Anybody have good examples of usability disasters?
Here's an example. Hector is a manager with a large team. Department admin wants to send Hector a spreadsheet with his team's salaries. She types "Hector" in the Outlook "To:" field. It autocompletes to "Hector's Team" but she doesn't notice that until after she sends it.
I suppose it's not a disaster as such, but my personal peeve is the sort of error dialog box you'll find in most OSes...e.g. "Unable to write to disk, data may have been lost"...and then a single button saying "OK". No it's not OK!!!
The worst horror story I know is the Therac radiation therapy device that killed patients. The case study is available as well.
Some articles have mentioned the complexity of the user interface as a contributing factor.
My favorite common usability pet peeve is the Grayed Out Menu Option.
Why the hell is it grayed out? Ridiculous.
If you're looking for usability disasters, just google for "shareware" or "freeware", or anything on download.com. Sad but true, 99.9% of it looks like is was designed by a blind man with both hands tied behind his back.
The plain old 'hit return to accept default' in a dialog box must be one of the most common source of disasters (though the default is supposed to be safe, it isn't always).
The Risks Digest is also a good source of usability mistakes as well as more general risks.
When websites only work with certain browsers but not Internet Explorer, just out of principle.
I've seen some business applications requiring Flash for displaying a simple table, though that's not really a usability problem I guess.
The Apple Boot camp wizard that has no working cancel buttons in any of the steps, you're stuck with either repartitioning your drive or killing the application.
Lotus Notes in general.
Windows Vista shutdown button - you never know what it's set to do (sleep, hibernate, shut down or do the macarena) so you'll use the tiny drop-out menu instead anyway.
The Outlook inline auto-complete mentioned in the question that's not linked to the address book or GAL and will be lost if the user profile is reset. Users tend to automatically depend on that cache without realizing it's highly volatile.
Microsoft has a few to name
Isn't Lotus Notes one usability disaster from end to end? At least as an email program (which was add-on functionality for what might otherwise be a semi-decent group work system - think old-style Wiki with workflow).
sites that insist on javascript, oh wait..
worst app I've come across recently has to be scribus, which is a shame because I need to do what it does.
There is a huge list of usability disasters in Nielsen's Prioritizing Web Usability, including some that have already been mentioned.
The "Interface Hall of Shame" is worth mentioning in this context... It's a bit old, but certainly interesting!
A few examples (not all computer related) :
In December 1989 in Montreal, a crazy shooter started shooting people at l’École Polytechnique de Montréal (Engineering School). It was later shown that the police intervention was delayed because 911 needed the exact adress of the building (couldn't find it by his name). 14 students were killed that day.
Air France's Airbus A320 crashed on January 20th, 1992. The same button was used for 2 differents functions (speed and angle of descent). 87 people died.
Example with less consequences :
Joel had this one I think a while ago - but many people have pondered it... The red off button to turn ON the cell phone.
As long as we're not restricting ourselves to computer UI, how about the usability flaw that killed John Denver?
Donald Norman's book The Design of Everyday Things - is one of the classics in this field. Many, many excellent examples of bad usability design can be found in this book.
Should be required reading in all HCI and Usability courses.
Cheers,
-Richard
(amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/dp/0385267746 )
Hi Willie,
Not nearly as disastrous as some of these examples... I have a blog focused on the analysis and constructive criticism of web and desktop application usability.
http://www.allaboutbalance.com/
Rob
JCL on the mainframe is a usability disaster. Although it was good for it's time when programmers were cheep and computing time was expensive times have changed and JCL hasn't kept up do to backward compatibility.
Not a disaster, but it could have been. The Apollo 10 lunar lander span out of control because both astronauts had flicked a guidance switch that only one of them should have. In the words of astronaut John Young in the excellent documentary In the Shadow of the Moon:
"Computer systems should be user-friendly. When you make a mistake it shouldn't kill you."
Any button that requires the user to hold it for more than 1 second for it to take action.
My boss and I were convinced that the timer on both his oven and his microwave could not be canceled once started; pressing Cancel had no effect.
I discovered by accident one day that you have to press and hold cancel for 3 seconds.
Cars need not only two hands but also a foot to operate.
I'm sure that in the past 100 years of innovation, we could've come up with something better than that.
Joel already posted it on his blog a while back, but worth mentioning shutdown vs. sleep vs. hibernate vs. suspend in windows
From someone who worked on it: http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html
Dropping of a file onto taskbar item in Windows (when you want to open file in application that is currently minimized).
Microsoft anticipated that users may want to do this and... added error message explaining that it won't work.
my example is stackoverflow search features which doesn't display the number of results at the top of the page : you have to scroll down to see the number of pages before knowing if you need to refine your search or not
Nokia E61 (and many other models I guess, but this is what I have).
There are MANY places and context when there's an obvious action to be taken, and instead of offering the option, a message pops up telling you where you should go to do it (some times that involves going 3 levels down in the menu hierarchy).
I can remember two right now:
That completely sucks. If the GUI designers had that options in mind, why they didn't just offered the option of doing the reasonable task in place instead of prompting those stupid messages?
There's still another one... one would think that the appropriate place for the file browser is the "tools" menu, but nope, it's under "office".
I think the automobile "Unintended Acceleration" issues of the 1980's was a usability disaster. Without a overly obvious separation between gas and brake pedal, and a safety interlock preventing switching from Park unless brake is applied, it was way to easy to misapply the accelerator and run into someone or something. The Audi-5000 took most of the blame for this, but it really applies to all vehicles. The car companies, their lawyers, and many pro-business wonks were unsympathetic and blamed the drivers. But just like the John Denver example posted earlier, an error-prone interface that does not take into account human nature and ends up killing people, is a usability disaster. A minor re-engineering of the interface solved the problem. Today, all cars have a shift safety interlock, and the brake pedal is shaped differently and sits much higher than the accelerator.
Hi there!
I recently wrote an article on this very topic: 9 UX and Usability pitfalls, and how to avoid them. You can check it out at http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/development/usability-ux-pitfalls-howto-avoid/.
It has quite a collection of different sites which are lack usability and a good user experience in one way or another with sites ranging from IRS to Dell, and everything in between. Some of the main problems that I mention are difficulties finding content, poor layout, confusing menus and poor menu layout and design.
I hope this will help you have a good idea of some broken sites and what to avoid. I'm writing a new article on sites that do most things right now as well, and I'll be sure to link to that at the time so you have some good ideas of sites that actually work and do what they should.