide the best user experience for what it is. The UI is simple and straightforward and does exactly what it needs to do; facilitate the endless barrage of emails asking questions to answers you addressed in the post.

This goes wrong when people go all in on designing a beautiful looking interface for their site or app only for people to find it confusing or useless. Like bodybuilders who build their muscles for show only to fall short when it comes to extended strength endurance tests, UI might look nice but alone it won’t do the heavy lifting. Develop your UX to make your product useful. Develop your UI to make your product fun.

The point being made in this video is that by overthinking the UX of your product will likely put you in a place where you suffer from one of the previous items on this list. Get the initial product completed, put it out there for people to use, gather data, update your product based on the data and repeat the process. Don’t worry about the small stuff. Put the product in your users hands and they’ll help you discover what the small stuff is as well as what the truly important stuff is.

Popups seem like a really good idea. They usually aren’t. Very rarely are they used well or for a site that even demands our attention beyond a single visit. Furthermore, how often have you been on your phone and one paragraph into enjoying the story about Gemini, the two headed cat, a popup ruins it all. You can’t close it. You can’t move it out of the way. You just don’t get to find out what happens to Gemini. The user experience was so bad that it was negated. The visitor couldn’t experience your site.

They could only experience your popup to sign up for your newsletter. Which they don’t want to do because their experience using your site was ruined.

Like any site or app element, popups can have a time and place. Perhaps only display them for returning visitors. Ensure that the popup doesn’t destroy the user experience. And if a user has already seen the popup, don’t keep showing it.

These are only guidelines. Sometimes the rules are broken effectively but these violations are ones we see often and are easy to fix. The best fix though is to start your process with UX in mind. From the very first customer discovery meeting, UX should be in the mind of every person on the team because UX, to some extent, touches each person on the team. Then, the end user touches the UX. This metaphor is quickly going off the rails so we’ll leave it at that.

Thoughts?

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