Design vs Art Blog

Intentional bad design is also a horrible way of taking advantage of users. The better example now a days is the myspace transmissions website.

The whole site is horrible and full of buttons that don’t do what they are supposed to do, like a virtual equalizer and a fake volume control.

The worst part is two controls labeled as “videos” and “pics”. They are there to confuse users and when they click they are taken to another page (instead of doing something with the interface). If you do that your users will be afraid of clicking every single control of the interface. Even worse, if some controls don’t have a label and are not self explanatory. Terrible web design, horrible usability.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Please don’t be so innovative creating buttons! I was checking Future Scanner, something like Digg but for future news. The idea is really cool but the interface design is just horrible.

Look at this examples. Trying to click on the arrows to vote for a particular article, a message appears reading “Login”. I understood the message, but when I tried to click on that word, it just disappeared. Please, try to avoid that kind of interface behavior.

Then I found the advanced filter button. It has an arrow pointing down that made me think a drop down menu would appear. Well, I was wrong. That button took me to another place.

This funky buttons might require a lot of effort and confuse users, so in order to improve usability, I would recommend you to stick to the normal solutions.

.

Popularity: 3% [?]