Jeff says: Ideally, it should actually delete the message. In fact, this looks way more suspicious and is likely to prompt an awkward “why did you delete the message?” type of response. Why it’s bad UX: Informing the recipient that the sender has deleted a message somewhat defeats the purpose of deleting it in the first place. Here’s what instead happens when you delete your message: No problem! Thanks to WhatsApp’s ‘delete for everyone’ feature, you can delete it and pretend like it never happened.Īctually, scratch that last part. We’re all familiar with the following scenario: you’re drafting a personal message to send to a close friend on WhatsApp, and you accidentally send it to someone else-perhaps a work contact, or someone you don’t know very well. WhatsApp rose to fame as the number 1 chat app thanks to great UX and a clean interface -making it all the more surprising to see it on this list. Finally, we’ll offer up some key lessons to help designers to avoid making such misguided design decisions in the future. To help us along our journey of discovery in bad UX, I’ve enlisted the expertise of resident UX designers Jeff and Amy, who’ll explain why each is an example of bad UX, and how each could be improved.
The following ten examples of UX design fails are great examples of what not to do in UX-from basic blunders that any rookie designer could make, to obvious oversights from tech giants who should know better.
Typically, if the user has to dig deep to achieve what they want to achieve, feels forced to do something they don’t want to, or gets lost in your user flow, the UX design needs to be improved. Perhaps they integrated an intrusive feature, such as a pop-up, in an attempt to push a user to carry out a particular action. There are lots of reasons for bad UX: perhaps the designer prioritized aesthetics over usability -the classic form-over-function problem -or perhaps the designers based their designs on their own assumptions rather than rigorous user research. Sometimes UX design is so bad that it becomes counterproductive-begging the question: “What was actually going through the designer’s head when making this design decision?” It’s when a UX design feature has been executed poorly that it sticks out like a fox in a hen-house. When done well, UX design is virtually invisible to its users. If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, you’ve most likely been a victim of bad UX.
Ever found yourself accidentally posting something you didn’t mean to? Ever ended up in the community support forum of an app seeking answers, only to find the other users are just as lost as you are? Ever been driven into a state of frenzy by music that started playing when you entered a site because you have no idea where it’s coming from-or how to make it stop?