Title: 6 Disasters Caused by Poorly Designed User Interfaces
Context: Don’t think good user experience matters? Care to stake your life on it? Because you just might lose it.
Synopsis: Usually, when someone makes a poor user experience design decision the outcome is, at worst, a string of expletives whenever a user is forced to engage with the design in question. We can live with that. Mostly because we don’t have to sit there and listen to the unhappy user and even if we send some researcher to go talk to them by the time the report gets written up the string of expletives has most likely been replaced with something more professional sounding such as “the user exhibits frustration when engaging with feature A”. But what happens when one of these “frustrations” leads to disaster on a massive scale and/or loss of life? It’s kind of hard to bury that feedback in a usability report. “Human error” often gets the blame in situations such as these when actually “user experience designer error” is more apropos. With a little luck you’ll never kill anyone with any of your designs…but you could. So have a great day at work!
Best Bit: “Hey, you know how in your car you have a little light that tells you when somebody’s door or the trunk is open? Yeah, this ship didn’t have that.”
via cracked.com
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