When I was younger, like every other midrange Gen-Z kid, I used to scroll on Buzzfeed as much as I could in class in middle school. The quizzes, the news, and the articles. I remember there would be lists of things in articles (25+ times X did Y! or 45+ gifts to get your X on Y!), and I’d find the ones about bad design choices really funny. Seeing the assignment for this reading response reminded me of these articles, so here are my own personal favourite (well, least favourite) bad design choices:
- Microsoft Office’s “Save As” option. Schools here love using Office365, so we would use it for EVERYTHING. Class notes, essay drafts and final essays, powerpoints and even calling your friends during COVID. However, one thing that frustrated us throughout, was that in order for you to save your document, rather than letting you save it to your most active parent folders, it always, ALWAYS defaults to some remote directory, usually the OneDrive Cloud directory. Maybe I’m being dramatic, but this was a nightmare for us, because we were all living under a timer. Our schools would delete our OneDrives almost as soon as we would leave the school or graduate.
I get that this may be a marketing tactic to get people to use their products more, but maybe they could also consider getting people to LIKE the usability of their products more too. I’m not sure if they’ve made it easier now because I’ve switched and resorted to using Google sites more (easier sharing, easier saving, etc.). If I was to change this product in a non-marketing mindset, I would just make an option to save it to your folders next to the option to save it to your drive. If you want people to save it to OneDrive, you could just add that button first, but also have the other button there too.
- Apple’s alarm sounds before iOS 17. I’m an avid user of Apple alarms, and I use Apple’s alarm sound that is literally titled “Alarm.” It sounds a lot like an alarm, in more of a ‘fire alarm, I need to run’ way and not a ‘wow, I could dance myself to be awake right now’, but it was one of Apple’s most used alarms nonetheless. Unfortunately, after updating my phone to iOS 17 (I had no choice), I realized that I couldn’t find that sound unless I scroll alllllll the way to the bottom of the list of alarm sounds, and then afterwards, you’d need to press on a button called “classic”, and THEN ONLY do you see the sound. As someone who is an avid alarm user every day and sleeps through them all (thus, the need for me to set 8-9 alarms every morning at varying times), I prefer having the same sound for all of them. It’s a hassle to individually change the sound each time.
Maybe it’s not as serious as I’m making it, and maybe the newer sounds are actually better. I haven’t listened to them yet. However, I don’t like the alarm sound interface in general. Regarding this problem in specific, however, would it not be easier to start off with two categories (‘new sounds’ and ‘old sounds’) and then users could decide whether they wanted the newer or the classic sounds? Rather than listing all the newer ones and then having to scroll and then click to see the older ones, it would be easier to sort it from the beginning.
The examples in this reading were very relatable, especially the example of the doors. I hate it when I push a door and it doesn’t push, so I need to pull it, but there is no way I could have known that it was a ‘pull’ door and not a ‘push’ door. I’ve bumped into the revolving doors at Galleria so often that now I need to stick my hands in front of me so I don’t hit my head. There were some principles that were mentioned in the text in regards to Human-Centered Design, which were affordances / signifiers / mapping / feedback / constraints. I was surprised that I hadn’t seen these principles before, because they made a lot of sense to me. It’s also one thing to understand a product, but you need to be able to discover the product well enough to understand it. If a product doesn’t follow HCD and we don’t understand it, what is the point? To apply the author’s principles of design to Interactive Media, maybe it’s a good idea to keep the user in mind. Rather than focusing on affordances of a product, I should focus on the signifiers instead, because they tell you how you can use the product the way it is meant to be used, not how to use the product for every possible use you can probably think up of. I want to look a bit more into UI/UX design in regards to mapping, because I think that would be much more useful. If I take all of these principles into account, I can make projects that are not only fun and interactive, but also understandable and used the way they are intended to.