Week 9. Opposite examples of HCI

 

An example of bad design

Many inventions were meant to make our lives easier however not all of them succeeded in that because of bad ergonomics and interaction with the user. The same happens in IT where interaction between the user and the machine plays a major part. Some developers do not pay much attention to the design of their finished product or make it sophisticated intentionally which may bring the user experience to a disaster. One such example is the booking system of Irish low-cost airline Ryanair. 

 

Ryanair booking page

 

 

While booking, the user faces a drop-down menu with lots of important options hidden from his sight. Because of that if he would not check all the options, some extra costs will be applied. A bad user experience in such important cases as the booking is inapplicable because it requires planning of a trip and money spending what people find stressful and bad design makes the user experience even worse. I suppose the only reason why people are still using the services of this company is because of extremely low flight costs, otherwise, the bad user design would spoil the whole business for that company. 

Another bad example of the design is the Aliexpress search bar and its large variety of options. In that case, the options are not hidden in additional menus but their abundance worsens the user experience. Also, each product has additional specifications which often cannot be understood by trivial users.  Aliexpress website often presents too much useless information for the user and the important one gets lost. 

 

 Aliexpress laptop description.

 

However, a good example of search page design is Google. For many years Google tried to make its search engine extremely ergonomic, fast and understandable for any user with any experience. It does not offer search settings first place as many other searches do but tries to rely on its own algorithms which determine the most relevant answers to user's search queries. Because of that, the major part of users gets satisfied with the result in about 10 seconds.

 

 Google Advanced search

 

 For the more deep and specific search users always may try the more detailed search provided by Google, which also has a good design and it is easy to understand. In my opinion a good design and accessibility is the reason why Google is still the most popular search engine. Google Chrome web browser is also based on good user design combined with a fast and reliable application what makes it the most popular web browser amongst others.

 

 

 

 Sources:

Oleg B. (Aug 16, 2021). “27 Bad User Experience Examples”. Plerdy. (Access date: 28.03.2022). https://www.plerdy.com/blog/top-website-ux-and-design-mistakes/

JAYE HANNAH. (updated on: JULY 30, 2021). “10 Classic UX Design Fails That Teach Us How Not to Do UX”. CareerFoundry. (Access date: 28.03.2022). https://careerfoundry.com/en/blog/ux-design/10-classic-ux-design-fails/