Bad UX Roundup #2: Five mobile blunders.
Mobile is the way of the future. Why are so many companies blowing the UX?
The first article was enjoyed by enough people that I decided to make this a regular thing. After all, there is enough shoddy UX design out there to make a career of writing these articles. As a UX designer, seeing some of the amateurish design work at major companies (with huge budgets) is like being a musician and realizing that Nickelback fills stadiums. The difference is that I believe it is significantly easier to educate corporate decision makers about the perils of subpar designers than it is to convince a Nickelback fan that they have bad taste in music.
For this episode, I have decided to focus entirely on mobile since so much of the world does their computing entirely on mobile devices, and since so much of the mobile design out there is done either grudgingly or as part of a deliberate effort to infantilize the user. Given that mobile design is even more challenging than desktop UX, the potential for embarrassing UX gaffes is staggering. The five examples I will show you are the penguin turd on top of the tip of the iceberg.
So, off we go.
Wikipedia’s mobile site STILL doesn’t include tags.
In the age of responsive websites, the very existence of Wikipedia’s m-dot site is a punchline in and of itself, but in that mobile site lurks a special Easter egg of halfassery. At the bottom of the regular site are a set of categories to which each article belongs, like the one shown below.
If you loaded the same page on mobile, expecting to find those categories at the bottom, you’d be let down. They just aren’t there. Instead you get this tacit admission of their mobile site’s crappiness.
Yes, you can just read the desktop site on your phone, but that means a whole lot of pinch-zooming.
This is not really surprising from the site that still splays text from one end to the other of a 27” Retina monitor because fixed margins might aggrieve some of the NEETs and bronies that make up their editorial demographic, but what truly makes it so offensive is that it dumbs down the mobile experience in a time when more and more people are migrating away from desktops entirely.
Given that every major technology company is trying to take agency away from its users by way of dumbed-down UX, to which they refer through their teeth as “simplifying”, Wikipedia should not be tacitly legitimizing the notion that mobile should be simplistic.
Slop level: 6/10
Google Maps’ very unhelpful auto-zoom
Here’s the scenario.
You are driving to an unfamiliar destination. Currently you are on the freeway and nearing the probable exit but you are not 100% certain it’s the right one. You pull up Google Maps and plug the address in. The screen then teleports to the destination and zooms so far in that it’s hard to even figure out where it is, let alone where you are in relation to that destination.
So you push the crosshairs button in the bottom right, hoping it will show your car and your destination in proper context. That just zooms you right onto your car, with no relation to where you’re headed.
You frantically pinch-zoom out until you finally have both your car and your destination on the screen at once, but by the time you do, you have just missed the exit.
All of this could be avoided if, upon loading a destination, Google Maps automatically set the zoom to reflect your current location, rather than the destination alone.
This is a very simple change to make so budget and bureaucratic resistance cannot possibly be reasons. This is just a half-assed oversight, and an especially disappointing one given that Google Maps and Earth are mostly a pleasure to use.
For the record, Apple Maps is also guilty of this, but, I mean… Apple Maps.
Slop level: 8/10
You can’t click timestamps in the description of a YouTube video on mobile.
Ever load an album on YouTube on a mobile device and wonder why people post the track list in the comments when it is already posted in the video description? It’s because the time hyperlinks are non-functional in the video description on mobile, but not in the comments. There is no rational explanation for this. It’s another half-assed oversight. Google must be aware of the problem given the prevalence of this hack; they just refuse to do anything about it.
Slop level: 8/10
Yelp and Pinterest mobile force you to download the app instead of viewing content on the web
There are three kinds of lies, and we all know what the third one is.
Any time a designer leans on statistics and A/B testing to justify a crappy design, they signal exactly what kind of a designer they are. A/B testing and data-driven design serve a valuable purpose (I specialize in data visualization, after all), however they are not a crutch to lean on, nor are they a shield to hide behind. However, that is exactly how it is used by punch-clock, by-the-book plugs who don’t have a design bone in their body.
In the case of Pinterest, their “product lead for growth”, Casey Winters, openly refers to himself as “the asshole that makes Pinterest do that” and only a few lines later goes on to defend his three-legged baby with statistical bla-bla that he refers to as the “mobile equation”. I can’t make this stuff up.
Defending a design that you openly admit is asshole-ish because of some numbers is as daft as defending your airline’s decision to send in armed thugs to beat up a passenger because it is “technically allowed in the rules”. Bad decisions are bad decisions. Bad design is bad design, no matter how many alternative facts you throw at it.
Google happens to agree that it is bad design and deemed such practices as not mobile-friendly. This, of course, led to an outpouring of sour grape whine from Yelp’s CEO, who penned a public rant disguised as an article, to which I will not link here. If Pinterest and Yelp want to push bad designs because they bring in short-term profits, they will end up like Zynga… or X10.
Slop level: 10/10
Wix and their mandatory hamburger menu
Wix is one of a growing number of services that let you build a website without knowing one iota of code. For those who don’t even want to bother learning WordPress or dealing with its logistics (I don’t blame you, by the way), these products are a godsend. To their credit, Wix’s product actually works, unlike SquareSpace.
That said, Wix very visibly half-assed their mobile experience. The way it is set up, you can design every page to have a desktop and a mobile form factor. However, the mobile pages are forced by Wix to be a dumbed-down version of the desktop experience. There is no way to create a custom mobile navigation scheme. Instead, Wix takes your site’s overhead navigation menu and turns it into a dopey-looking hamburger button.
This is one of the example sites Wix includes, meaning it’s more or less as good as Wix gets.
This is what you get when you click that button.
Seriously? That’s the best Wix can do? That is a hideous menu, and it’s important to note it is not Oliver Pedrosa’s fault. That’s how the menus come out of the box and your options for customization are very limited.
In case you haven’t gotten the memo, hamburger menus are not gold-standard UI design, and there are a lot of better options for mobile navigation. Wix does not give you any of those options. You cannot even add microcopy to the button saying “menu”.
Slop level: 9/10
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