The ugly interfaces
we all have to face
Why are we all surrounded by very bad design that hasn’t changed much since its birth?
We all know that there are two kinds of UI’s, the ones meant for end-consumers, a.k.a. B2C interfaces, and the ones meant for other businesses, a.k.a B2B interfaces. But there actually is a third kind, which is not only overseen most of the time, but it’s majorly underrated as well.
It’s the B2E sort. Business to Employees. It’s the interface that people need to use for their job. Those are the UIs to use if you’re a cashier in a grocery store, if you’re an accountant in a bank, or if you’re an employee at the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency for one.
Remember in 2018, when someone in Hawaii freaked everyone out by selecting the wrong option from a dropdown? “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL” is what the notification on everyone’s phone showed. This historic moment turned out to be the Pearl Harbor of bad UX. Non-designers started dropping jokes about the uncannily, dangerous drop-downs. When non-designers start making design jokes, you are either doing something very wrong, or you’re Comic Sans. In both cases — change is needed.
This is not only a bad design but a terrible naming convention as well. Reminds me of when NAVAIR & The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) released the long-waited UFO videos to the public by naming them “GOFAST.wmv” and uploading them to their online library. People still think aliens don’t exist, and bad design + naming convention can be blamed for that as well. Just saying.
Bad UI is not a drill, indeed
It’s not only the emergency squad in Hawaii that has to use poorly designed digital things on a daily basis. Most of us have to work out overly complicated, under-designed interfaces to do our job.
Bad design is as ubiquitous as good design– you realise it’s bad when you interact with a better version.
I had a side job at a grocery store for almost 5 years. Which is a very long to hold a job in my millennial world. How I did it, I have no idea, because I was surrounded by extremely bad design all day long. Even though I worked there for a long time, I never understood what most of the UI buttons did or what the words meant. I do remember how painful it is to work out one of those terminals you see below. Tapping at the right input field required a great amount of luck, finding what you are searching required a miracle, and successfully finishing a ‘flow’ from beginning to end (eg. ordering a Marlboro light carton) required a religious sacrifice.
Most of us should recognize this situation. We’re surrounded by overly beautiful websites and mobile applications that lure us to spend minutes and hours of our lives on them, but the things we need to use to do our jobs are more often terrible and life-sucking than well-designed.
Here is a short example. Every time something in a grocery store is not sold but thrown away, given for free, donated to charity, etc. it needs to be registered in the internal system. The process to do that takes a lot more time than buying the actual product. Buying the products means a scan at the counter and payment, but registering it as ‘gone bad’ takes character. You need to log in every time you use a terminal. Then identify the store ID, then navigate to the feature that lets you adjust the stock. Then find the product (which can be a tricky exercise, when there is a lot of almost-the-same but different size/taste products). Then fill in the quantity and then select a reason. There are a loooot of reasons to choose from. So many, that most people working at grocery stores will just select a random one, not to waste a few minutes of searching for a reason. Or at least, my co-workers and I did that back in the days.
It’s a very painful process that takes an incredible amount of time. But everyone working in grocery stores needs to do this almost all the time. Hours can be saved, per employee, per store, if this whole thing gets an upgrade. Not to mention that people would be happier interacting with properly working systems that help, instead of worsening, their daily activities. Not to mention the money the store will save from better productivity. Oh and don’t get me started on the reduction of food that gets thrown away if the whole system is to be rethought, not only redesigned.
It’s been a solid six years since I quit my side job at the grocery store. So you can imagine how surprised I was to spot a very recognizable bad UI in one of the recent store commercials.
See that screen on the right? It still haunts my nightmares from time to time. I don’t have an actual picture of how the interface looked like, but I reconstructed it from memory, and it looks like this:
Almost like this. Everything had a bevel and emboss effect on max. Bad rendered .png shadows everywhere. Most used options were hidden at least three layers away, meaning I had to press one of those 9 buttons on the right, then again one of the 10 options, and then again select one option. I wasn’t allowed to use a lot of options, since they were for management functions, stuff with counting money and giving people free groceries, etc. But all the options were there, filling in unnecessary physical and mental space.
You would think that ditching the grocery store for a career in the digital design world would save me from bad design. I certainly thought it would. But the design agency I previously worked for, decided to switch all the fine working apps and go for the Microsoft 365 package. And if there is one company that is the king of soulless, humanless design, that’s Microsoft. As I said, I used to work there, fortunately — not anymore. I chose sanity above 200+ features that I didn’t ask for.
How can we drill this down?
This is where good designers need to take the stage. Working with bad UI’s cannot only create (fake) missile threats, but it’s also very unproductive and it makes no one’s life easier or happier.
The question is — What company is willing to let their employees be deliberately unproductive, using systems that are hard to understand and navigate, and not improve their processes? Sadly — almost every company. What is being delivered (nevertheless if it’s for B2B or B2C customers) has always been more important than how it is delivered.
But with the rise of this whole design thinking thing, and with more and more people understanding what actually good design means and how it can help improve people’s lives, I would say that it’s time to take a good look at those B2Employee systems. To improve internally before spending so much time trying to ‘fix the world’. There are so many design agencies trying to change the status quo, but changing to a better cloud file system like Dropbox, for instance, is too much.
“A poor user interface sends a message to employees that their time and commitment have little value, and that … the problem is their own fault. Then leaders wonder why their people don’t innovate or embrace change, and why it is so hard to execute the company’s strategy”
When it comes to innovation, one thing is sure — it starts from within. Within the people and within the company. But when you gift people with a very bad design that hinders them from doing their basic work requirements, expect no innovation. Expect no eagerness and no happiness. Endless meetings with talk about how and what the user experience should be as if we’re rethinking drugs for drug addicts, but no talk about team experiences. About improving the interfaces that we ourselves need to use daily. The interfaces that are meant to help us shape and reshape the world around us.
What now?
The Internet is surrounded by beautiful websites, but our attention spans are shrinking yearly, now at a whopping seven-whole-seconds. So all those amazingly designed websites and mobile apps are quickly forgotten. Very quickly. But a lot of our work-related day-to-day interactions still happen on ‘dinosaurs age’ machines that can use all the designer love they’ve never had.
I guess it’s our job, as designers, to question these not working systems, instead of being very commercially oriented all the time. Which answers the subtitle of this article as well — Why do we still have those old things? Because we’ve been focusing too much on the shiny part that new customers see, not on the part that can make a real impact on how we (and they) do the jobs.
