Bad UX Roundup #12: It’s called HUMAN-computer interaction for a reason.

User experience is all about the union of man and machine. If you’ve been paying attention, you might notice that we are not becoming any less dependent upon technology. Quite the contrary. At some point the line between the metal and the meat is going to become too blurry to be useful. The question is, will the resulting hybrid resemble us?

Just as with corporate mergers where one company always emerges dominant, the merger between man and machine will result in a winner. Will our species become silicon-augmented superhumans, or squishy vessels for soulless algorithms?

If we want to come out ahead as we merge with our technology, we need to keep ahead of that technology. The technology must be designed to serve us, and not the inverse. If digital information is not presented in a way we understand, people will surrender to the complexity and allow the machines to make decisions for us until we end up like the characters in Wall-E, except dumber.

We will never stand a chance against the machines if their designers have no understanding of the humans who use them, or who outright hold contempt for those users. In this episode, I present six examples of UX blunders resulting from a refusal to design around the strengths and limitations of the human mind.

In Notes for Mac, the button to delete a file looks more like a way to view the trash.

This is the interface of Apple Notes on the Mac.

See the cluster of buttons at the top left? Here it is up close:

The two buttons on the left change view modes. The first opens up a list of folders into which your notes are organized, and the second shows you the attached files found in all of your notes (the meaningless mystery meat button is itself bad UX).

The two buttons on the right actually alter data. The second (right) one, as should be fairly obvious, creates a new note file. The first (left) one, however, deletes the file you are viewing and/or editing. Did you perhaps think that it would take you to a list of your deleted notes? You might be in for a nasty surprise.

If you click the trash can icon, it will delete your current note without a confirmation prompt, no matter how big the file is or how long you’ve been working on it. You can recover your note, but the steps to get there are not obvious. The trash is located in the list of folders, which you access via that first button on the left.

If you manage to figure things out this far, you will then notice there is no option to quickly restore your deleted file to its original folder. You will have to manually select where the file will go.

If you have done this before, the steps are not overly onerous, but they are definitely not intuitive. If a user is working under pressure, perhaps writing notes for an important presentation in half an hour, and they hit the trash button, their note file will disappear with zero visual indication of where it disappeared to. If the user made that mistake in the first place, it might be because they never knew where the actual Notes trash was, which means they will probably be unable to figure it out now that they are flustered. If they are in full-on panic mode, they are screwed.

For the user to get to this point, Apple had to get several things wrong. Here they are:

• The delete button uses a signifier that is shared with the “view trash” command in other contexts. This might be ok if the context makes it clear, however…
• The delete button sits far away from the actual file that it is set to delete rather than sitting on top of it, so it is unclear that it acts upon a file.
• The delete button is situated in a cluster of buttons, two of which are view-change commands, and there is nothing to indicate that it too is not a view-change command, i.e. one that changes the view to the trash.
• The actual trash is hidden behind the folder view menu.

Apple could eliminate 90% of the problems caused by the current design by fixing any one of those failure points. Maybe they’ll fix it some day… Hell, maybe they’ll design an ergonomic keyboard.

Important lessons

• Place buttons that command data-altering actions in proximity to the data that they alter.
• Separate buttons that perform different categories of action.
• Avoid mystery meat icons.
• Remember that error recovery needs to be easy because users who have made errors are often stressed out.

Facebook has no safety interlock for unfriending someone.

Even though error recovery is clumsy in Apple Notes, you can at least undo your mistakes with no harm done. The same cannot be said for Facebook. If you are a compulsive or nervous mouse clicker, you might just accidentally unfriend a friend. How, you ask?

You are probably familiar with this menu, which appears on every friend’s profile:

What you might not have noticed is that it is not opened with a click of the mouse. It is a hover menu. Simply moving your mouse over the button opens the menu. That Unfriend button at the bottom has no confirmation prompt if you click it. Your friendship with someone can go “poof” that easily. This means that you are only ever one click away from unfriending someone.

If you accidentally unfriend a close friend during good times, it probably won’t have any impact on your friendship, as the friend won’t have any reason to believe it was not an accident. However if you are not as close, or your friend posted something politically polarizing, or the two of you have had some rough times lately, the act of unfriending them may plant a seed of doubt in their mind that will be hard to remove. Any friendship that is not on perfectly solid ground could be damaged, however subtly, by an accidental unfriend.

Not only that, but you will be forever reminded of your butterfinger mistake by this piece of information:

This could be avoided by including an option in Settings to put a confirmation prompt in front of any Unfriend commands, or even to disable unfriending unless the user enters their password, which would additionally prevent intentional but impulsive unfriends. For those who have not turned that setting on, the “Close Friends” option (currently used to show you everything that person posts) could require you to confirm before unfriending.

It’s not really surprising that Facebook would get this wrong, given how little their robot-like founder seems to understand human relationships.

Important lessons

• When your product impacts people’s personal relationships, you need to take extra care.
• When data actions involve a second party, you can never have a perfectly clean undo. Design around this.
• Allow users to control the level of error protection they are afforded.

On Reddit, “top” shows, by default, only the past 24 hours.

On the Reddit home page (the “Front Page of the Internet”), as well as every SubReddit, you are able to filter the vast stream of content in a number of ways. The default view is “hot” which is some hybrid of recency and high user ratings. However, if you just want to see the absolute cream of the all time crop, you will want to click on “top”.

Or at least that’s what you would assume. In fact, by default, the “top” view only shows the past 24 hours.

While it is possible to change the setting to “all time”, the question remains why Reddit defaults to 24 measly hours. Given that “hot” already filters for highly rated recent content, it makes the default “top” mode pretty useless. When someone looks up the top content, the assumption is they want the best of all time. It does not carry with it the implication of recency.

At least Reddit did give us the option to view the all time top content, but they made it very inconspicuous with small, faded text. Given that Reddit is no stranger to dark patterns, especially with their infamous “shadow bans”, I can’t help but wonder if there is a sinister motive.

Important lessons

• Functions should do what users expect them to do.
• Default settings should align with the most common use cases.

Facebook doesn’t give you a character count to let you know how much you can fit into a color post.

If you use Facebook, you are familiar with the feature to add a colorful background to your statuses, added last year. It basically automates what people had been doing for years, which is putting words over a background, and posting it as an image.

Of course, all things have their price. You can’t type out the entirety of Paradise Lost and expect it to fit into one of these backgrounds. Therefore, color posts on Facebook have a 130 character limit. You wouldn’t know that, though, given that it does not show you how many characters you have left.

You have to just type until the colorful background and its options disappear. Twitter has shown you how far you have left to go, or how far you are over the limit, for years. Facebook has had this feature out for long enough that there is no excuse. Very sloppy.

Important lessons

• Provide the user with the information necessary to perform their task.
• Copy the competition when they get it right.

BECU’s app will not keep you logged in.

Everyone hates entering passwords. It’s a fact. If there is one thing people hate more than entering passwords, it is entering passwords on a clumsy little touchscreen keyboard where the letters, numbers, and special characters are on separate screens.

Fortunately, today’s mobile phones have all sorts of security features like fingerprint and facial recognition, and remote data wipes, meaning that the apps contained within can relax their security measures a bit and allow free access to their functionality without having to constantly enter in account passwords. If only BECU (Boeing Employees Credit Union) would receive that memo.

As you can plainly see, the BECU app has a “Remember Me” checkbox, which suggests that, once you have logged in, it will allow you to freely use the app without constantly logging in.

That is most certainly not the case. Even though you have clicked “Remember Me”, you cannot so much as view your balance or deposit a check without entering your password. It’s a huge pain in the ass. And, in case you’re wondering, this is not some sort of regulatory compliance issue. There is no reason for them to do this.

BECU hasn’t shown up on my Roundups before, but that’s about to change. Their grasp of technology is embarrassingly bad. Expect more from BECU. If your financial institution has a crappy digital experience, drop me a line and let me know. I’ll be happy to put them on blast.

Important lessons

• Don’t make your users constantly enter passwords.
• Functions should do what users expect them to do (i.e. “Remember Me” should remember you).

Epson printers won’t let you print in black and white if you are out of any of the colored inks.

I found this gem online. Take a look at the error message below.

The printer is refusing to print a black and white file because the cyan and magenta inks are empty, even though the black ink is full. This is clearly a ploy to sell more ink, which is the real cash cow for printer manufacturers. I believe we have discovered a new dark pattern.

Important lessons

• Do not build arbitrary limitations into your product.

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/jclauss/

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John was a scientist, he was hooked on LSD, interested in mind control and how the monkey held the key.