Ask HN: Bad user experience angers and depresses me – what can I do about it?
I currently try to justify why poor design decisions are made and to give the "system" the benefit of doubt. Perhaps there are cost constraints, time constraints, or perhaps the intended use case is not the one I am in -- but a lot of the time I arrive at this conclusion: "this design is simply indefensible -- had the creator, or anybody involved actually tried the design, just once, surely they would notice the problems and fix this". Furthermore, the fixes are sometimes very obvious. So, I think to myself, is the whole world just lazy? Stupid? Apathetic? Why would somebody make this thing the way it is, and think it is acceptable?
I had listed examples, ranging from NYC subway gripes, double doors where one door is locked and the handles are ambiguous, cell phone gripes, google maps, windows, etc, but there is no space for it in this post. So, for the sake of helping me, please just assume that my assessments of certain designs are accurate, and that they are undeniably awful, and had the designer(s) attempted to use their design once they would have realize this -- and that it's not just me.
Lastly, and more to the point, I feel awful that such banalities can have such a profound effect on me. I realize that I may come off as whiny or arrogant or whatever -- I accept that. But it really, truly, pisses me off when I encounter bad user experience, and I honestly don't want it to. What can I do about this?
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[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadWhat can I do about this?
1) search for alternatives (e.g another app, not always applicable) 2) report the issue. Contribute if open source. 3) maximize your chillness: learn stoicism, meditation, ASMR, music, social interactions, problem solving etc in order to better cope with your cynicism intake. 4) change humans/society, e.g by improving education or any other hard task (can be in intersection with effective altruism goals) 5) suffer.
This is mostly a disjonction of cases of what you can do about this :}
Edit: wow this is meta! As you can see, my numbers do not have newlines. While writing it I did inserted newlines but somehow because I'm on mobile, hackernews got it wrong. This is a beautiful example of common mediocrity that cause eternal avoidable "suffering" or at least needless suboptimalities in our daily lives.
On the self-help front, you may want to pursue mindfulness studies, with an eye towards the sort that helps you interrogate your own mind about why you feel the way you do. You may be surprised where that leads. Studying stoicism or other philosophies around acceptance may also help.
However, let me both open and close with the suggestion that professional help may be worthwhile. I do not mean that in a bad way, but a helpful way. I am all about self-help and independence and learning things and doing my own thing, but there's a limit to how far that can reach and sometimes you need direct external help.
Specifically if you see it as a personal attack, consider looking up "signs of reference". It is a similar concept where you are delusional and believe that written signs are specifically designed and aimed at you.
This is probably good advice, though I am skeptical it would help. I think it would be helpful if you could tell me which elements that they may be able to help me with.
I would actually recommend taking your post as-is to a therapist as a starting session. (I wouldn't bother with the HN conversation itself.) It's a good starting point.
I'd say this... going to see a therapist once is not itself a commitment. If after the first time you don't feel like it's going to help, you will be free to stop. But I do believe there is some significant and true help that you can get from one... even if I am very reluctant to put into words the reasons why I believe that. I apologize for that, but I am trying my best to be helpful, and to not hurt you unnecessarily or out of unprofessional clumsiness.
By updating your priors as evidence comes in, your disappointment is reduced.
I see incompetence everywhere, but I don't feel angry and depressed.
One thing that I've found essential is to have a reservoir of people who are dependably competent. A few guys who can actually code, some who understand the topics I'm interested in, and some who know some fields I'm not so good at.
Well, that's where you and I differ, I suppose. It upsets me that I'm often on the other end of this incompetence, and that I am powerless to change it. My only recourse is to endure it. It feels wrong, and it bothers me.
Nobody else is responsible for your feelings.
Nothing we experience is novel.
Many solutions to our inevitable suffering have been proposed and practiced for over two thousand years. Find one that fits. They're all pointing at the same things, but wear different clothes.
“What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher? What is a bad man but a good man’s job?”
more here: https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/u.osu.edu/dist/5/25851/files/2...
Change your perspective, Always ask why to your self like If you find something dumb and also in abundance, there must be reason why it is still being used. Walk in others shoes, make your product/daily decisions thinking the same way. It will not just work first time, Every day do meditation for 15-20 minutes and think for what you saw last day and repeat, you will have your answers. May be you get new business idea doing so ;). That would be the best way to handle it in my opinion.
If you see a bad design, that you know could be better then don't be sad, you have a business opportunity!
Now I have a name for the tendency of bad supervisors that show up and announce "Things are going to change around here!" before they have any idea why things are the way they are.
Isn't that perspective represented by the first salesman? Both are seeing the same limited data and drawing a conclusion about business potential. The second salesman may be wrong, but their optimistic view is still a possible one.
Especially since we know shoes can be plenty useful in hot climates and are 99 percent about fashion anyway.
If you continue to view it as simply indefensible, you'll never solve anything. If you feel strongly about it, perhaps you can start teaching design, or raising awareness about design. But, in the end, you have this restricted circle of concern, this bad design attacks you personally and you cannot forgive it.
This piece seems insightful about this point: https://www.concordmonitor.com/Bertrand-Russell-conquest-of-...
“I am persuaded that those who quite sincerely attribute their sorrows to their views about the universe are putting the cart before the horse: the truth is that they are unhappy for some reason of which they are not aware, and this unhappiness leads them to dwell upon the less agreeable characteristics of the world in which they live.”
“Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to center my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection.” - Obviously, you've already directed your attention outwardly, but in this case, I think you need to widen your perspective and circle of concern until these issues seem small. You get tunnel vision on them.
“The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.”
“The wise man thinks about his troubles only when there is some purpose in doing so; at other times he thinks about other things, or, if it is night, about nothing at all. . . . It is amazing how much both happiness and efficiency can be increased by the cultivation of an orderly mind, which thinks about a matter adequately at the right time rather than inadequately at all times.”
Anyway, my $0.02
In my personal opinion, yes, the designers probably don't care about your use case, or about the product at all.
The designers were probably happy to collect a check and go home.
Try thinking of it this way:The closest living species to humans practices casual rape, murder, and infanticide. There were closer species, but humans likely hunted and raped them to extinction.
With these humble beginnings, it is amazing that most people can walk down the street safely (and that the street was built at all). More than 7 billion humans now live on this planet and for the most part peacefully coexist. Life expectancy and quality of life has never been higher and violence has never been lower. These metrics continue to improve over time.
Viewed from this perspective, issues of crappy UX seem insignificant.
Hope this helps
There is an excellent chance _a_ designer, maybe even _most_ designers, on the project were not happy with just collecting a check.
There is a good chance there was not a single designer who worked on or led the project from its start to its finish.
There is a not-insignificant chance that there were no designers "collecting a check" for the offending design at all.
My first thought is that you should create a website with the worst offenders found day-to-day and tag them with the manners in which they fail. It would be both fun and crowdsource the popular opinion of what really bugs people.
The second part is why it should affect you so personally. My guess would be that you have built a career on good UX and seeing examples of bad UX undermines its importance. For this I think getting some perspective is useful. In many cases bad UX is good enough. Unfortunately you are very attuned to good/great UX and see any deviations as gross misses. It's like someone with amazingly acute pitch hearing listening to what's imperceptibly off pitch for the rest of the population. In this sense, the hypersensitivity may actually be about you. Just my 0.02
> The second part is why it should affect you so personally.
When it's a public service where exorbitant amounts of money are spent on it, and where it needs to serve the public and fails miserably. One thing that comes to mind is NYC transit, which replaced giant paper maps on the platforms with small non-touch LCD TVs that show a blurry, barely legible map -- that is, when they are not showing advertisements, promotions, or what amounts to government propaganda. In the above example, I know the cost associated with this change was huge, and that it utterly fails at its design goal, and that had anybody loaded the image on the TV just once before deciding to spend millions replacing all of perfect usable paper maps they would have seen how awful it looks -- and yet there it is, in front of me, at every platform.
Again with the above example, I fully realize it may not even be the fault of the "designer", per se, given the budget, politics, time constraints, whatever. Maybe it's because they need to cut labor costs by having a way to update service announcements without having humans replace paper postings on every platform. Whatever the reason, though, the shitty LCD tvs are in front of me every time I'm on a subway platform. I cannot escape it, I pay to see it, and I cannot change it.
Another reason for the personal offense is difficult for me to describe, but imagine an injustice were to happen to you, and you ask the person in charge: "You know this is wrong, but why can't you fix it?" they reply: "that's just the way things are", or "well, life isn't fair".
This reminds me of "23 Minutes in Hell" which I've never read but was struck by the description of hell as 'annoying'. At first I thought that seemed lame, but then on further thought I realized at over eternity we could get used to many intense things. Annoying things no matter how annoying will always be annoying unless you can somehow psychologically reframe it.
Similarly, a girlfriend of mine used to always complain about a particular garage door which took forever to open. After hearing this many times and having shared her annoyance, I said that she should either do something about it or don't mention it as it will only linger in her mind amplifying it.
It's really unfortunate that these things are below the level where you're motivated to take action but elevated to the point of being intolerable. In hopes that you can get to the bottom of this, I'll just point out that you described this as 'an injustice that were happen to you' as where I would say that the injustice was inflicted on the public at large. I think it was something about you being hypersensitive to bad UX since you've come up with a plausible rational explanation of the situation but it doesn't lessen the experience. At least you don't also have an exceptional sense of smell. I'm always moving myself about in public transit to minimize my exposure to the wafting trails of former passengers.
OSS has some of the worst UX in the world. Look at Inkscape. Look at the GIMP - probably the only piece of software in existence where the name is bad UX in itself.
But because it’s open source, you can fix it.
You won’t be able to fix all the bad UX in the world. But you could make a massive difference by applying yourself to just one project like this.
You can't fix it really because everyone (understandably) wants a say in the visual and interaction design of the software, but you can't design by committee. Having many participants contributing to source code can work well, but I don't think this model works well for design.
It sounds really undemocratic (why shouldn't everyone have their say?). And it undoubtedly contributes to the stereotype of the designer as diva or precious about their work. But can you think of an open source project praised for it's visual and interaction design that was collaboratively developed with dozens or more participants? If you can, it will be an exception, not the rule.
When there are too many participants in the design of a program, you end up with a project pulled in every direction and pleasing to no-one. But if you go the opposite route and limit design decisions to a dedicated UX team, you end up generating resentment from contributors or users who feel their input is being ignored.
The people who do have the necessary perspective to see the impact of the problems are those whom they impede. These programmers don't yet have the project-knowledge to efficiently design a fix nor the relationships with the existing maintainers to persuade them that the fix is worth it. These people could produce a description of the nature of the problem. That takes effort and all it would be is...
Whining: Descriptions of problems by those who aren't taking steps to fix them.
In the same vein, you could consider learning more about why the poor design decisions are the way they are. At all levels (from building and city UX to individual products), there are myriad uncertainties and trade-offs when building something.
Some commenters are gesturing at to mental health issues - I don't know you well enough to feel comfortable with making a judgment like that, but on some level, if this is bothering you deeply, anger and depression may be symptoms of a deeper mental health issue: this might help! https://ncase.me/mental-health/#toc_4
You can add a complete list as a comment. Please?!
- Dialogs that display truncated information, but aren't resizable (looking at you, Windows).
- File Open/Save dialogs that always open to the same default location, requiring the user to keep navigating to the same directory over and over.
- Information displayed in non-selectable (thus, un-copy-paste-able) form. Generally this is seen more in desktop and mobile apps vs. the web.
- Anything that changes what I type without my explicit OK. This includes IDEs with predictive completion, MS Word's on-by-default correction, and mobile devices that auto-capitalize email addresses and automatically add a space after a period...
- "Secret Question" drop-downs where none of the questions remotely apply to me
- Required fields that shouldn't be, e.g. "Company Name"
- Short length limits for site passwords. If you're limiting passwords to (let's say) twelve characters, that strongly suggests that you're storing the password in plain text on your servers (you should be storing a hash).
- Excluded punctuation characters for site passwords. This suggests that developer(s) decided "rather than expend the one-time effort to properly sanitize/escape our inputs, we thought we'd just dump the responsibility to exclude our arbitrary list of characters on the users for all time"
If the world around you is making you angry and depressed (regardless of reasons), then perhaps consider professional help for your mental health.
It can be your environment, some places are designed by people who don't care. Some places even are adversarial.
It can be you, either from lack of something (sleep, magnesium, ...). It can be you missing some understanding. Or you just don't getting that most people either don't have your attention to details, don't care, or don't want to do anything to improve their environment. It can be you not being the intended audience. It can be you not putting yourself into the intended usage.
But either way, you can choose to accept it or change it and be proactive about it and don't whine as it reinforce learned helplessness. Pick your battles. The environment is dynamic. For example try littering and see what happens. Or you can make some improvements to it. Or you can point and shame on the internet.
Giving feedback in the real world is quite easy. You can carry a pen and a stack of stickers, or a spray paint can to mark things. For example you see ambiguous handles just mark one red sticker/dot on the handle which is closed and a green dot on the handle which is open, (or do the opposite and set-up a live twitch :) )
You can write letters to the mayor. You can also notice the positive small details left by people who care, and reward them.
You should first treat those bad UXs as childplays:
- Some of them might be working back then
- Some of them were patched so to accomplish other thing but accidentally render them unusable
- Some of them might be a result of rushed work due to pressure from higher ups
- Some of them are simply lost in translation due to time
Being angry and depressed is frustrating but you should redirect those energy to something more worthwhile.
If you really want to contribute, broadcast your intent. Get close to someone having authority to those stuffs with bad UX, use subtle social approach to get things done, consult to people who could yields better UX becaus there must be a better person doing it™.
As a child I used to be angry if my personal drinking bottle isn't put on the table from an exact distance between two sides of the table.
I use that energy to develop instinct to design a well-architectured software, maximizing development speed and customer satisfaction at the same time.
BTW, SAP is hiring!
'hope that made you smile :)
No point getting angry about things you cannot and never will be able to control. Focus on what you can control and take pride in that.