I recently listened to a podcast by Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. from the UIE Userability podcast series where they answer questions from others in the field. This series has been both entertaining and informative, much like other UIE podcasts.
The question posed to Jared and Robert Hoekman, Jr. in this particular podcast was “Why do so many bad designs exist 20 years after Donald Norman’s legendary book on design – Design of everyday things (DOET). It was a lively discussion that talked about, among others, how many badly designed doors (a main point of discussion in Don Norman’s book used to illustrate the principle of affordance) still exist today.
Even though a newbie to the user experience field, I have certainly become more attuned to design elements in every day life since entering the field. I have also since changed my thinking from blaming myself or feeling stupid for not being able to use an object to critically thinking about the design of that object. Countless times, I too have tried to push open doors that need to be pulled because the design provided no or wrong affordance on how to open it. This problem is of course not limited to the design of doors. Websites, software applications, electronic equipments, other architectural elements, vehicles and many other everyday things follow this trend.
Jared, Robert and the caller Scott Berkun ended with the conclusion that the reason for this long history of repeated bad design practices was the fact that as human beings we put up with a lot of things in life. If we fail at accomplishing something because of a design flaw, we learn a way around it so that we don’t fail at it again instead of fixing the design mistake itself. How many times have we all done this? I think oftentimes we do it without even giving it a second thought because we are always trying to get through, moving along, adapting to things as they are without challenging them to make the experience better.
I’m not the first to log bad design and make people aware of their existence. Mark Hurst’s blog on product design and the FAIL blog (hilarious blog featuring design failures as well as everything else in life) have done it quite well. I am hoping to take this one step forward. Whenever possible I plan to contact the responsible parties with recommendations on how to improve their design with the hope of improving their user’s experiences. This is probably a more realistic goal for websites and web applications than any other design domain.
If you come across such design failures, be it a website, software or any other aspect of life, send them along with your experiences and I would be happy to feature it on my blog. If together you and I can do something to improve it’s user experience, we have done well. The more users demand improved experiences, the more designers are challenged to create better designs that result in better user experiences.
Speaking of doors, enjoy this clip that takes the theory of affordance home.
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