Bad UX Roundup #14: The dumbing down of humanity

Applied mediocrity 101

Hello friends (and enemies, because I know this series has haters) and welcome to another episode of Bad UX Roundup. I’ve been thinking.

Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between good old fashioned stupidity and true evil. When design sucks, my first inclination is to assume that some Zuckerberg-like villain planned it that way to intentionally dumb down users and make them more controllable. Most of the time, Hanlon’s Razor wins out, and I concede that it probably was just the result of sniveling committees and cut-rate designers. But every now and then, I see something that is so ostentatiously dumb that it betrays its own brilliance, like an episode of Beavis and Butthead.

I’ve dug up some examples of that kind of suspicious stupidity. Some of it may truly be honest, genuine dumbfuckery, but I think you’ll be able to spot the ones too bad to be true.

Facebook Messenger hides the friend status of a contact.

Here is the interface of Facebook’s Messenger app.

Do you see a way to tell if Austin Bales is friends with whoever took this screenshot? I sure don’t.

And you certainly won’t have any luck on the list of friends either:

There is only one way to view your friendship status in the Messenger app, which is to scroll all the way to the top of a chat thread — which could take a very long time as we have already covered — at which point there will be a bit of text telling you that information.

If you don’t want to deal with that, you are forced to go to the person’s profile, which requires that you have the Facebook app as well as the Messenger app. Only then will you see if the person is still friends with you.

You don’t need to be Edward Tufte to figure out how to fit a friendship status into the Messenger UI. On the chat thread view, the status could be situated at the top of the page next to the contact’s name. On the friend list view, it could be a small badge on each contact’s avatar. There are lots of possibilities, and none of them requires a UX genius to figure out. No, this is something darker.

Facebook has been hostile to the idea of users knowing who unfriended them because it’s not warm and fuzzy. Third party apps that tell you when you are unfriended and by whom have popped up, and each time they have been shut down by the paternalistic dimwits in Menlo Park. One need not wait for a Cambridge Analytica scandal to realize that Facebook have contempt for their users. Zuckerbag is more interested in treating users not as customers, but as the cliched “product”, or even worse, experimental guinea pigs.

Let’s not forget, this is the same guy who used Facebook to alter the emotional states of its users without their consent, users he has referred to as “dumbfucks”. With that in mind, it should be clear that Facebook does not cater to its users, but rather dictates the experience they will have, whether they want it or not. Their MO is to put users into whatever mental state they believe will make them into more profitable zombies, which is to say they are as neurotoxic and insidious as the mainstream media ever was.

Allowing users to know who has unfriended them simply does not fit into Facebook’s insulting narrative in which grown adults are nothing more than infants with the ability to spend money. All you have to do is consider Facebook’s unctuous and overfamiliar tone.

• They like to tell us “we care about you” as though they won’t cut us off from our own friends if one of their peabrained moderators doesn’t like what we post.
• The Facebook timeline stretches all the way back to one’s birth, as though people will upload their entire life to Facebook.
• I get notifications telling me that so-and-so “added to their story” as though Facebook knows the first thing about this person’s real life story.

The good news here is that artificial intelligence will replace centralized networks as the backbone of social connection, and there’s absolutely nothing Facebook can do about it.

Important lessons

• Give the users the experience they want, not the experience you think they should have.

This Hulu trainwreck

I’m just going to let this picture speak for itself.

And now I’m going to speak for the picture. What. The. Fuck.

What kind of grade-A asshole includes a tab in their app that does nothing?

Just right off the bat, anyone who knows the first thing about digital design knows that it is a constant struggle to remove as many unnecessary pixels as possible. Even halfway decent designers are concerning themselves with the final 10% of waste pixels. A do-nothing button in a prime piece of screen real estate is the final, uh, 100%. It is literally the first thing anyone would remove and the last thing anyone would even think to add.

Notwithstanding the fact that iOS’s bottom menus are themselves monumentally stupid design, if you’re going to put one in your app, it only makes sense that you would want it to contain as few buttons as possible, as it reduces both cognitive load and the chances that someone will fat-finger the wrong button. The only decision here resembling a correct one was to put “Account” in the location that most users have a hard time reaching.

But there is another issue here. Why is the “Account” section absent from the app in the first place? If you have read anything from me, you will know that I generally advocate using websites over mobile apps because they are platform agnostic and don’t require a special download. That, however, does not excuse this kind of half-assery. If somebody is going to take up space on their device and in their brain to download your app, it damn well better be useful.

I have the sneaking suspicion that this design blunder is loosely connected to the oh-so-hip notion that mobile apps should be “simple”, which is to say dumbed down and neutered. Given the aforementioned love of native apps at the expense of websites, this means that digital experiences as a whole are being dumbed down.

While I cannot ascribe this particular example to any sinister master plan, if only because it’s so fatuous, it clearly has some of that hipsterish “simple” in its DNA. In other words, rather than being the product of some prancing wannabe Steve Jobs with a grand vision of a sterilzed world of white space and “magic”, this came from some fourth-rate agency ham who was exposed to those same notions and naïvely imitated them the same way a tribe of equatorial cannibals encounters Christian missionaries and starts crucifying their sacrificial virgins.

Important lessons

• Don’t omit key features from your app.
• Conserve pixels. Always conserve pixels.

YouTube’s “Watch later” list is hidden for no good reason.

There are all sorts of situations in which you cannot or do not want to watch a YouTube video, though you may be browsing them. You might be on your phone, and come across a high-resolution video or full-length movie that should be watched on a real screen. You might be slacking off at work looking at YouTube, but you know you can’t commit to anything more than a dog video. Whatever the case, you need to save the video for later. Fortunately, YouTube has got you covered.

Right?

Barely, actually. My YouTube “Watch later” list (found at the left side of the screen) has several items in it, but you would not know by looking at it.

Not only is there no indicator that “Watch later” has any videos, or how many, but the “Purchases” link does have a count of how many things I have purchased. I, the user, will assume that all of these links must have a count if they have stuff in them, considering that “Purchases” looks just like the others, so it should behave like them.

Occasionally, if I scroll down the list of suggested videos on my homepage, I might see a row called “Watch later”, but that only seems to happen if I have recently added something. Otherwise, YouTube hides this list like it’s a double chin.

The “Watch later” list is YouTube’s way of bookmarking a video. Considering just how busy and distracted most people are, unless the user is reminded of that list and the items in it, they will forget it even exists. Furthermore, YouTube is constantly digging up and recommending more videos for the user, meaning there is even more content to bury their saved videos. I certainly forgot that I had any videos saved to watch later, let alone what they were.

They could do a few simple things to increase the prominence of the “Watch later” list.

• Include a count of “Watch later” videos the same way “Purchases” has one, but possibly with a red highlight.

• Let the user switch between “Up next” and “Watch later” in the list of videos next to the one the user is currently watching.

These solutions took me 5 minutes to come up with, and yet Google with its army of designers and product managers can’t seem to give us anything better than the current design which is so hidden that it is effectively useless. In fact, it is worse than useless because it decreases the chances I will ever see the video because it encourages me to put off watching it, but then neglects to remind me of its existence. This is the company that makes Gmail, which has all sorts of reminders and organizational features, and yet it seems like none of that insight found its way to YouTube.

Important lessons

• Do not create black holes for users’ stuff to disappear into and be forgotten.
• People bookmark and save things to unload information from their brain. When you encode information externally, it is a signal to your brain that it is ok to forget that information, because you know you can refer to it later. Obscuring saved information makes it useless.

The Facebook app does not show you time stamps on the activity log.

Here is a snapshot of the Facebook iOS app’s activity log. Do you see any entry times?

I sure don’t. And yes, I tried the dropdown. All that does is give you the option to delete a post. If you want to know the time that you did something on Facebook, you’ll have to use the desktop website.

Here we go again with the dumbing down of the user experience on mobile. Unlike with Hulu, Facebook has a track record of sinister plots. Omissions like this reek of purpose when they are connected to Mark Zuckerberg. Is it so hard to believe Facebook are using the migration from desktop to mobile as a smokescreen for an overall infantilization of the user experience and the user themselves.

Important lessons

• Do not cut functionality from your mobile app that is present on your desktop site.

In Adobe Illustrator, the default number of sides for the polygon feature is 6 and not 3.

What do you think the typical user of Illustrator creates more of? Triangles or hexagons? Unless the user is drawing a beehive, the comparison isn’t even fair. Triangles are one of the most commonly rendered shapes, right after rectangles, in Illustrator, especially for the purposes of interface design, where hexagons are barely used at all, and for decoration when they are.

That didn’t stop Adobe from making the default polygon of Illustrator a hexagon.

And you better believe there’s no way to change the default number of sides in a polygon. You’re stuck with 6 and you just have to reset it every time you start the application. As a result, users have that many extra clicks when they use Illustrator.

I can’t even begin to explain this one, but maybe the explanation is simply… Adobe.

Important lessons

• Calibrate the default settings of your software to the most common use cases.
• Let power users customize everything.

On LinkedIn there is no search feature in the groups section.

You already know from previous Bad UX Roundups that LinkedIn design and product staff eat paste. Here is the latest evidence.

When you go to the Groups section of LinkedIn, you might want to search for new groups to join, or just search the discussion of any group you are a member of, or that makes its content public. Well, you can’t. See?

On the “My Groups” tab, there is a search bar, but it just filters the groups you belong to, and does not actually search their content.

There really isn’t much to say here. LinkedIn always seem to be missing obvious and simple functionality. I am beginning to think they source their “talent” from the ruins of Yahoo.

Important lessons

• If you make this kind of blunder, you’re beyond help.

Want more of me?

After you’re done getting your head checked, you can find me at these places.

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