A Personal Collection of Bad UI/UX Designs
User experience, or UX, refers to any interaction a user has with a product or service. It could range from how a physical product feels in your hand, to how straightforward the registration process is when signing up for a new service. While user interface, or UI, refers to the look and feel, the presentation, and the interactivity of a product.
The main difference between these two concepts is that UX design is all about the overall feel of the experience, while UI design is all about how the product’s interfaces look and function.
If done well, UX design is virtually invisible to its users. The ultimate goal of any UX design is actually to let users not “feel” the design because every step users take within the product should be intuitive, natural, and effortless. It’s when a UX design feature has been executed so poorly that it becomes counterproductive — begging the question: “What was actually going through the designer’s head when making this design decision?” For example, a so-called “Norman Door” has design elements that give people the wrong usability signals to the point that special signage is needed to clarify how they work.
Here I am going to list several bad or confusing UX design examples based on personal experience.
- Whatsapp delete message feature
Whatsapp is the no.1 chat app globally with over two billion monthly active users, thanks to its clean and tidy interface and easy-to-use functionalities. But I am sure most people have this awkward situation: you have sent a message to the wrong person or you simply wanted to rephrase what you have just sent, and you were desperate to delete it. Luckily, Whatsapp provides a feature called “delete for everyone”, which allows you to delete it promptly so no one can see it anymore. However, because the recipient can still see that the sender has deleted a message, it just negates the purpose of deleting it in the first place. In fact, this looks way more suspicious and is likely to prompt an awkward “what did you delete?” type of response.
I think a better solution is to give a grace period of time to the sender, say 1 min, during which the sender can delete the message without the recipient knowing. If that grace period passes, then there is the need to let the recipient know the message has been deleted. Because usually, most senders would realize at once if they’ve made a mistake or typo, so it’s fair to let them correct it immediately.
2. Canvas announcement features
As students, we need to constantly check the announcements sent by professors and TAs on Canvas. One thing that particularly annoys me is that, on this announcement screen, it is unclear to me where to click in a message to navigate to its details page.
The first thing that caught my eye is the “All Sections” button in blue. The name “all sections” is already confusing enough and unclear about what it means (at the beginning I thought it meant something like “all the information in this message”), plus because it’s in blue, it’s very natural for users to regard it as a link and click it first.
However, if you click it, nothing will happen, and if you hover on it, it will display “number of users this message has been sent to”, which is definitely not a piece of information that is important for the user to know in this situation. After you look around for the link to the detailed page for a while, finally you find the right button is actually the title of the message, which is bold, black, and not obviously “clickable”.
I believe this is a design failure caused by not putting themselves into users’ shoes to figure out what is the “job” the user is going to perform. It provides unimportant and irrelevant information to the users and make the real important thing less obvious.
3. Horrible drop-down list
Everyone hates dropdowns, so it’s so strange that some UI designers still haven’t realized this. When it comes to filling in online forms, there are few things more frustrating than having to find your country if it’s at the bottom of the list or to choose your year of birth rather than simply type it in.
There are actually many more user-friendly designs to get around this, for example, using an auto-complete searching field, making two options a switch instead of a drop-down list, etc.
Do you have any bad UI/UX experience? What do you think they should do to improve it? Feel free to share your thoughts!
Further Readings
