“UX is a joke, and it’s inexcusable”

I can’t stop thinking about how people laugh at the experiences we’re designing for them.

Here are a few of my favourite UX related jokes:

1. Sign-up friction. Stevie Martin brilliantly identifying one of the sad reasons more people haven’t left Twitter yet.

2. CAPTCHA and authentication hell loops, courtesy again of Stevie Martin.

3. Online checkout experiences that suck (featuring Nick Mohammed in a very Nate-like role… perhaps this ad takes place in the Ted Lasso cinematic universe?).

4. The myriad of awkward (now accepted) patterns and behaviours that video calls have encouraged – Design Thinking Comic: Anatomy of a Zoom call.

5. Infuriating password creation experiences.

I think we should see these jokes as a form of UX research. If something becomes a parody, then we’ve really dropped the ball, and we should be focusing on fixing it.

When I tell people that I work in user experience design, or that I help to make websites, products, and services easier to use, they love to recite their worst experiences, with distinctly implied accusation. And it’s embarrassing.

In particular, it’s cookies and pop-up experiences that most people seem to blame me for. I’ve given more mini-explainers and workaround tips on these intertwined issues than anything else. The best jesting I’ve seen about it so far is the brilliant how-i-experience-the-web-today.com.

There is no EU cookie banner law is a great recent piece that attempts to explain the issue that we actually need to address, and highlights that the cookie experience we currently love to hate isn’t even justified.

Or take password generation. At my old company With Associates, we mocked up a site back in 2011 that recreated the classic password form as an example of poor UX. This wasn’t an original observation back then, just an obvious one to illustrate the point. I imagined we would have been better at it by now. And yet…

These poor experiences are maddening to users, but the fact there are still so many is what maddens and saddens me most.

The persistence of poor user experiences – most of which we’ve known how to remedy for decades – feels inexcusable. So how do we excuse it? How did user experience become a punchline? And how might we better address the causes of these seemingly basic issues?

The repetition feels too big to ignore.

Mathew Wilson is a Stroud-based designer with 25 years of experience helping stakeholders, designers, and developers work together to solve real user needs. A version of this post first appeared on his blog, Documenteering.