Product Suicide Via User Experience

MySpace made a slew of mistakes, while Facebook (and recently, G+) have enough of the right moves, arguably.  Some friends’ “pet hates” in user experience (UX):

From Tom Harrington, Independent iOS developer: Google Wave.  Whether the goals were worthy or useful quickly became irrelevant in the face of a confusing, annoying user experience. I always found it difficult to tell if anything new had appeared in a wave, and if so what it was.  The description of Wave sounded promising but the implementation was awful.”

To add some personal experience, a few of us in KdL Web2.0 Social Media networking group tested Google Wave, found it to be more nuisance than utility.

From Kevin Ernest Long, “Geek at Large”:  “Older examples of apps that failed to evolve fast enough. Lotus 123. Word Perfect. UX was not the only factor but it was a significant one. Good UX depends a primarily on who your users are. If you want into a large emerging market you need to design for them, possibly even at the expense of annoying a small loyal existing following.”

Up to the moment, an anonymous user of Quora provided thoughts on the UX goodness and poor terminology:

Good: Visual design.

Not good: Language choices. “Limited”, “Extended Circles”, “Public”… really? Does anyone outside of the Google bubble know what the heck those things mean without sitting down to think about it? If even 5% of your users confuse Public with Your Circles then you have a huge privacy fiasco waiting to happen. I’m calling this the worst because it is virtually costless to fix.

Even less good:  Confusing the Friend/Follow function (and calling it “Add”).  Does anyone know what “Add” means?

Three directions on this sign, on a two-way road = broken UX

To close, I like what Jared Zimmerman, Interaction Designer wrote on the subject: “…the ‘old guard’ of IxD people came to interaction design from a liberal arts or engineering background.  Many new UX professionals are coming to the field from other design based fields and are much more adept at explaining their ideas in a much more aesthetically pleasing way.

It can be hard to separate the meaning from the message but it is often very important in this field to understand that many of these people do have brilliant ideas but lack the visual design skills to communicate them in an ideal fashion.”

About Saul Fleischman

Working with social web apps developers on getting things made: my role tends to be functionality ideation, user experience, and also, marketing communications and community development.

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