Learn how to drive your external stakeholders bananas by inundating them with BAD UX…

Now don’t get me wrong. This post by the very nature of its title probably feels like a sarcastic rant and your mostly right but please know I am a “glass half full” guy so bear with me — I’ll get there.

But let me start off with a bit of a confession about some inner strife I have been battling. I think we can all agree that when one sets out on a new and challenging journey, there is always a certain mix of excitement along with an equal amount of trepidation that is experienced. Regardless of how well it’s going — it’s still hard at times to convince ourselves to feel totally secure in our decision to set out on such a major course of action.

So this is how I feel at times in my current pursuit to explore and reach a deeper understanding of User Experience. When people ask what I am studying and I tell them UX / UI they look at me quizzically. Then I elaborate saying “User Experience and User Interaction” Design and some of those folks will give a head nod (probably to be polite) and others just continue to look at me going — “Huh?” It’s usually at this that point, an insecure part of me starts to fire off questions inside my head saying something like — “Is this UX thing just a fad? Can the world be this broken or misguided that it needs UX Designers? It seems so obvious for things to be correctly designed for it’s users so how can this be one of the hottest careers out there? Aren’t things inherently made to be easy to use?” Let me tell you, all it takes is one bad UX experience to shore up those flailing self doubts which finally brings me to the story at hand….

So today on MLK day, I took my wife for a relatively benign outpatient procedure at a local hospital. In an effort to save time since we were cutting it a bit close time-wise, we decided to do some research while enroute, to zero in on the “best” point of entry in advance of our arrival. The mission, as we envisioned it, would be to swoop in like a Chinook chopper, hotly approaching the landing zone with the most direct trajectory — upon touchdown my copilot would swiftly dispatch herself to the rendezvous point and she would arrive at the agreed upon time. We would come to find out that these efforts made to avoid being late and thus inconveniencing the folks at the hospital, would not be reciprocated at any level by the end of this appointment.

Ok proceed with step 1, figure where to drop her off. The paperwork says Health Care Center II. This means we need to find a map of the hospital and figure out where exactly on the campus is Health Care Center II located. So go to the hospital website on our handy dandy smartphone right…and access the nice responsive website (it’s MainLine Health after all) but low and behold it’s a pinch and zoom fiasco to find the map on a desktop website. After looking around a bit, we find the map location buried as a hyperlink on the About Us page. So open the map itself and its time to pinch and zoom again. With this level of hand to eye coordination and dexterity required for this task, its good we are a husband wife team on this day and one of us was not relegated to this level of navigation while flying solo. Ok so there is the Health Care Center II or HCC2 on the map— and it is separate from the main hospital — glad we didn’t decide to park anywhere and wing it by walking in the front door.

Now we are pulling onto the grounds of the facility and we find signage directing us to drive to the right on a road that leads to the back of the hospital to HCC1 and HCC2. Ok feeling a little better now. We are right on the money according to the clock on the dash. So we see an entrance signed as Outpatient Procedure Unit. Nothing that says HCC1 and HCC2 — so we start to panic a little because we are both confused.

“Did we pass it? Is there another sign somewhere we missed?”

Ok a small bit of infighting breaks out because we begin to confuse each other, since once confusion rears its ugly head, it begins to spin off in different directions. So the verbalized battle for logic between us went something like…

“Well we are here for outpatient so that might be the entrance but why would they be so specific about calling the building HCC2 if that wasn’t what where we were going…. Ok lets be sure and double back in the car to make sure we didn’t miss something.”

So upon backtracking — there was another entranceway buried within a narrow parking area /inlet and 25 feet high up on the wall there were dull metal letters spelling out “Health Care Center II”. So we looked around for telltale doors to gain access to the building but the candidates for entry were suspect to say the least. One was a glass door down a series of steps that was locked. The other is an uninviting, unsigned brown steel door that has with a super secure ID swiper but for some reason I give it a try and it flies open with the slightest touch of the handle (go figure). Upon further investigation this leads to endless set of corridors and feels like a time eating trap and a sure way to get lost further down the rabbit hole of frustration. At least this point we were just confused but felt we still had a better option and didn’t want to make this any worse.

So now back to the car and drive back around to the afore visited Outpatient Procedure Entrance that looks promising but still doesn’t put all doubts to rest. So I drop her off at the door and off she goes. They told her not to bring anything with her including a cellphone so as she walks away from the car the realization sets in that we are now incommunicado from here on out.

Thankfully parking the car was pretty straight forward — the garage was pretty close by. So I park the car and make my way to the entrance and enter an atrium space that has elevators to the right. Ok I need to find suite #2407 — ok so remember — 24 hours , 07 days a week was my mnemonic technique — I am doing my part to get to my destination successfully.

So I get in the elevator and I am thinking 2nd floor — but there is a regular 2 button and a 2R button. “What to do? — well lets go with 2 sans R and see what we get.”. At this point I know it’s a 50 / 50 shot right, but I had a sinking feeling like the goose chase is about to get wilder and I was right. As it turned out, neither 2 nor 2R offer anything that seems encouraging after ferreting around vacant hallways without doors for a couple of minutes. I finally get some feedback that is re-encouraging as I passed two other folks juking about, heads swiveling in curious fashion and with a familiar look of consternation. A quick exchange of glance and we know we are kindred spirits in this nightmare of Bad UX. Now the final blow to all semblance of self respect for an independent thinker… ask another human being for assistance in navigation. Ugh! So I have now resigned myself to this next step and seek out a person who can let me in on this joke — surely there is a camera with people laughing at me somewhere at this point.

Feeling fully defeated, I spied a door plaque labeled Volunteer Office and figured these surely are good people who would have mercy on me. A very nice lady greeted me and proceeded to tell me that 2407 is on the 4th floor, and I could find separate elevators on the other side of the building. She points out the way to proceed and everything goes as instructed. I find the office plaque that says 2407 and I feel grateful but a little perturbed at what I had to go through. I opened the door and there is my wife sitting in the waiting room with the grin of the Cheshire Cat. I asked her how she dealt with the labyrinth and she stated “I asked someone when I walked in they told me about the hidden elevators and the fact that 2407 was on the 4th floor”. All I could do was laugh and feel thankful for the reassurance that UX design is much needed in the world and not just a passing fad.