David Pogue does entertaining TV shows on technology, was the techology columnist for the New York Times, and is currently a columnist for Yahoo and Scientific American. In his Technofiles column titled
Dumb Design (sorry if that link doesn't work, sometimes Scientific American locks their stuff up pretty tight) of the April Issue of Scientific American Pogue summarizes a few of his complaints. Here are some excerpts with my comments.
Have you ever tried to cancel a service on a company's Web page? You look everywhere, but you just can't find the Cancel option. It's almost as though the company has hidden it on purpose.
Pogue is much more forgiving than me. While I accept that much bad design is not on purpose, the hiding of the "Cancel" option is not one of them. Amazon Prime used to hide it really well, not sure if that's still true. If you sign up for New York Times Premiere using their webpage, do you know where the "Cancel" option is? It doesn't exist. You have to call them, go through their voice menu system, wait on hold for a while, then explain that you'd like to cancel your Premiere subscription. "Can I ask why, sir?" Hey, my time is worth nothing, waste as much of it as you like.
To their credit, Netflix makes it really easy to cancel. And their user interface is excellent! Amazon should be ashamed.
A common way to get burned on the Internet is to sign up for a free offer with no charge as long as you cancel before the free period ends. Some companies are wonderful, sending you a nice email that the free period is about to end, along with a "Cancel" link. Other companies are not so good, so now before signing up for free offers I make sure I can find the "Cancel" option first.
The last free offer I signed up for was Apple Music. It was bad when it was called Apple Beats, and it's still bad, so I'll cancel soon. There's a reminder in my calendar, including a note to myself about where the "Cancel" option is.
Apple Music reminds me that I should comment about Pandora. I use Pandora when I'm working, but I had to spend time on other issues for the past month and hadn't listened to Pandora in a while until yesterday. Maybe they've made an improvement, or maybe they changed an algorithm, but the channels now seem to be playing a more accurate
*and* larger selection of music. Nice!
The mobile era makes the challenge even greater; it's especially difficult to cram a lot of features into limited screen space.
Very true. I like a big screen and a normal keyboard, so I wait until I get home before checking stuff online. I don't feel the need to be constantly interconnected.
At the moment, millions of people, stymied by terrible software design, blame themselves. I must just be a dummy, they might mutter. I guess I'm some kind of Luddite.
Pogue is describing exactly the attitude I opened this thread to combat. People, it is not your fault! These apps (or whatever) suck!
In fact, though, if a control doesn't work the way it should, or it isn't sitting where it ought to be, it may well be the designers' fault, not yours.
Ya think?
But in other casesmany, many other casesit seems clear that the creators of bad interface design just weren't thinking.
Sometimes designers
*can* be blamed for bad designs, but we can't ignore that bad design is often not the fault of designers. Too often design projects are given too little time and too few resources. Over the years designers eventually become habituated to having only enough time and resources to do a bad job.
It makes sense when you think about how often apps are updated. Constant change to keep up with incessantly changing demand is necessary and important and has to be done fast under great time and money constraints. Most software goes out the door with designers and coders crossing their fingers that all the stuff they know is bad or wrong or broken doesn't cause too many problems.
Of course many companies have a ready solution for all the problems in their software: they make it near impossible to contact them and complain.
Pogue makes four specific suggestions for how design could be improved, but I found them either wishy-washy, too general, or vague, so I won't describe them.
But I do see a disturbing trend, and that's the emergence of some user interface standardization. Standardization is great, very welcome, makes it easier to use a new app or website, but some standardization is as bad as the QUERTY keyboard. I'd hate to see some examples of poor interface design become standard.
By the way, this standardization isn't happening because of the good graces of the high-tech industry, at least in my opinion. It's happening because underneath the surface they're standardizing on software libraries like AngularJS and Bootstrap and others. User interfaces implemented using the same software libraries will tend to have a certain sameness of structure and behavior.
--Percy
™ Version 4.2
