THE OCCASIONAL MENTOR:
A monthly column based on questions I’ve answered on Quora, heard on Slack groups, and other career advice I’ve given over the prior month. Feel free to challenge me in the comments, if you have a different experience. Below is a question I answered in December (slow month) and an idea for the new year.
Happy New Year!
Wait. Bad UX? I guess we can start the year with something a little more aspirational first and then get on with my answer from December.
On the DesignX NYC Slack, as on many of my social media spaces, everyone is talking about what they plan to change, do, realize for the New Year. It’s a good exercise and I thought I’d share my New Year’s resolutions here.
What I really want to do is get back on top of my writing a bit (lot) more. I do this Occasional Mentor column, but realized that I had a couple months of content backlog that I didn’t publish yet. I’d like to get more articles out on other things I’m doing, especially insights from our Behavioral Economics NYC guests. I’ll be experimenting with a few other formats as well.
I’m all caught up on republishing Brett’s Forbes articles to the Decision Fish blog. Brett posts at least once a month on financial wellness, philosophy, behavioral economics and of course decision making. I’m taking the opportunity this year to redesign that space to be more useful, with timely posts, curated content and links to our Behavioral Economics NYC videos. If I find time, no…When I find it, I’ll put in some work on a much-needed revamp of this site.
I also plan to start having more meaningful F2F conversations. Some of the Slacks I’m on have used the @donut plug-in for peer mentoring/networking. It can be hit and miss, but when I do meet interesting people it’s a win. I’ve already had five meetings this month with people I met at meetups and via @donut, including one client pitch!
In the spirit of Give/Get, I encourage you to think about how you can learn from your networks and what you have to offer, because I’m sure you have a lot to share in the coming year.
How you can help? – Follows always help. Follow
Also, don’t wait for @donut to match us. Reach out if you want to grab coffee or lunch some time.
Areas where I can help? – I can help walk anyone through the wonderful world of startups and can offer advice on pitch decks, founder programs and bootstrapping. I recently went through the Startup Leadership Program and was in a couple of incubator programs including NYU StartEd. We even placed well in MetLife Foundation’s Inclusion Plus. AMA.
And now, from Quora…
What are some examples of poor UX designs in good websites/apps
I’ll clarify a previous answer. There certainly is such a thing as bad user experience and it is possible for UX Design to be implemented poorly. That said, Bad UX Design or Dark UX or using UX methods or knowledge of human behavior to trick users into actions that are against their interest does exist; however, it wouldn’t properly be called UX Design, since the fundamentals of UX Design begin with the users’ interests.
Poorly implemented UX is really anything that’s is irritating or gets in the way of the user’s goal: badly implemented user flow, difficult onboarding, “corporate underwear” (where content or structure is delivered from the corporate POV rather than the user), or anything that generally frustrates the user.
My favorite example lately of poorly implemented UX is the old Search Bar at Jet.com. They have since fixed it, but for a very long time it was an extremely frustrating experience. On the home page, the search bar is displayed prominently at the top of the screen. It used to be that when you entered a search on the home page, a new search page would open with a new search bar, forcing you to enter the search again. This was true no matter which device I used. I can’t figure out why delivering results from the home page search box should be so difficult that the user should have to re-enter a search. I was really happy when they finally fixed it, which incidentally was around the time they started delivering some items in more environmentally friendly packaging. (I could go on about their packaging issues).
The rest of the online UX at Jet.com is relatively good. I like the filtering and ratings information and the information about product safety. The cart functions pretty seamlessly and allows you to add or change items from a popout window. They could do a better job identifying second day only versus standard delivery, since there is an added cost. And their “buy more to reduce the price of everything” plays into some cognitive biases. You could call it a dark pattern, but it is not a new or unrecognizable one. Walmart has been using similar price drops for years.