Bad UX Roundup #9: Common sense is not common.

Published in

UX Planet

7 min readMar 19, 2018

Another week, another batch of crappy UX. There are times that I think that user experience must be a form of arcane wizardry, given that it seems to float beyond the ken of even self-professed experts. Maybe I really do have some sort of preternatural gift for design and details. Then I remind myself, nah, this shit just requires common sense.

In fact, all it really requires is that you sit down for a moment and actually think. What could go wrong if I omitted that feature? Why would anyone think to click that? Should I really be adding pointless fluff when there are huge design problems? Who am I as some bean-counting stooge to tell the designers how to do their job? These are the questions that lead to better design, but nobody is asking them.

And that brings us to today’s five examples of bad UX. All of these could have been avoided if people would just think.

“Drafts” is the default landing page when you click Stories on Medium.

In case you’re wondering, I have a whole file of Medium’s UX buffoonery. Medium is just a goldmine of lousy design. Here is yet another nugget of brown gold. When I go to the Stories section of Medium, I end up on the Drafts page.

Usually, when I go to Stories, it’s because I want to see a list of the articles I have posted, so I can view the article, usually to send someone the link. This is a lot more common than me going to Stories in order to edit a draft, and for the latter, I will generally keep that tab open anyway.

Common sense tells us that the landing page should show the most frequently accessed information, but Stories does not give us that. It is one extra click to get to my published articles, and then I still have to click one more time to get to the article I want, but only after I wade through a pile of stupid comments, since I can’t filter those out of the list.

Important lessons

Landing pages should show the most frequently-accessed information.
Don’t conflate comments and journalistic content. Seriously.

Adobe Illustrator has no affordance to let you know that you have selected a line segment.

Look at the rectangle below and figure out which of the sides I have selected.

If you use Illustrator, you already know that it’s impossible to tell based on looking. Illustrator lets you know what points you have selected, but not line segments. This shortcoming has been around ever since I started using Illustrator in the early 2000s, which means they have added countless stupid and useless features while neglecting basic fundamentals of usability.

Odly enough, however, I will encounter this bug every now and then:

It actually looks as though Illustrator has visually distinguished between selected and un-selected sides, but in fact it has not. They are all equally selected. This bug has been around for just as long.

This is par for the course for Adobe, who seem to have some sort of aversion to refining their products, preferring to bloat them with crap nobody asked for, kind of like an architect who keeps adding stories to a building rather than reinforcing the foundation. Some day it’s all going to collapse and take a lot of people with it.

Important lessons

Always show the user important and relevant information.
Don’t add new features until you perfect the ones you already have. Seriously.

On Reddit, voting buttons are visible on archived posts.

Reddit is called the front page of the internet, but it looks like the back page of a church newsletter (presumably with more porn). Reddit is as known for UX design as Huffington Post is known for journalism. Therefore, it’s a wonder they haven’t already found their way onto one of my Bad UX Roundups, especially when hack writers are singing the praises of its “brutalist” design; when the hell did that become a good thing?

That changes today. Welcome to BUXRU, Reddit.

Reddit automatically archives every post after 6 months. When a post is archived, it cannot be upvoted, or downvoted, nor can it be commented on, or its comments voted on. If you have ever visited an archived post on Reddit, you will notice that the vote buttons are still present, however.

That’s just plain sloppy. How hard would it be to make the buttons disappear once they are disabled? I suppose the same idiots who slobber over Reddit’s lack of design will come up with some stupid excuse for this too. Just ignore them.

Important lessons

When a function is disabled, make it very apparent.
Eliminate unnecessary pixels. The vote buttons are unnecessary pixels since they don’t do anything when the post is archived.

Silvercar’s city selection is a pain in the ass.

The other day, I was looking through Silvercar’s city selection to see where they were available. The way it works is it scrolls through large vertical blocks representing each city by means of a scroll button on either side. It does not let you click and drag it on the desktop.

If I were to quickly click the right button to look through all the cities, I would reach the last city, Tampa, at which point the scroll button would disappear and my next click would take me to the Tampa page.

If I were to then hit the back button, the location of the city selection menu would be reset to the beginning of the list, forcing me to start clicking all the way through again, this time much slower so as to not accidentally hit Tampa again, and do it all over once more.

This could easily be solved by (A) having a narrow dead zone after Tampa so when I click it, nothing happens (or a number of other similar fixes), (B) remembering the position of the horizontal scroll when I click the back button, (C) including a click-drag function, or (D) doing away with this goofy horizontal scroll completely.

Silvercar opted for (E), none of the above.

Important lessons

Never reset the scroll position of a page when users hit the back button.
Anticipate user error and design error forgiveness.
Always employ click-drag scrolling to let users control the pace.

On LinkedIn’s website, if you click the Notifications button it takes you to another page instead of opening up a dropdown.

On Facebook, my notifications icon opens up a dropdown menu showing me all of my notifications. This means I can see them without having to interrupt what I am doing, be it posting or commenting. It’s just common sense.

Unfortunately, we already know LinkedIn is missing common sense. When I click the notifications button, it does not open a dropdown. It takes me to a separate page. And if I were to go to that page, it would not save whatever I was typing. If I happened to be typing something, there would be a prompt asking me if I wanted to discard it, with no option to save it.

This suggests LinkedIn are cognizant of the issue but, for some reason, refuse to implement a dropdown. Given that Facebook and countless others have already added this very basic feature, it is testament to LinkedIn’s monumental incapability that they themselves haven’t just copied it.