Bad UX Roundup #8: A variety pack of crappy design.
It’s 2018 and bad design still runs rampant like unemployables at an Antifa rally. For all of the well-established design principles providing positive feedback, some companies just refuse to get even the basics of design right. Some of them outright flout good design for their own twisted purposes. Well, no bad design is safe on my watch. If you put out crap, I will call you out. This episode of BUXRU features a diverse sampling of turds ranging from the merely incompetent to the buffoonishly patronizing to the outright devious. I think you’ll enjoy it.
Google’s smarter-than-thou search results
If somebody puts their search in quotes, it means they are looking for a very specific phrase. In fact, it’s likely they put the phrase into quotes specifically so Google would not attempt to get cute and correct the user on a supposed misspelling that they are quite aware of. Google seems to have missed this memo, because they have started correcting people’s quoted searches.
There is no reason for this other than that some pinheaded brunchois yupster thinks they know better than everyone else. All it does is add one more click for 99% of people who use quoted searches.
And, in case you’re wondering, a weirdly large number of people seem to think it’s spelled “Montley Crue”.
Important lessons
- Unquoted searches are “automatic” mode. Quoted searches are “manual” mode. Respect manual mode and back off when the user selects it.
Outlook Calendar and Outlook Mail have the same browser tab icon.
If you’re like me, you keep a lot of tabs open. A LOT of tabs. Even on my Retina monitor, they accumulate to the point where there is no space left for titles. Therefore, I rely on the favicons to tell me what a tab is. If I have Outlook Mail and Outlook Calendar open at the same time, which I usually do, I should be able to tell them apart at a glance. Unfortunately, I can’t, because they both have the same favicon:
It seems trivial, but even the one second I lose from clicking the wrong tab throws me off my game in a way that costs me more than one second. And considering this happens more than once per day, the cost to what is known as “flow” is pretty high.
This problem is so moronically easy to solve that there is absolutely no excuse for it.
Important lessons
- Favicons are part of the UX.
- Understand how users use your software (i.e. with 50 tabs open).
Medium.com’s “gotcha” premium stories that use up your freebies whether you wanted them or not.
Medium has made several appearances in my articles for their many affronts to good design. So far, the reasons have been simple blunders, but this time around, they are guilty of a dark pattern.
Medium’s current monetization model is based on a premium subscription. Writers can place their content behind Medium’s paywall, and readers will only be able to access it by paying a monthly fee. No problem so far. Medium also offers readers up to three free paywalled articles per month to entice them into paying. Still no problem.
Where things get hairy is that the second you click on a paywalled article, it is counted toward your monthly limit. This means that if I were to click on a post from LinkedIn or Reddit, unaware that it was a paid article, I would automatically be down one freebie, whether I actually wanted to read the article or not. If I ended up clicking on something out of passing curiosity, especially something with a clickbaity title, and it turned out to be crap, I would have wasted my freebie.
It gets worse. On the front page of Medium, paid articles are marked as such, however longer titles are obscured, and hovering the mouse does not show the rest of the title, such as that below. Again, I am forced to risk my freebie with inadequate information.
This is a dark pattern, because it is almost certainly by design. Medium are trying to strong-arm me into paying for their service. Unfortunately, it is backfiring on them because this is one reason (in addition to their very blatant political agenda) I would never pay for a membership.
What the site should do is to give me a synopsis of paywalled articles and a prompt to unlock the entire thing before I commit to it. Moreover, it should let me know at the top of the page in the sticky header how many freebies I have left. Something tells me they’re as likely to listen to this suggestion as they are to adopt my design for improved stats.
Important lessons
- Pissing your users off in free mode is not a good way to get them to upgrade.
- Let the user confirm before commiting to an irreversible action.
The default mode of Apple TextEdit is not plain text.
One thing I like about Windows is that Microsoft’s default text editor, Notepad, is as mindlessly simple as it can get. It takes input in plain, unformatted, monospaced text with no extra noise. If you copy text into it, any formatting attached to that text will be mercilessly scrubbed and only the naked Unicode will make it onto the page. It is beautiful. Better still, I could just right-click anywhere on the desktop, and Windows would give me the option to create a new Notepad file right there. When I was a Windows user, I would often intentionally paste formatted text into a Notepad file specifically to get rid of the formatting.
Apple makes that more annoying. When I open a TextEdit file, it defaults to rich text. While Microsoft offers separate plain text and rich text editors, Apple does not. Given that Notes already accepts rich formatting, there is even less reason for this lousy excuse for a text editor to have all these silly features.
Oh, and if having to manually switch into plain text mode was not enough friction, every time I open up TextEdit, I have to see this screen:
That’s right. It won’t just open up an empty text file. It will make me deal with this annoying screen first. And, notice how it is automatically putting the file in iCloud rather than on my hard drive. Fail all around.
Important lessons
- Don’t add unnecessary friction to tasks.
- Basic, elemental tools always have a place, because users will surprise you with the ways they use them.
Facebook visually updates comments but embedded links still suck.
If this isn’t the ethos of millennial yupsters summed up, I don’t know what is. You may have noticed that comments on Facebook posts now appear in messy looking balloons.
As stupid as they look, that isn’t even why they made it into this episode of BUXRU. Even if the new visual design looked like it belonged in the Louvre, the fact is that Facebook chose to prioritize an unnecessary cosmetic update over a functional improvement of embedded links that has been plaguing comments for years.
When I paste a link to my feed, or another wall, the content preview appears right after I paste the link. Then, I can delete the ugly URL while the link preview remains. It is now the standard for posting online. Even clunky-ass LinkedIn does it.
The same does not apply to comments and replies. If I paste a link into a comment, it just sits there, not generating a preview.
Once I post the comment, the preview will appear after the fact. But the URL is still there. And I can’t go in and edit it to make it disappear either. This just adds more noise and distraction to online discussion.
I may have given Facebook a pass here, assuming that it was just too far down the list compared to more significant design issues. But the fact that they actually spent development resources on a frivolous cosmetic redesign instead of fixing this annoying problem means that their product managers are a bunch of overgrown children. I do wonder if there is some darker motive behind this decision, but I’m invoking Hanlon’s Razor. This is just plain old stupidity.
Important lessons
- All things being equal, always prioritize functional upgrades over cosmetic ones.
- If you allow link embedding, load the preview before the user posts or sends, and let the user delete the source URL from the text.
- Bubble comments look stupid.
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