Ask HN: Why is tech UX so bad in general?

The H-1B program allows companies and other employers in the United States to temporarily employ cheap foreign workers in occupations that require highly specialized knowledge. Many businesses outsource work to other countries for additional cost savings. Companies rely heavily on automated testing to mitigate the downside of hiring less skilled developers. You have worse UX but they spend less money. What can you do.

Top of my head most of it is compliance to varying laws in different jurisdictions, and of course optimization for growth and profits.

It's hella surprising how much users will keep using a product with shitty UX as long as it still solves a problem for them.

The tech world functions by selling products that are unfinished, and promising to keep working on them after you buy them. These days, almost everything is de facto early access.

>I have just tried to get my access back to my bank account.

This is related to tons of regulation regarding KYC. Nothing to do with "tech".

UX in tech is bad for a great number of reasons.

1. Good UX is hard and even harder to get right from the start. When teams* are faced with tight deadlines to deliver functionality, they invest too little time in figuring out how to best solve a problem. Even less time and effort is expended to follow up on something that was delivered in order to see if it works (it doesn’t) and how it can be improved.

2. Developers* have their mind set on optimization. This applies to ticking off requirements on a backlog item (I refrain from using the term "User Story" on purpose; the context of features isn’t properly communicated either). With UI development, there is a myriad of details to cover that require attention from everyone and developers* won’t complain if there is no detailed spec for input constraints, form validation, error handling, responsive behavior, keyboard interaction, a11y. Works as designed, why bother.

3. UI Development (for tech, the interface to the user makes/breaks the UX) is seen as "lesser" or "a complicated mess to avoid" by senior developers*. My subjective feeling is, that the seniority in UI dev is/stays behind the mean. There are more juniors around.

4. To a degree, the product quality in tech isn't great, it's not only bad UX. Bad UX is merely more visible, despite it not making the news as much as the backend engineering blunders of not sanitizing input or exposing databases to the interwebs.

5. https://userinyerface.com

* Not all of them. There are exceptions - appreciate them and treat them nicely, they are hard to replace :)*

What are the financial incentives to produce good UX? In your case, it’s regulatory compliance (KYC), which is the lowliest incentive of all. Also, customer losing access to an account happens infrequently and is not a large source of loss for your bank, I would guess. And you are strongly incentivized to plow through whatever UX they throw your way, because you literally need to do it to get your money. The incentives are aligned entirely against you in this case.

Applying for a loan, though, well I’ll bet you’d breeze through that interface on any device.

UX follows short-term profit incentives.

When UX is your competitive advantage, and especially when switching costs to another product are low, that’s where you’ll see the best UX. Google Maps and Google Search come to mind.

The dirty secret is that no self-serve tech UX is good. For valuable clients you hide the pain behind an account manager.

As an aside, get Authy if you can and replace the SMS 2FA. As someone who worked in account security, changing phone numbers is account compromise like 99% of the time.

Generally, all examples you mentioned don’t have competition or compete in different things than UX, so there you go.

One example, banks, especially old big banks. They compete first and foremost on public perception of them being secure. As we know, security and usability are almost always diametrically opposed, so it’s a concept of a bank that makes banking hard to use. Some companies are trying to change it, but it’s hard.

Banks are a something else entirely when it comes to art of horrible customer service. The other day, I noticed a "security alert" when logging into my bank account. "Someone logged into this account from an unknown device. If it wasn't you, panic" basically. I wanted to write a suggestion that they add an IP address and timestamp to make that message useful and actionable, but they don't even have a contact email address, just phone numbers (even for the IT department!). The "chatbot" doesn't connect to actual humans.

I'm guessing it's because focus has shifted from the "basics" of being able to do the actual thing to something else.

That something else is probably "having it JustWork(tm) in 98% of the cases" is better economy than "having it work in 100% of the cases". Your product will win if it works and "feels nice any easy" for most people, compared to a product that is flexible, and works and utilitarian, but maybe "looks worse" because it actually was made to work, also when things don't go smooth.

It's definitely a trend, whitespace everywhere, UI's void of buttons or obvious hints of what to do or what can be done, a sacrifice to the gods of UX.

While I do empathize with bad UX this story does feel like a bit of an unnecessary dive across services without trying to fix the root issues.

If your contact info is not stable then you are going to have a hell of a time with 2FA through your phone. There are alternatives, both hardware and software that will fix this problem for you. Have you looked at what your bank supports?

If the answer is "yes and they only use SMS based 2FA" then fine - the next issue is figuring out why your email provider isn't sending an image. Is it too large? Gmail supports multiple quality settings and has a will tell you the attachment is too large to send - for a single image you should be able to select a lower quality to send it.

This dive into other services sounds like a waste of time. "Good developers" would at least try and understand what is broken before throwing random OTS storage services at it.

You asked "in general."

It's because "UX" is presently way too full of itself; it passes off a lot of mere fashion and preference as "objectivity" or "science" and then other UX people get suckered into believing it, not just continuing arbitrary trends, but also reducing usability and optionality along the way.

Poofy vs. flat buttons is just a preference, it's not science.

So fashion is focused on instead of real usability. Fixing this will take time, and probably regulation type measures. The analogue here is architecture. It's great to make something beautiful, but if you don't have wheelchair ramps or the bars on the railing are wide enough for a kid to get a head stuck in you don't get to build the building.

UX needs more of this.

First anecdote that comes to mind is my local pizza place’s buggy mobile web UI, with generic HTML inputs for all their fields that make typing in my phone and email a pain due to autocorrect kicking in. They also shove their app down your throat on the web ui, and the app somehow manages to be even more unusable!

UX is generally OK but you unfortunately are dealing with a corner case.

So you’re experiencing scenarios which have not been taken in consideration.

99% of Programmers are not product designers. The more you look into it the more you understand why Steve Jobs is so special.

"design elements are often overlooked by founders in favour of revenue-makers like sales and business development."

https://sifted.eu/articles/startup-ux-tips/