Unless human learn to control machines through their minds we will always need a well-designed control panel or a menu to perform certain tasks. A bad design can have minor implications like pushing a door instead of pulling because the signs are mostly confusing or more serious causing physical harm. You would think that companies hire the best designers to come up with great user experience but they don’t. Let’s go back in history and take a look at few examples of bad design disasters.

1.  Watch out that glass door

   Apple’s latest state of the art designs Apple Park in California is a spaceship look alike circular glass building. The custom-made glass is so flawless that on the very first day of occupancy, seven people reported incidents where they walked right into the glass wall. And that’s just the number that was reported. The glass is so impeccable that employees keep bumping into it. To avoid this, yellow post-its were used by desperate employees but these were later removed as they tainted the perfect glass walls. Talk about design excellence.

   It seems Apple did not keep employee safety in mind when designing this. It’s a perfect example of excellent UI but not so excellent UX.

2. Miss Colombia or Miss Philippines

   Does anyone remember the night of Miss Universe 2015 crowning?

   Yes, that’s right I am talking about the night when Steve Harvey announced the wrong Miss Universe and embarrassed himself. Take a look at the cue card, this might give you an idea what went down that night. Harvey probably confused 1st runner-up as the 1st position and totally ignored the right side of the page. Could happen to anyone? Maybe, maybe not. But why design such a product that has the slightest possibility of confusing your user and that too at an event which has international visibility.

   
   Image Source

   
   Image Source

   Sorry, Harvey! Just a bad day

   

   What did this bad design cost people?

   An extreme embarrassment to Steve Harvey and extreme disappointment to Miss Colombia and her fans.

3. SUV that killed Star Trek star Anton Yelchin

   In 2015 Anton Yelchin was found crushed between his 5,000 pound Jeep Grand Cherokee and a metal gate. Anton exited his car to close his house gate thinking that the car was in park mode whereas it was actually in reverse or neutral. The car rolled down the steep driveway and crushed Yelchin against the metal gate causing instant death. After this incident, 1.1 million vehicles with monostable shifter were called off the streets. Autoweek reported monostable shifter as a fault of design rather than engineering. The shifter returned to default position without giving the driver any feedback about the selected gear state.  This design had led to 100’s of accidents and around 40 injuries.

Bad Design Affects Business

1. Google Wave
   Google launched a product called Google Wave which had features like mailing, instant messaging, document sharing, social networking, blogging. Wave was so complicated that a 195-page user guide on how to use Wave is available on Amazon. The learning curve for Wave was too steep, the product failed even before people could realize what it was about.  This screenshot of Wave gives an idea about the user experience it had, that’s too much data for my small brain.
2. Nokia 7600 

   

   In 2003 Nokia designed the strangest looking phone, Nokia 7600 which looked like a teardrop. This phone had a standard size screen for that time but figuring out how to hold this phone or fit into your pocket was a great labyrinth. Single-handed texting on this phone was out of the question. Plus it had excessive weight with a very poor display. No doubt this product was a huge flop. Through the years Nokia has lost its market and this can be credited to designing such inconvenient handsets to some extent. Bad designs hurt your business. Maybe you don’t see the effects right away but in the long run, you will realize that you are losing customers. If the customer does not know how to use your product they will find an alternative to it. If your designers are not prototyping and testing their design that leads to bug fixes in the development phase or even worse in production which cost 10 times or 100 time more respectively.

Good Design Increases Customer Satisfaction

If we could inference that one thing from these examples that would be, design is important and not just by the looks of it but the usability of it. Do not limit to designing products that look amazing, the actual workmanship lies in giving the functionality of the product a wow factor. And this is what that retains users. If you are an online marketeer your UI and UX is your brand, conversion rates depend on the usability of your website.

It’s not the X-Factor, it’s the UX-Factor

Facebook recently added a functionality where you can react to a photo or post with an emotion. When I see a post on my FB wall different emotions cross my mind, sometimes I find that post hilarious, sometimes I find it offensive, so now FB has given me the option to show my exact emotion with one click(commenting takes effort, think about what you will write, spell checks, check the grammar. ugh!). This feature made me go WOW!

What Constitutes a Good Design?

A good design should be four things

1. Functional – the design should solve the given problem
2. Intuitive – the design should not confuse the user. Ease of use is important
3. Aesthetic – beautification of your design is necessary so that it does not put off the user. Beautiful objects fascinate and grasp user attention
4. Long-Lasting – designs should be durable so that if required more could be built on top of it and not throw away with changing trend

Avoid bad design by following these basic rules:

1. Your users are already accustomed to certain ways, don’t deviate from the usual design unless you are making their life easier. As we say in the design terminology:
   “Designer’s model of a product should align with the mental model of their target user”
2. Always test your products and ideas before getting it into production. Technology has made it so much easier now, tools like UXaudit.io can help you in user and usability testing of your product with real-time users. Compare designs with AB preference tests, get the first impression of your design with the first glance test and many other like click tests and questionnaire tests. Early feedback can help you improve your designs in a more cost-effective way. Fail early and fail often, that is the golden rule for delivering a quality product.

   Analysis of a questionnaire usability test in UXaudit.io

   Also see:

   Sample test results for an AB test conducted using design wireframes

   Sample test results for a Click test conducted using design wireframes

   Sample test results for a Question test conducted using design wireframes

   Sample test results for a First glance test conducted using design wireframes

    

3. Boil it down to your target users. Different people have different tastes and your design may not necessarily cater to the masses of people. Don’t ask people already associated with the product to test, take unbiased opinions, a fresh set of eyes can tell you about the obvious things that you may have missed.

With this I think, we all can surely come to a conclusion that the cost of delivering a bad design is much more than the cost of having a good designer on board.