Bad UX Roundup: ᔕTu¶iD or 𝖊𝖛𝖎𝖑?
Coming out of retirement to take on the Clown World of UX
Wait, what? Who is this guy??
Yeah. I’m back. Sort of. Maybe. Not really.
For those of you who don’t know, I used to publish roasts of bad UX design on here. Guy Kawasaki tweeted at least two of my articles. Then Medium changed their algorithm so that, instead of getting 1000 unique views within a week of publication, I couldn’t get 1000 people to view my article in a year.
For those of you who do know, I’ve got enough material to carry us through to at least the new year. Rejoice.
Why now? Because the world of UX is on fire, that’s why. Just as it seemed that our profession had received legitimacy in the tech industry, just as we’d carved out a niche doing what it was we were good at, what would serve a valid purpose for both society and commerce, everything got turned on its head.
The UX Clown World has arrived. It is manifesting at all levels of the profession. UX leaders are getting laid off disproportionately. Companies are making almost no effort to create elite IC tracks. Tough economic times are being used as a thin pretext to de-specialize UX designers by reimposing graphic design duties on them. The term “UI/UX designer” is as inescapable as “rizz” in late 2023, and just as grating. UX is being treated as a second-class citizen, and the quislings in our field have the nerve to tell us “you aren’t making enough of a case for UX to the executives”. More than ever, people are leaving UX, either to retire early or to flee to other professions.
The world needs UX more than ever because, as technology comes to control every last formerly sacred domain of human existence, a failure to control that technology could literally mean the end of our species. And yet, companies show contempt for the discipline that makes technology controllable. As I’ve said before, if we don’t control technology, it will control us, and the end result will be catastrophic.
Toxic positivity has weakened the UX field. Any sort of criticism of those involved in product design or product delivery is usually met with a chorus of screeching (usually with a… political… overtone). Moreover, there is a galling learned helplessness amongst those in the field, claiming there is nothing they can do, and that everyone else has made it impossible to design good products. In short, the field refuses to take responsibility for itself.
The UX community needs to stop whimpering and start raising hell. I see plenty of LinkedIn and blog posts about the current situation but little mention of who caused it. There’s lots of weasel talk about “incentives” or “process” or “business”, but no mention that, ultimately, SOMEONE is making these decisions. That someone might be a UX designer, or a UX director, a product manager, or an executive, but that is all abstracted into these ineffable concepts that prevent any concrete action from being taken. That needs to change.
Ultimately, the entire product community needs to stop being afraid to name names. We need a call-out culture in which those who dare to call themselves product designers or managers or executives but, through their personal failings, deliver bad products are directed, bluntly, to answer for their failure, to explain themselves. The assumption should be that, if you have not taken adequate responsibility for your own failure to prize human agency over corporate profit, you will not be welcome at UX/design/product gatherings, or to online communities. In short, we need to take out the trash.
While I plan to explore this cultural shift in a later writing, I promised you a Bad UX Roundup today, and a Bad UX Roundup you will get. The theme of today’s roundup is a reminder of the human-level causes of bad UX, as opposed to the wishy-washy non-explanations that we’re all sick of. The question I ask today is how much of bad product design is the result of bad intentions, and how much is merely bad execution? Is it stupid, or is it evil? It’s not always easy to tell and, in truth, it may be both. For long-time BUXRU readers, that might seem obvious. But for the rest of you, you’re in for a treat.
Sound good? Let’s go.
Amazon’s does not give you an “other” option when flagging a problem with your delivery.
I encountered this gem when I had a not-so-rare issue with delivery. If memory serves, the clinically insane delivery driver left the package on my BACK porch.
Now, to understand how absolutely unjustifiable this move was, consider that, at the time, the only way to get to my back porch was to squeeze through a narrow bottleneck that required you to walk sideways. It was awkward enough with free hands, let alone holding a package. That side of my house was practically screaming “don’t go this way”, but this koala-brained halfwit decided they’d take the extra time out of their day to do just that, with no idea if I’d even see my package. There has never been any issue of theft with my packages, and it was not a particularly valuable item, so there was no possible explanation other than a double-digit IQ.
When I went to Amazon to report the bad delivery, I noticed that my issue was not listed. That’s not surprising given how improbable it is. But that’s why God created the “Other” checkbox, for situations just like this. And yet, as you can see below, there was no “Other” option.
Yes, that’s right. That delivery driver is not the only flywit employee at Amazon. Can you imagine making a form that does not include an “Other” option?
But, speaking of other options, I considered an even darker possibility. Part of me wonders if this is not the result of a long chain of oversight in which each participant failed to note the lack of an obvious feature mandated by every design standard imaginable. Instead, what if it was an intentional choice?
It would not shock me to find out that some Karen in charge decided that they only accepted a certain type of issue and did not want to even hear about anything else. This would be in line with a certain strain of busybodyism rampant in Big Tech in which they only can imagine their products being used in a certain way and any other use case is either unthinkable or just unacceptable. Remember “you’re holding it wrong”.
ᴠᴇʀᴅɪᴄᴛ 𝖊𝖛𝖎𝖑 ⛧
LinkedIn groups that have approval gates do not indicate it on the post button.
Groups on LinkedIn have their own timelines to which group members can post their content the way they do to the LinkedIn feed at large. If you post to LinkedIn, you probably know the all-important trick for increased visibility: don’t put a URL in your post. LinkedIn’s numbnuts algorithm will bury your post and very few people will see it. The way around this is to put the link in the comments. But, LinkedIn groups complicate this method.
There is an option for group admins where they can gate member posts so they must be approved before being shown on the group’s timeline. This obviously necessitates a change in approach for those who use the link-in-comments method. That would be fine, except that there is no way of knowing what the group’s policy is until you attempt posting. Look at this.
The above image is the posting dialogue for a group with approval gating. The “Post” button is the exact same as in a group without, however. So I might make a post saying “Link in comments” only to find out after hitting “Post” that I cannot put the link in the comments. Maybe the lack of link will lead to the post being rejected. This could have been avoided by changing “Post” to “Submit” for groups with approval gating.
Given that LinkedIn hires the bottom of the barrel for pretty much everything (especially content moderators and UX designers, it seems), this could easily be an oversight. But, I do wonder if they did this specifically to make life that much harder for people who want to get around their asinine algorithm.
ᴠᴇʀᴅɪᴄᴛ
ᔕTu¶iD 💩
The YouTube homepage doesn’t show whom you’re subscribed to
Anyone who regularly uses YouTube probably has accumulated a great number of subscriptions, probably in the hundreds if not more. With so many subscriptions, it is difficult to keep track of which channels you’re subscribed to. On the homepage, YouTube shows content from subscribed channels and non-subscribed channels. There is no way to tell which is which without either (A) already knowing or (B) going to the video.
Users rely on their subscriptions as one of many strategies to tame the overgrowth of content on YouTube, the majority of which is of low quality. Subscription to a channel is an indicator of that channel’s quality in the eyes of the user and could be employed when scanning the feed for videos to watch. Not only does this allow a user to get to desired content more quickly, but a prominent interface distinction between subscribed and non-subscribed content could quiet the visual noise that bombards the user and reduce their overall cognitive load.
When I took the above screenshot, you were able to hover the mouse over a video and it would show expanded information about the video, but even that expanded information did not include whether you were subscribed to the channel. As of this writing, the quick view is no longer available, but when it was, even with the expanded space to show subscription status (thus eliminating it as an excuse), YouTube refused to show you that vital information.
It is hard to believe, with all the people involved in the design of the YouTube homepage, that this is a omission of carelessness. There is a clear benefit to showing subscription status that would be known to at least one or more people who could raise the issue, and there are no spatial constraints preventing that information from being included, even without the quick view mode. That points strongly toward an intentional omission as a dark pattern.
YouTube has a history of attacking both users and creators with bad UX for their own benefit. Susan Wojcicki, the unmissed former CEO of YouTube infamously removed the dislike count from videos despite it being a useful indicator of a poor-quality video. The move was clearly intended to benefit the promulgators of abhorrent content such as megacorporations and government entities (while spammers hitched a ride with them). That’s only the tip of the iceberg of YouTube’s intentional UX blunders, and entirely in line with their modus operandi.
I would not be surprised in the least if YouTube omitted subscription status on the homepage specifically to force users to rely on their “algorithm” to dictate viewing habits as opposed to their own personal judgement. They’ve pulled this crap before and they’ll keep pulling it until people start voting with their feet.
Verdict: 𝕰𝖛𝖎𝖑 ⛧
Facebook removed the ability to suggest friends
Here’s a feature that is so old that Z-kiddies and TikTok users probably don’t even remember it. It was already long gone when I added it to my list of UX fails back in 2018.
It’s as simple as this: you could introduce two of your friends to each other by “suggesting” them. There was no need for a mutual chat thread which creates the awkwardness of seeing the two new acquaintances off to their own two-way thread, or individually messaging each, creating a minor prisoner’s dilemma of conversation initiation. Instead, the Suggest Friends feature created a low-pressure icebreaker for two people to begin having a conversation while offering an out for either of them.
The feature offered such a nuanced understanding of human psychology that I suspect that Zuckerberg didn’t come up with the idea. And then one day it disappeared, never to come back. In its place was the algorithmic “Suggested Friends” feature that uses who-knows-what BS data collected without the knowledge of users to take the place of human recommendations.
This is just one more example of Big Tech trying to take away people’s autonomy and replace it with an algorithm that nobody asked for, one programmed by someone that doesn’t know the first thing about how human beings interact with one another. This seems to be an even mix of basic incompetence with some of Silicon Valley’s trademark bungling paternalism that’s so pervasive that I don’t even think they’re aware of it anymore.
ᴠᴇʀᴅɪᴄᴛ ᔕTu¶iD 💩
Apple’s support number is spelled out rather than given in numerical format
It’s almost 2024 and Apple are still failing to live up to their reputation. If you want to call their phone support line, you’ll have to take the extra step of converting the (8-character…) alphabetic phone number 1–800-MY-IPHONE to numeric inputs.
Alphabetic phone numbers only ever made sense in the pre-smartphone era when people did not carry the entire white pages, yellow pages, and an address book in their pocket and needed mnemonic devices to remember a number that they didn’t dial frequently. In an age when you only have to remember a phone number for a matter of seconds and are usually transcribing it from a screen, they are completely useless. They are all the more useless in this situation considering that the iPhone does not let you enter in alphabetic characters when dialing a phone number, nor does it display the entered digits as their alphabetical equivalent.
This utterly unnecessary breach of usability protocol could be a dark pattern from Apple to discourage people from calling their line, however the amount of calls this would reduce compared to the increased anger that the customer support reps would face as a result just doesn’t square.
No, I this one can be chalked up to the kind of snowflakey pompousness that only Apple has truly mastered. If there’s one reputation Apple does consistently earn, it’s that one.
ᴠᴇʀᴅɪᴄᴛ ᔕTu¶iD 💩
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