User Experience Design “Fails”

This classic example of a hand-washing sink, although it looks normal from the outside, is in fact a IxD fail. It violates at least 2 of the 5 principles: consistency and perceivability. Shown by the red and blue dots, this sink has the hot water on the right side and the cold water on the left. This is an example of a behavioral inconsistency because the norm is to have hot water on the left and cold water on the right. Because the average user is expecting this, it is entirely possible to get burnt or simply just frustrated when you are attempting to use cold water to wash your hands. This unfortunate sink is also an example of a hard design to perceive correctly because it goes against the user’s learned expectation and therefore will be unpleasantly surprised by this interaction. This sink could be fixed with proper plumbing considering the only real thing wrong with it is that the hot and cold water need to be on the correct side.

A digital example of a bad user experience is this Judiciary committee website (shown on left). This one is a little bit less obvious because the overall design is nice looking — the icons have hover states, the image is good quality, the logo is pretty etc. However, if you take a look at the navigation, it is a series of social media icons, a search icon, and a pancake menu. Looking at this, it is impossible to tell what exactly the user can do or explore with this navigation. Considering the fact that this website has quite a large area to work with, there is no reason for there to be a pancake menu here. This would an example of bad visibility according to Norman’s ideology because the user is required to click the pancake menu in order to view what kind of information they can find with this navigation. As I collapse this browser window (image below), I notice that the page is in fact responsive, and yet not much changes with the design. The search icon and the words that are part of the logo drop off the page. This is a bad use of space which can go along with another of Norman’s principles, mapping. There is clearly a lot of leftover space, especially in the browser version, which can be used to improve the poor visibility of the navigation. Another issue to be addressed in this one is the fact I got a 404 error page when I clicked on the link to the old version of this website. This was a little confusing and took me a second to figure out what went wrong and that I had to click the logo to be linked back from this error page to the homepage, violating rule 5 of Schneiderman’s 8 rules which is to prevent errors like this from occurring at all.
