Ask HN: Bad user experience angers and depresses me – what can I do about it?

>So, I think to myself, is the whole world just lazy? Stupid? Apathetic? Why would somebody make this thing the way it is, and think it is acceptable?

In my personal opinion, yes, the designers probably don't care about your use case, or about the product at all.

The designers were probably happy to collect a check and go home.

I'm not a UX person by any means but do appreciate good ergonomics and begrudgingly tolerate the bad.

My first thought is that you should create a website with the worst offenders found day-to-day and tag them with the manners in which they fail. It would be both fun and crowdsource the popular opinion of what really bugs people.

The second part is why it should affect you so personally. My guess would be that you have built a career on good UX and seeing examples of bad UX undermines its importance. For this I think getting some perspective is useful. In many cases bad UX is good enough. Unfortunately you are very attuned to good/great UX and see any deviations as gross misses. It's like someone with amazingly acute pitch hearing listening to what's imperceptibly off pitch for the rest of the population. In this sense, the hypersensitivity may actually be about you. Just my 0.02

Become an open source contributor.

OSS has some of the worst UX in the world. Look at Inkscape. Look at the GIMP - probably the only piece of software in existence where the name is bad UX in itself.

But because it’s open source, you can fix it.

You won’t be able to fix all the bad UX in the world. But you could make a massive difference by applying yourself to just one project like this.

I appreciate your feedback, and you are mostly correct. I have actually thought of making a website to document "shitty" things.. from annoying graffiti, to terrible websites, to awful interfaces on popular products and software. It's an issue of time and commitment, both of which are in short supply lately.

> The second part is why it should affect you so personally.

When it's a public service where exorbitant amounts of money are spent on it, and where it needs to serve the public and fails miserably. One thing that comes to mind is NYC transit, which replaced giant paper maps on the platforms with small non-touch LCD TVs that show a blurry, barely legible map -- that is, when they are not showing advertisements, promotions, or what amounts to government propaganda. In the above example, I know the cost associated with this change was huge, and that it utterly fails at its design goal, and that had anybody loaded the image on the TV just once before deciding to spend millions replacing all of perfect usable paper maps they would have seen how awful it looks -- and yet there it is, in front of me, at every platform.

Again with the above example, I fully realize it may not even be the fault of the "designer", per se, given the budget, politics, time constraints, whatever. Maybe it's because they need to cut labor costs by having a way to update service announcements without having humans replace paper postings on every platform. Whatever the reason, though, the shitty LCD tvs are in front of me every time I'm on a subway platform. I cannot escape it, I pay to see it, and I cannot change it.

Another reason for the personal offense is difficult for me to describe, but imagine an injustice were to happen to you, and you ask the person in charge: "You know this is wrong, but why can't you fix it?" they reply: "that's just the way things are", or "well, life isn't fair".

How many designers? Who was removed during the project to work on something else? What was the budget and deadline, and how were they changed during the project? Were the designers professional, full-time designers or someone from another discipline pressed into the task? Were the design elements crafted for the task or adapted from a library? Was the design in-house, through an agency, through multiple agencies?

There is an excellent chance _a_ designer, maybe even _most_ designers, on the project were not happy with just collecting a check.

There is a good chance there was not a single designer who worked on or led the project from its start to its finish.

There is a not-insignificant chance that there were no designers "collecting a check" for the offending design at all.