Bad UX Week #1

Hello everyone,

We all talk about good experiences and take inspiration from great product design. But I think real learning happens from bad experiences or failed designs. We keep experiencing them every now and then. Let’s learn from them so that we don’t repeat those mistakes in our work and actually make the world a better place. I decided to document them from my own life in this new publication:

Please follow the publication to stay tuned and receive updates on new posts. While this publication doesn’t necessarily discuss solutions, followers can feel free to comment their thoughts and potential solutions or alternatives to the design problems mentioned.

My week would end on Saturdays. So, every Saturday, there will be a post that lists all the bad experiences I have had in the last 7 days including digital products, physical products, services and more.

Here goes Week #1…

  1. Sticker on Apple:

Most Apples have a sticker pasted on them. I have to remove the sticker and eat the fruit. Removing this sticker is not a good experience. Firstly, a lot of times, I fail to remove just the sticker without disturbing the fruit. So, I don’t get a nice and happy feeling while eating. And the worst part — The feeling of left-over glue on the Apple going into my mouth is hard to digest.

2. Amazon Packaging:

While Amazon Packaging is great in terms of rigidity, safety & logistics perspective, it wasn’t a pleasant experience for me while opening the packaging for one of my orders this week. I got my power bank delivered to my office address. I wanted to open and see if it is working properly or not. It is very difficult to open the Amazon Packaging if you don’t have any tools at your disposal. It was insanely difficult to tear open the thick and strong tape and to add to that, it smelled horrible. I got some glue stuck onto my hands. The sound that came made everyone around me turn their eyes onto my desk — which I hated the most. I don’t want people to know what I’m upto. While the packaging re-established my confidence that Amazon’s Delivery won’t screw up the items, I think Amazon should also consider the last step in the customer experience — Customer opening the packaging to see their order, and make it put a smile on my face.

3. Facebook’s Misleading Arrow:

Facebook recently redesigned it’s apps. And the icon in the screenshots above got me confused for the first few times. I initially thought it is the send button which is moved to left instead of the standard right position, mainly because there is actually no send button visible until you start typing. No, it’s a forward looking arrow that actually takes you back, showing the other things you can send! A bit confusing, isn’t it?

4. Chai Point Flask:

While the contents of the flask — the Chai itself is great, opening the flask is always a pain. It is basically an aluminium pouch put inside a cardboard box. Most of the times, when you try to rotate the cap, the top part of the pouch inside also rotates, thus making it almost impossible to remove the cap without any hassle. I almost always end up opening the cardboard box, holding the pouch with one hand and rotating the cap with the other. This again falls into similar category as Amazon’s example above. The last step in customer experience isn’t very pleasant.

(Update)

Chaipoint tweeted that they are already working on a new design. Awesome!

5. Numbered Points (Ordered Lists) on Medium:

This happened while actually writing this article. I wanted to give numbers to each of the bad experiences here. However, when I type number ‘1’ followed by a dot, and hit spacebar, medium detects that I am about to type a numbered list and increases the font-size of 1 automatically. When I type something and hit enter now, it automatically populates 2. Beautiful. But the problem lies when you try to write content beneath a numbered item.

Saw the problem? If I break the chain, medium starts counting from one again. If I want to ignore medium’s styling of numbered items and just type 2 and dot, it doesn’t look the same as 1. because medium doesn’t let me edit ‘1.’ Sad for someone like me who cares about details :(

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Raviteja Govindaraju

Written by

Principal product designer at NestAway | Certified mutual fund advisor | More on raviteja.in.

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