Poor UX - A True Story

Written by David Charney
Posted: May 9, 2009 (10 months ago) | 0 comments

I was at Siggraph a few years back and these guys were presenting their new usability ideas and theories that surrounded a new UI. They tried to go for the cool factor as a means for better usability but without the many other attributes they were failing fast.

One of the components they had on screen was similar to what I have created here - except for their first example had a little close button in the top right corner of the main panel. Basically there were these little info panels that could display contact information - or really any kind of information on screen. They could throw these different panels out and re-align them quickly. It sounded like the usability testing they did involved a focus group of themselves and that everything was working great except for one thing. They explained that the close button was too small in the top right hand corner of their info panel. They kept missing it with a mouse or touch screen. There can be many panels on screen and so closing them needs to be quick and effortless. Their current system was unacceptable to them and their “new” approach to usability… but they had a trick up their sleeve.

This is where they started to show their excitement. Smiles kept appearing as they looked at each other while thinking about and preparing to explain their marvelous idea. “Why does the panel have to be flat?” they asked. A good question. Why does it? So they replaced the close button with a rotate button and clicking it rotated the card around 180 degrees until we saw the backside of the panel which contains a very large, easy to click, Close button. Now they can click the button with ease.

So my buddy told me after this session that I said “What the hell?” a bit louder than I should have… So three problems were obvious to me. First, the user STILL has to click a tiny button in the corner of the screen. Two, it adds an additional click to close any panel. These clicks add up. Three, they didn’t explain who their audience was so the panel flip could potentially be a complication in the eyes of the user.

I said nothing more of this at the time but this event did strengthen my desire to pay much more attention to what I was doing within my designs. Cool doesn’t mean functional. Animated doesn’t mean efficient. They have their time and place and that is now when I use them.