#ux fail

I used to be able to share cool things I found on Tumblr with other people. Now I can't.

They pulled a fucking pinterest. I literally never made a Pinterest account because of this crap.

Fuck you, Tumblr. Get rid of this horseshit.

They want us to innovate. They want us to come up with great ideas for product and process improvements. Maybe we’ll even dream up a new product or service. But how do we have such innovative revelations? There’s nothing to it! Just get together for an hour to do some good ol’ design thinking.

The first step is to empathize!

Instruct teams to develop an understanding of the customer/end user problem they would like to solve. The teams can brainstorm multiple problems, then down select (15 min).

This, of course, is utter bunk. Empathy is not a step in a process, and 15 minutes isn’t enough time to understand much of anything, let alone your users’ problems.

me: aaaah i love my new desktop background image! really cute elephant. 😌 ok now lets just close the settings window.

also me: wait....how?! there’s no close button in the upper left corner?! 😩

the mac: well i thought you wanted, on your OTHER connected screen (which you didnt want to change backround image on) to get a copy of this settings window! a window which does have the sought after closing button. for both those settings windows. although you didn’t want to change image on THAT screen.

me: it doesn’t make sense.

The Creative Arts Center (CAC) at West Virginia University, built in 1966, has never had way finding signage, which is odd, because the building is notoriously difficult to navigate. The majority of the building is a big circle, resulting in some maze-like hallways and room configurations. Then there are a couple of rectangular offshoots and a top floor that is only accessible from one of the main stairwells.

In the Spring semester of 2007, I taught a course in which the students designed, organized, and ran an event for high school students interested in pursuing careers in the visual arts. As the event would have participants moving between studios on different floors of the building, it was decided that signage would be necessary for a good experience. This was just one small detail of a very large project, so the signage, while sufficient for our needs, was not intended to be a longterm solution to the building’s navigational issues. Regardless of that fact, it remained on the walls for years, as some limited signage was better than no signage at all.

When I arrived for the first day of class this semester, I noticed that official signs were being installed. Here’s the sign at the entrance I typically use. The doors straight ahead lead to the building’s lobby. Note the stairs on the right.

Now, look at the sign. I’m not certain of what the 3 represents, but it may be the floor. This is the main floor, but there are two floors below. So, if they number the basement as 1, this would be the third floor. You may also notice that the room numbers are not based on the floor, as they are in any other building. The room numbering in the CAC makes no sense whatsoever, contributing to the difficulty in finding your way around. But none of that is what makes this sign suck.

You’re probably thinking that to get to the Office or Music Education Room, you should go up the stairs to the right. And the School of Music is straight ahead through the double-doors. After all, that’s where the arrows are pointing.

Well, good luck finding any of them. To get to the Office, you have to go through those double doors, and then turn to the right. If you’re looking for the School of Music or the School of Art & Design, you should go up the stairs.

I asked my students if they knew who designed the signs. They had no idea. You would think the school would take advantage of the design faculty and students. They do posters for shows, brochures for art exhibits, catalogs, banners, and websites for all of the schools in the College of Creative Arts. My class designed the college’s logo as a project.

I’ve been using Codex to automate some of my job hunting tasks. I built out a workflow that ingests job descriptions, evaluates them against a bunch of criteria and then ranks them in a priority order. It keeps track of what I’ve applied to when, rejections, and so forth.

Last week, I had just entered some new positions and noticed that an update was available. So, I hit the Update button. The app closed, and after several minutes, I realized that it hadn’t relaunched like it usually does. I clicked the Codex icon in my Dock, and it changed to that question mark icon indicating that the app couldn’t be found. I checked my Applications folder, and sure enough, Codex was gone.

I immediately queried ChatGPT to find out what might have caused that.

Codex wasn’t removed; it was merged into the new ChatGPT desktop app. What you now have is: ChatGPT — the new unified app containing Chat, Work, and Codex ChatGPT Classic — the previous standalone ChatGPT desktop app Your existing Codex projects and tasks should remain in the new ChatGPT app. Open it and choose Codex from the sidebar. OpenAI says existing Codex users can also set Codex as the default view and switch the app icon back to the Codex logo in Settings.   So the update effectively renamed/replaced the Codex app with the new unified ChatGPT app; ChatGPT Classic is your old ChatGPT installation, preserved separately during the transition. You can keep it for now, but new agent features such as Codex live in the new app. 

Huh. That’s a bit different than an “update.” So, OpenAI thinks it can just delete apps off my machine without any kind of warning. I’m not particularly happy about that, and I let ChatGPT know it.

Absolutely. An update should not silently replace one app with another and leave you wondering whether your work disappeared. A clear pre-update notice such as “Codex is becoming part of the new ChatGPT app; your projects will carry over, and the old app will remain as ChatGPT Classic” would have prevented the confusion. You were right to be alarmed when the app vanished.

You know how Facebook works. Every year, on your birthday, all the people you’ve friended (and most of whom you never talk to) get a notification and send you a short greeting. Your feed blows up, and depending on your conscience, you may spend a significant amount of time going through and thanking everyone.

That happened to me this morning, March 26th. But my birthday is on April 14th.

I checked, and for some reason, my birth date had been change from 4/14/74 to 3/26/79. I was baffled. How could that happen? I changed it back, and when I did so, it alerted me to all of my accounts that this would impact, including Instagram. It also listed my church’s Instagram account. That tipped me off.

Several weeks ago, I added that account to the Instagram app on my phone so that I could easily access it as needed. I don’t regularly manage the account—but I’m one of the people who can. As it turns out, the person who does manage the church’s account is celebrating her birthday today.

I was preparing a lecture in which I would cover various ways UX researchers are experimenting with AI. I decided I would provide AI-generated illustrations that went along with the uses. So, I entered the following prompt into ChatGPT.

I want you to create a series of illustrations for me, all in the same visual style (ink outline and watercolor illustration) and color palette. All of the illustrations will feature the same robot. The illustrations will feature two different humans. Human 1 is a middle-aged Asian woman. Human 2 is a young hispanic man. 1. A robot conducting a usability test with human 1 as the user. She is sitting at a desk with a laptop. The Robot is taking notes. 2. Human 2 conducting a usability test with the robot as the user. The robot is sitting at a desk with a laptop. The human is taking notes. Should look like illustration 1 with the roles reversed. 3. The robot interviewing human 1. They're standing at a store checkout counter. 4. Human 2 interviewing the robot. Should look like illustration 3, but reversed. 5. The robot helping human 2 look through a filing cabinet.

This was the first result—only four illustrations that don’t follow my instructions, and one of the robots is wearing jeans.

I don't want the images I listed combined into a single graphic. I want 5 separate graphics. The illustrations you created are good stylistically. But you didn't follow my instructions close enough. Try again.

Now we’re talking. Okay, this might work out. On to illustration 2.

Whoah! What happened to the robots head?

You changed the robot. Can you do that illustration again using the same robot from illustration 1?

Uh, alright, fine. Let’s move on to the third one.

Redo that, but have the woman standing with a shopping cart, and make her look like she is speaking.

Why did you change the image format?

Thanks for pointing that out — the change in image format happened because the prompt for illustration #3 called for a different scene and composition, so the model automatically adjusted the layout and ratio to fit a taller, more vertical format for the standing interaction at the store checkout. This can happen when elements like shopping carts or full-body figures require more vertical space than a desk-based scene. If you want, I can re-generate illustration #3 with the same horizontal aspect ratio as the first two images to keep the series visually consistent — just let me know!

Yes, keep the series of images as consistent as possible.

You put the robot standing inside of the shopping cart. That's dumb. The woman should be pushing the cart.

Good enough. I decided to keep that one and move on to illustration 4. It started drawing that one in the square aspect ratio. So I stopped it, and told it to use the original aspect ratio. It started again with the square aspect ratio, so I again stopped it and asked why it was using the square aspect ratio.

Thanks for your patience — you’re absolutely right to ask. The square aspect ratio in Illustration #4 was unintentionally introduced due to the default behavior of the generation tool when the aspect ratio isn’t explicitly specified on each prompt. Even though the visual style was preserved, the format shifted. To keep consistency with the original horizontal layout (like the first illustrations), I’ll regenerate Illustration 4 with the proper aspect ratio. I will ensure all subsequent images match that format too.

I'll be more specific. In illustration 4, the robot should be pushing the shopping cart. Human 2 should be interviewing the robot and taking notes on a clipboard.

I’ll take it. Moving on to the last one.

Not quite. I want the robot digging through the filing cabinet. The man should be holding files looking on.

Okay, so they took the drawer out of the cabinet, and the robot is sorting from the back, but this had taken way too long already. I’ll go with it. And this is what I ended up with in my lecture. There’s very little consistency.

For a long time, we were using Webex for online meetings at Boeing. I always had a 5-minute notification set. Assuming I wasn’t in another meeting, when the notification popped, I’d immediately join the meeting. I’d continue working on whatever I was doing until somebody else joined. That way, I didn’t get involved in what I was doing and forget to join. I’d always be on time.

Then we switched to Microsoft Teams. Teams will pop up a notification when somebody else starts a meeting that you are invited to. If you have a meeting with twenty people, all twenty of those people will get a pop up notification when you start the meeting, and it will tell them that you are the one who started the meeting five minutes early.

I’m a manager. If I have a meeting with one or more of my reports, and I start the meeting five minutes early, they may join early just because they feel pressured not to “keep the boss waiting."

This feature in Teams was probably meant to be useful. However, it doesn’t take business social norms into account. It feels impolite. It feels intrusive. So, I’ve changed my behavior. I don’t join meetings five minutes early anymore. I wait until two or three minutes before. Or, I get involved in something and forget that I’m supposed to join the meeting, arriving a minute or two late.

I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. One of my reports started our one-on-one three minutes early. I joined right after, and he apologized, knowing that I had received notification that he started the meeting early. He felt guilty about it, thinking that I might have felt obligated to join early!

This is a bad user experience—one that provides little to no value.