Exploring Poor Interaction Design
Interaction design or IxD is essential to every day life. The user experience of an object dictates how easily and efficiently the object can serve its purpose. There are many examples of both analog and digital IxD that work flawlessly and do exactly what they’re supposed to, but that isn’t what I am going to talk about. Let’s take a look at some interfaces where IxD fails.
My first example comes from my own lovely dorm room. Aside from being a half hour walk from all of my classes, I love my room. It’s spacious, air-conditioned, and has a bathroom: everything a college student takes for granted at his or her parent’s house. It was everything I imagined and more, but then I actually used the bathroom. I stepped into the stall with the toilet and tried to shut the door, and realized I had to press my body against the back wall if I was going to successfully close it.

You’re probably thinking, “that doesn’t sound awful, it’s just a big door.” Well, it gets worse. The stall door barely clears the toilet itself, just adding to the already infuriating process of closing it comfortably.

And the worst part is that if your leg happens to be too far forward when you’re closing the door, the bottom corner won’t hesitate to slice right into your calf.

Three out of the six of my suite-mates have bled because of that stupid, poorly designed door. According to Nielsen and Norman’s 10 Usability Heuristics, it fails flexibility and efficiency of use for sure. There is nothing efficient about using that stall door if every time I have to use the bathroom, it turns into an obstacle course. This interface has also done a poor job at preventing errors since the bottom of the door doubles as a weapon. It may not seem like a traditional error, but the scar on my leg says otherwise. On a more nit-picky note, it doesn’t really follow the consistency principle as you would think a small stall space would have a door that opens out instead of inside. Overall, this stall door’s IxD fails spectacularly, but I’ll just have to deal with it for the remainder of the year.
Now, let’s switch over to technology. There’s a website I’ve used only once in my entire life for a very specific purpose, but the UX is so unusable I need to share it. Scribble Maps is an online map labeler that turns a 15 minute project into an hour long excursion.

I was using the site to easily label locations on a map for my anthropology class since a part of the final exam was knowing exactly where archaeological digs took place. Sounds simple, right? I’ll just drop some pins on a blank map and label them. Nope. I tried to place my first pin down on the map, and right off the bat I’m given around a million options of pins I can put down, all varying in shapes and sizes.

The simplicity that I would have preferred and that Norman talks about in his Minimalist heuristic is completely cast out the window. Once I choose one of the horrible options I’m given, then my mouse turns into the pin and I can click and place it. I can name it, then I hit save. That’s fairly normal, but what if I put it in the wrong place. My mouse is still a pin, so instead of going to grab it and move it, I’m placing another pin down in the wrong spot. So now I have to go all the way back to the mouse tool and move it. But wait, what if I don’t need it anymore? Select it and hit delete on my keyboard? Of course not! I have to find the conveniently unlabeled eraser tool.

Are you kidding me! I feel like I’m working in MS Paint. These features easily fail the consistency principle, since what I would normally to do to delete something isn’t what I’m doing here. It also is not efficient to use at all since I have to keep switching mouse controls. It definitely doesn’t pair up with the real world because of the unlabeled and just plain silly symbols and icons. And finally, the process of doing practically everything on this online service is so tedious for such a simple concept. And here’s the icing on the cake. I was halfway through my map and had another obligation and just quit my browser not even thinking about it. BOOM! All my progress obliterated. You’d think maybe an online service would have an auto-save function, maybe I’m getting picky. But there wasn’t even a manual save function. That’s a monumental error if I’ve ever encountered one.