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

Sadly the most helpful comments will be voted to the bottom.

If the world around you is making you angry and depressed (regardless of reasons), then perhaps consider professional help for your mental health.

Here are a few of mine:

- Dialogs that display truncated information, but aren't resizable (looking at you, Windows).

- File Open/Save dialogs that always open to the same default location, requiring the user to keep navigating to the same directory over and over.

- Information displayed in non-selectable (thus, un-copy-paste-able) form. Generally this is seen more in desktop and mobile apps vs. the web.

- Anything that changes what I type without my explicit OK. This includes IDEs with predictive completion, MS Word's on-by-default correction, and mobile devices that auto-capitalize email addresses and automatically add a space after a period...

- "Secret Question" drop-downs where none of the questions remotely apply to me

- Required fields that shouldn't be, e.g. "Company Name"

- Short length limits for site passwords. If you're limiting passwords to (let's say) twelve characters, that strongly suggests that you're storing the password in plain text on your servers (you should be storing a hash).

- Excluded punctuation characters for site passwords. This suggests that developer(s) decided "rather than expend the one-time effort to properly sanitize/escape our inputs, we thought we'd just dump the responsibility to exclude our arbitrary list of characters on the users for all time"

> Our optimistic salesman may be completely ignoring the fact that no one is wearing shoes because no one needs or wants to.

Isn't that perspective represented by the first salesman? Both are seeing the same limited data and drawing a conclusion about business potential. The second salesman may be wrong, but their optimistic view is still a possible one.

Especially since we know shoes can be plenty useful in hot climates and are 99 percent about fashion anyway.

It can be a combination of multiple things.

It can be your environment, some places are designed by people who don't care. Some places even are adversarial.

It can be you, either from lack of something (sleep, magnesium, ...). It can be you missing some understanding. Or you just don't getting that most people either don't have your attention to details, don't care, or don't want to do anything to improve their environment. It can be you not being the intended audience. It can be you not putting yourself into the intended usage.

But either way, you can choose to accept it or change it and be proactive about it and don't whine as it reinforce learned helplessness. Pick your battles. The environment is dynamic. For example try littering and see what happens. Or you can make some improvements to it. Or you can point and shame on the internet.

Giving feedback in the real world is quite easy. You can carry a pen and a stack of stickers, or a spray paint can to mark things. For example you see ambiguous handles just mark one red sticker/dot on the handle which is closed and a green dot on the handle which is open, (or do the opposite and set-up a live twitch :) )

You can write letters to the mayor. You can also notice the positive small details left by people who care, and reward them.

Whatever you think is the reason, you are depressed. Against depression and known to work, there is: - physical exercise - contact with nature - professional advice

BTW, SAP is hiring!

'hope that made you smile :)