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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.

That would feel like a drop in the ocean. It's not going to change the frequency of my encounters with bad UX, and it's not going to change how I feel whenever such an encounter occurs.

Yeah! It's nice to be able to see the opportunity in bad UX.

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

You can't fix it really because everyone (understandably) wants a say in the visual and interaction design of the software, but you can't design by committee. Having many participants contributing to source code can work well, but I don't think this model works well for design.

It sounds really undemocratic (why shouldn't everyone have their say?). And it undoubtedly contributes to the stereotype of the designer as diva or precious about their work. But can you think of an open source project praised for it's visual and interaction design that was collaboratively developed with dozens or more participants? If you can, it will be an exception, not the rule.

When there are too many participants in the design of a program, you end up with a project pulled in every direction and pleasing to no-one. But if you go the opposite route and limit design decisions to a dedicated UX team, you end up generating resentment from contributors or users who feel their input is being ignored.

One problem with a lot of projects is that they have a poor developer experience for new contributors. For those who are already working on the project, these developer experience problems aren't impactful. So, by selection bias, the project leadership doesn't see them as a priority.

The people who do have the necessary perspective to see the impact of the problems are those whom they impede. These programmers don't yet have the project-knowledge to efficiently design a fix nor the relationships with the existing maintainers to persuade them that the fix is worth it. These people could produce a description of the nature of the problem. That takes effort and all it would be is...

Whining: Descriptions of problems by those who aren't taking steps to fix them.

I would say, try to see world from others eye. eg. If door nob is to low -> for children, Fonts too big--> For elderly, Website so dumb --> for accessibility reasons etc.

Change your perspective, Always ask why to your self like If you find something dumb and also in abundance, there must be reason why it is still being used. Walk in others shoes, make your product/daily decisions thinking the same way. It will not just work first time, Every day do meditation for 15-20 minutes and think for what you saw last day and repeat, you will have your answers. May be you get new business idea doing so ;). That would be the best way to handle it in my opinion.

Medium filled with ads and dark patterns - for management promotion

sorry, I did not understand. can you elaborate.

I think it was just sarcasm

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.

There's this story about the two shoe salesmen. The first one visited this hot climate country, and nobody was wearing any shoes. He got really depressed, said "Nobody is wearing any shoes here, goodbye" and left hurriedly with the next train. The other guy smiles arriving while looking excitedly around, and then exclaims: "Wow! Everyone is a potential customer. Nobody has even one shoe. I must set up shop immediately!"

Great metaphor, I think it's implying that bad designs could be a potential opportunity if viewed from the right perspective.

If you see a bad design, that you know could be better then don't be sad, you have a business opportunity!

Yes, and also read about perfectionism.

I'm not sure about this parable; it reminds me of Chesterton's fence. Our optimistic salesman may be completely ignoring the fact that no one is wearing shoes because no one needs or wants to.

Ah, but that is why Sales and Marketing were invented! Why else would we need to pay people to convince and manipulate other people into buying our product?

+1 for the reference to Chesterton's Fence -- hadn't come across that one before.

Now I have a name for the tendency of bad supervisors that show up and announce "Things are going to change around here!" before they have any idea why things are the way they are.

Hopefully we have now very effective sociopaths at work to fix this problem.

> 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.

Ive sent a few emails to Website Support or Newspaper Editors when I see something that is bad and I can offer a constructive solution. In a brief message, stating the subject what's wrong and a short suggestion for improvement. (maybe with an example image or PDF. Rarely get feedback, sometimes I see the issue addressed. Either way, I can at least be satisfied knowing that I did something to improve the situation.

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

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".

I really feel for the position you're in. I've been in similar ones, but in smaller, more direct scopes (e.g. within a company) regarding technical issues other than UX.

This reminds me of "23 Minutes in Hell" which I've never read but was struck by the description of hell as 'annoying'. At first I thought that seemed lame, but then on further thought I realized at over eternity we could get used to many intense things. Annoying things no matter how annoying will always be annoying unless you can somehow psychologically reframe it.

Similarly, a girlfriend of mine used to always complain about a particular garage door which took forever to open. After hearing this many times and having shared her annoyance, I said that she should either do something about it or don't mention it as it will only linger in her mind amplifying it.

It's really unfortunate that these things are below the level where you're motivated to take action but elevated to the point of being intolerable. In hopes that you can get to the bottom of this, I'll just point out that you described this as 'an injustice that were happen to you' as where I would say that the injustice was inflicted on the public at large. I think it was something about you being hypersensitive to bad UX since you've come up with a plausible rational explanation of the situation but it doesn't lessen the experience. At least you don't also have an exceptional sense of smell. I'm always moving myself about in public transit to minimize my exposure to the wafting trails of former passengers.

>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 often arrive at this same conclusion, and I find it depressing. I find it difficult to sum up the feeling beyond "losing faith in humanity".

As others stated, I think you might need to adjust your expectations and think of the big picture. Humanity is amazing, but far from perfect, and will always fall short if you compare it to some imaginary ideal.

Try thinking of it this way:The closest living species to humans practices casual rape, murder, and infanticide. There were closer species, but humans likely hunted and raped them to extinction.

With these humble beginnings, it is amazing that most people can walk down the street safely (and that the street was built at all). More than 7 billion humans now live on this planet and for the most part peacefully coexist. Life expectancy and quality of life has never been higher and violence has never been lower. These metrics continue to improve over time.

Viewed from this perspective, issues of crappy UX seem insignificant.

Hope this helps

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.

There are tons of organizational challenges that can lead good designers to make crappy product. What I had in mind was more along the lines of fixed fee development in India and China.

I'd say you have to view it differently. You said, "So, for the sake of helping me, please just assume that my assessments of certain designs are accurate, and that they are undeniably awful, and had the designer(s) attempted to use their design once they would have realize this -- and that it's not just me." So, you'll have to enlarge your context on this. You can, perhaps, try to empathize with people not exposed to the notion of good design, or people that can't conceive of it, or live impoverished enough inner lives to have no concern for it at all. You should realize that you yourself certainly have equally large and glaring blind spots invisible to you, and sympathize with the human condition.

If you continue to view it as simply indefensible, you'll never solve anything. If you feel strongly about it, perhaps you can start teaching design, or raising awareness about design. But, in the end, you have this restricted circle of concern, this bad design attacks you personally and you cannot forgive it.

This piece seems insightful about this point: https://www.concordmonitor.com/Bertrand-Russell-conquest-of-...

“I am persuaded that those who quite sincerely attribute their sorrows to their views about the universe are putting the cart before the horse: the truth is that they are unhappy for some reason of which they are not aware, and this unhappiness leads them to dwell upon the less agreeable characteristics of the world in which they live.”

“Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to center my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection.” - Obviously, you've already directed your attention outwardly, but in this case, I think you need to widen your perspective and circle of concern until these issues seem small. You get tunnel vision on them.

“The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.”

“The wise man thinks about his troubles only when there is some purpose in doing so; at other times he thinks about other things, or, if it is night, about nothing at all. . . . It is amazing how much both happiness and efficiency can be increased by the cultivation of an orderly mind, which thinks about a matter adequately at the right time rather than inadequately at all times.”

Anyway, my $0.02

Shouldn't you adjust your expectations as the evidence comes in? If you think something should have been done differently, next time don't expect so much?

By updating your priors as evidence comes in, your disappointment is reduced.

I see incompetence everywhere, but I don't feel angry and depressed.

One thing that I've found essential is to have a reservoir of people who are dependably competent. A few guys who can actually code, some who understand the topics I'm interested in, and some who know some fields I'm not so good at.

> I see incompetence everywhere, but I don't feel angry and depressed.

Well, that's where you and I differ, I suppose. It upsets me that I'm often on the other end of this incompetence, and that I am powerless to change it. My only recourse is to endure it. It feels wrong, and it bothers me.

> It feels wrong, and it bothers me.

Nobody else is responsible for your feelings.

Nothing we experience is novel.

Many solutions to our inevitable suffering have been proposed and practiced for over two thousand years. Find one that fits. They're all pointing at the same things, but wear different clothes.

Not sure it will help but as reading this, I recalled that Tao Te Ching quote:

“What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher? What is a bad man but a good man’s job?”

more here: https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/u.osu.edu/dist/5/25851/files/2...

Have you built/coded/made/delivered things to other people? Being on the other side of the table, so to speak, may help - as receiving their criticisms (and knowing internally why you didn't think of making it better, or knew but didn't have time/funding/certainty) can give a window into what was going on when you see examples of poor design. In a way, it's narrowing the window of "indefensibility".

In the same vein, you could consider learning more about why the poor design decisions are the way they are. At all levels (from building and city UX to individual products), there are myriad uncertainties and trade-offs when building something.

Some commenters are gesturing at to mental health issues - I don't know you well enough to feel comfortable with making a judgment like that, but on some level, if this is bothering you deeply, anger and depression may be symptoms of a deeper mental health issue: this might help! https://ncase.me/mental-health/#toc_4

If you want to feel worse, take an interest in something in your neighbourhood that seems wrong. After a bit of research, you will find that it is indeed wrong, so you will get in touch with your local representatives to get this obvious stuff fixed. That's when you will realise that they don't give a damn, that they won't fix it even if it is their responsibility and duty to do it, that they don't give a damn about that either, and that they have done plenty of similar wrongs everywhere around and plenty of other wrongs too, once you start paying attention to it (and the more informed you get about a subject, the more wrongs you find). Then you understand that you can do whatever you want, you're never going to get them to fix them, even though they are obliged by law to do so, and you realise at the same time that you lived happier before you tried making stuff better or just normal.

If I were you I would work it from the inside

You should first treat those bad UXs as childplays:

- Some of them might be working back then

- Some of them were patched so to accomplish other thing but accidentally render them unusable

- Some of them might be a result of rushed work due to pressure from higher ups

- Some of them are simply lost in translation due to time

Being angry and depressed is frustrating but you should redirect those energy to something more worthwhile.

If you really want to contribute, broadcast your intent. Get close to someone having authority to those stuffs with bad UX, use subtle social approach to get things done, consult to people who could yields better UX becaus there must be a better person doing it™.

As a child I used to be angry if my personal drinking bottle isn't put on the table from an exact distance between two sides of the table.

I use that energy to develop instinct to design a well-architectured software, maximizing development speed and customer satisfaction at the same time.

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.

I'd suggest you explore the world of Stoicism. You could start with https://twitter.com/dailystoic

No point getting angry about things you cannot and never will be able to control. Focus on what you can control and take pride in that.

If this bothers you enough, you may want to seek out a therapist. I don't want to and can't diagnose you over the internet, but certain phrases you use suggest to me there are some elements that they may be able to help you with.

On the self-help front, you may want to pursue mindfulness studies, with an eye towards the sort that helps you interrogate your own mind about why you feel the way you do. You may be surprised where that leads. Studying stoicism or other philosophies around acceptance may also help.

However, let me both open and close with the suggestion that professional help may be worthwhile. I do not mean that in a bad way, but a helpful way. I am all about self-help and independence and learning things and doing my own thing, but there's a limit to how far that can reach and sometimes you need direct external help.

this is correct normal people don't get angry over little things like this

Anger is one thing; it can even be productive, for example by leading OP to advocate and work for better subway accessibility. It's the taking it personally, and the (OP's word) depression that indicate a problem.

I think it depends on the topic and intensity. For example, significant anger over poor freeway design and traffic is extremely common and not a sight of a psychological disorder. Same with terrible UI on common apps

I second a therapist. I have had a relatable experience to OP which started off as small gripes with poor design to personal attacks. This became a major factor of full blown mania and I ended up in hospital for months; wouldn't recommend it.

Specifically if you see it as a personal attack, consider looking up "signs of reference". It is a similar concept where you are delusional and believe that written signs are specifically designed and aimed at you.

> If this bothers you enough, you may want to seek out a therapist.

This is probably good advice, though I am skeptical it would help. I think it would be helpful if you could tell me which elements that they may be able to help me with.

I am very reluctant to do that. I am not a therapist, but I know enough to know there's some danger in applying labels to people in this sort of situation willy-nilly. commandersaki was less reluctant, and they did pick up on one of the things I heard, so I guess I'll at least endorse that post from that perspective.

I would actually recommend taking your post as-is to a therapist as a starting session. (I wouldn't bother with the HN conversation itself.) It's a good starting point.

I'd say this... going to see a therapist once is not itself a commitment. If after the first time you don't feel like it's going to help, you will be free to stop. But I do believe there is some significant and true help that you can get from one... even if I am very reluctant to put into words the reasons why I believe that. I apologize for that, but I am trying my best to be helpful, and to not hurt you unnecessarily or out of unprofessional clumsiness.

The more you look for these patterns the more you'll notice. It's how our brains work. I myself notice a lot of what you mention as well, and I do my best to file it away in a "mistakes to avoid when I get to be the one making decisions" folder in my brain. Not much more I can do beyond that, because so much of this is a byproduct of poor incentive structures, bureaucracy, or plain negligence. Attacking it all at once will feel like trying to boil the ocean.

And specifically, on the doors issue. Vox has a great video on this.

"It's not you. Bad doors are everywhere."

https://www.vox.com/2016/2/26/11120236/bad-doors-human-cente...

I work in a public sector and I surely have pissed off people like you. I would like to give you the benefit of the doubt, that had you been tasked with creating a working thing with all sorts of budget and reglementary and scheduling constraints, that you would have succeeded at all.

I had listed examples, ranging from NYC subway gripes, double doors where one door is locked and the handles are ambiguous, cell phone gripes, google maps, windows, etc, but there is no space for it in this post.

You can add a complete list as a comment. Please?!

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"

Television has bad UX. To fix it, I can suggest: Don't use the cursor movement function. Allow the numbers to be used to specify channels, input selection, timer for sleep timer and recording duration and others, and whatever else you might use it for. Allow commands to have optional numeric prefixes (like vi does). Don't add functions that will delay after the command is entered and then execute it; if the user has not finished entering it, then the user has not finished entering it. Allow OSD to be disabled. Don't use so much fancy UI animations and that stuff. Don't use virtual channel numbers.

Good UX requires empathy. Your feelings are the understandable result of this, i.e. the lack thereof in products. In general, decision makers hardly care, even if they say they do. A good UX is expensive. Results are extremely difficult to quantize and good design is at best the promise to enhance the experience. Furthermore, the methods of the practically ubiquitous UCD are almost entirely focused on maximizing profits, not make good tools. If you want to learn or get insight how to make a difference with good tools (not products) take a look at activity theory-based interaction design.

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 :)

People would suggest two main solutions:

1) Avoid things with bad design.

2) Find a way to accept bad design, so it doesn't affect your emotions.

The real solution is to fix the world so it has less bad design. This is about both making people act more intelligently in the present, and ensuring that at the very least, people do not become stupider in the far future (and, hopefully, become at least a little smarter).

This solution involves significant changes to the entire world.

> fix the world

I'd say "combat entropy", make it a more difficult and pernicious problem.

Meditation helps compartmentalizing your thoughts, so if you meditate, you might still notice the problems and be angry at them, but you might be able to better control the anger and tame it.

Also, it sounds like you may be angered by something else, so you are on edge, and it’s easier to be angered at a door than at someone or at some situation. Going to a shrink may help disentangle the anger.

And yeah I am with you: fuck google maps.

One thing that's important, I think, is to recognize in the moment that you're getting upset, that in that moment right there, it's not the design itself that's causing you pain, but your reaction to it. It's not gonna be like a "AHA! Cured." sort of revelation, but practiced repeatedly you'll start asking yourself whether that's the ONLY option available to you, or maybe there is something you yourself can do so as to not to suffer.

The second thing, and this I learned from Yoga, is to actively look for what's okay. When it gets pretty uncomfortable, I try to do what my teacher once said, which was to focus on the bits that feel well. In your case, the door might be shitty, but the roof ain't leaking; the new maps may be crap, but the electricity is on; Google maps is rubbish, but the phone's screen is working alright. It's not that one good design compensates for bad design, it's that the poor design is enmeshed in a far bigger picture, in which there are good things, and it's your freedom, perhaps the greatest freedom, to choose where to direct the attention to.

Third, I've rarely seen a brilliant first iteration of anything. Every so often it happens, but more likely is to start with something and get better. So the map replacement is one: the vision for these screens may be 1. As a revenue stream, 2. Help the visually impaired, 3. allow more functionality - like calling a staff member quickly (whatever, I don't live and NY, this is just examples). The implementation is rubbish, but if it's the first iteration, that was always ever going to be the case.

Finally, here's a bit of mirroring, do what you like with it: Clever people take great pride in their cleverness. They like that they're smart, and they like the sharpness in their brain. And so, this often creates a blind spot to how miserable that smart brain of theirs can make them. Like in your case, where you said: "oh, I don't think treatment can help, but if you could list some ways in which it might" etc - that's your proud clever brain speaking, entrenching you in a position where you're just angry all the time. But the rest of you recognizes this is a shitty way to be living, hence you posting to begin with.

So maybe there are some time when it's quite okay to tell yourself your clever brain is actually getting in the way, and use things that are not reason-based, like trust, and emotional monitoring, and get help from someone who worked their whole career at helping people deal with anxiety and anger.

Must be nice to live such a privileged life where you worry about trivial imperfections.

seek professional help

Exercise

This is relatable!

What can I do about this?

1) search for alternatives (e.g another app, not always applicable) 2) report the issue. Contribute if open source. 3) maximize your chillness: learn stoicism, meditation, ASMR, music, social interactions, problem solving etc in order to better cope with your cynicism intake. 4) change humans/society, e.g by improving education or any other hard task (can be in intersection with effective altruism goals) 5) suffer.

This is mostly a disjonction of cases of what you can do about this :}

Edit: wow this is meta! As you can see, my numbers do not have newlines. While writing it I did inserted newlines but somehow because I'm on mobile, hackernews got it wrong. This is a beautiful example of common mediocrity that cause eternal avoidable "suffering" or at least needless suboptimalities in our daily lives.

Read a book on coping with narcissism.

Go on a very long hike in a forested nature preserve.

wow thanks im cured

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