Design: Good and bad design experiences
A walkthrough of my findings on Good and bad design
Ever noticed why the fork or spoon is built straight? Well, obviously it cannot have chains to hold, wouldn’t serve the purpose right?
Design has been there for ages! Can you imagine it has always been a part of our evolution process. From the ancient knives and Lota used for various purposes we discovered the science and process behind design.
Not just a piece of art but a methodology used to create meaningful experiences. Intriguing right! So what exactly is design?
Design — Serves a purpose, manifests a problem and has an impact on the user’s life making it easier everyday. Be it your brush or high-rise buildings, everything requires a design system to be successful as a product.
Do you know how can we achieve good design or something called amazing customer experience? The answer is to follow a set of principles. Don’t worry m not telling you to bucket design with some rules. The principles are used as a foundation to guide behavior.
Based on Dieter Rams “Ten principles for good design” I have selected 5 examples of good and bad design. Do you know more? I’d be interested to hear about it.
Good Design
1. Slice App
Need a privileged gateway to financial freedom? Small credit? Low-cost EMI, EMI without a credit card? Have a hobby to chase? A new laptop to learn design? They have got it all, actually, something better than a credit card.
I have always wanted to feel independent at times and set goals for earning money and take financial decisions on my terms. I came across Slice App and this catchy line caught my eye — “ Shop now, pay later in EMIs, for FREE!”
Slice was born to redesign the financial experience for India’s millennials. A simple, smart, perfectly executed UI, engaging and a transparent experience with modern design and awesome customer experience.
Slice card is a forever free Visa card which has no joining fee, no annual fee and no hidden charges and that’s a pretty cool functionality!
Less but better is their way of pleasing users ;)
2. Avni EzeePad — An eco-friendly sanitary pad disposal technique
Still throwing sanitary pads in your newspapers? Well It is not okay to waste paper for disposal if it can be recycled for better use.
However it is important to throw away your sanitary pads properly. These must be safely wrapped in a disposal bag to avoid foul odor.
Avni is an Eco-Friendly Menstrual Products company who came up with a very useful and innovative idea for safely disposing our pads. They have this envelope look as an inspiration.
For maintaining eco-friendliness, effortless task completion and most importantly solving a problem by understanding the environment and user needs as well.
It comes in different shapes as well for different menstruation flows and it needs no further explanation. Brilliant!
3. Sealing Clips
You’re probably curious now! Ever got frustrated being unable to seal plastic bags easily? I was wondering where to hide the half bag of Lays I ate yesterday I don’t really want my lays to go stale and lose it’s crispiness:(
Mom would kill me if she finds out another dabba full of chips….Shh
Sometimes people cannot afford to transfer all items in storage boxes. Here comes our savior, Phew…The Sealing Clips!
A great example of easy usage, innovative, inclusiveness, user-centric, accessible and not to forget they are available in different sizes and colors too!
4. LED Hug Night Lamp Torch
I remember the times when I was unable to read a book at night while the lights go off and of course no one wants disturbance in their sleep *too many naps weren’t enough for my brother*
This is a simple LED hug night lamp which you can just wear around your neck, sit somewhere comfy switch on those dim LED lights on the edges and start reading! Cool right?
It’s a highly innovative, simple to use, sustainable and is long-lasting(I have to say after experiencing) product.
The usage doesn’t stop there! Ever considered night running? Working late at night and don’t want to disturb others? No keyboard lights? Well they provide different light modes for different tasks too!
5. Steel Straws
Straws? Really? Well yes Undoubtedly, they protect your teeth from swimming in coffee and juice which erodes your enamel. Reusable straws are going to replace the plastic ones soon.
There are a number of interesting new developments in the straw technology. These stainless steel, glass and bamboo straws serve for different types of drinks. Cheap plastic straws may leak heavy metal and plasticizer, making them bad for our health and for the environment. That’s why we’re getting rid of them.
An innovative, easy to use, eco-friendly, aesthetically and accurately built redesign!
Next time you order a coke or juice-infused tea, proudly skip the plastic-wrapped plastic straws and use your own reusable straw. Once you’re in the habit, you’ll hardly notice a difference and you’ll be doing your part to help save marine life :)
Bad Design
Have you ever came across deliberately inconvenient everyday objects and thought to yourself, “Am I not smart enough to use it or is this already not working? “ You are not alone! I have often felt frustrated, irritated and even angry at times when I am unable to use a product or service when it is so poorly designed.
Bad design is not user-centric. It fails to execute the purpose of a product or service. Bad design is also a design but not being considerate to any of your user needs can create failures.
Being fixated on applying an idea can make you forget the purpose of it. Even if the form seems appealing, the execution of all the set of elements is what defines a product.
As designers the usage has to be clear when you design a product. An idol is not made keeping the function in mind but designer’s always have function in their mind.
Bad design is simply great imagination without wisdom — M. Cobanli
1. Amazon’s account delete process
Can you believe we need a tutorial to delete the account on Amazon?
So I wanted to delete my amazon account and start a new one and had to go through this tedious deletion process making it infuriatingly difficult to delete my account— felt like they were trying to stop me forcibly and give up on deleting. Well I am a very motivated person so I did go through the process!
If you can’t figure out how to delete your Amazon account, don’t feel bad — very few people know how! You’ll have to arm yourself with patience first!
Personally I did not expect this from Amazon. The task was too long than it should be, a non-techie person won’t be able to figure out the Help option takes them to the close account page and they need to scroll down further, I got frustrated at some point by not feeling well supported, not really efficient, intuitive or simple. Overall a very bad experience :(
2. Dark patterns
The big pop-up window urging you to sign up for a website’s newsletter with a big red “Sign Me Up” button, while the opt-out button is much smaller remember?
Dark Patterns are tricks used in websites and apps that make you do things that you didn’t mean to, like buying or signing up for something.
Here in the below image there’s this banner Ad for chatmost, which is made to look like it has a speak of dust on it, causing people to brush it away and accidentally click the link! Shocking right? Well, there are many more types of dark patterns companies use such as as a way to lure you into clicking and take you somewhere you didn’t intend to go.
Another example can be immediately deducting money after a free trial period. A very bad design technique that can cause long-term issues.
3. Fiverr’s 5 star display
Fiverr has decided to go against standard UX conventions by opting to represent a 5-star rating with…1 star rather than displaying multiple separate star icons.
Users who are used to the standard behavior of multiple stars representing the rating might assume that the product only received a 1-star rating.
They have different colors that represent the same 5-star ratings which gives a bad impression to the user in an anti-intuitive way.
People expect things to work similarly across the internet. By thinking just about how much space they saved doing this conveys choosing functionality over form and ignoring consistency in design.
Don’t let your own perception of “unique” things make your users work hard.
4. Error messages
Error messages can be frustrating. How many times have you gone to fill out a form or create an account, only to receive messages that don’t really help you out of that situation?
It makes you want to drop what you’re doing and break something, right?
Research from 2009 has shown that error messages increase cortisol (the stress hormone) levels in individuals when they were interacting with computers that faced a system breakdown. Not everyone is a programmer who understands error codes. Error messages should be crafted in a way to make users feel safe and are easy to recover. Providing alternatives in an error also gives a personalized touch to users.
To conclude — Error messages create a very bad user experience with zero efficiency and inclusiveness. Let’s Stop Scaring Our Users!
5. Hard Handle grips
Once in your life you must have came across these weird looking handle grips for bikes and scooters that really hurt our palms?
They say it’s made for perfect grip but the aesthetics are not good enough to satisfy the user’s grip and also take care of the palms. Not a useful product that will sustain for longer period and will rather increase the burden caused in your hands which is not quite efficient and effortless.
Safety is first and hence grip is necessary but we should also keep the user in mind in all the different ways creating use cases and design the product respectively.
The purpose of this research was to identify good and bad designs around us and how good designs have evolved in all these years and bad designs are hard to recognize. I hope you enjoyed reading!
