Horrible User Experience Design…On Purpose
by Teresa BrazenOkay, so I had to laugh at this or I might have gone postal on my coworkers. Today I spent about 20 minutes trying desperately to cancel 2 magazine subscriptions. I was dumb enough to sign up for them as a “free” add-on to another purchase a long time ago — 6 months for free, thereafter auto-renewal. Ah, sweet auto-renewal…how I loathe you.
Let me see if I can help you envision the pain:
1. Renewal charges show up on my credit card (I would have cancelled prior to renewal if I could have ever figured out where to call. But that’s another horrible user experience blog post. Let’s move on.)
2. I call the number listed on the charge.
3. I am asked by an automated voice if I want to use voice prompts or keypad. I choose keypad.
4. I subsequently end up in a system that asks me for voice prompts at every step in the process with keypad as an option only a couple of times.
5. The system keeps telling me it is sorry that it doesn’t understand my voice.
6. I repeat each one of my answers, typically, 4 times before there is recognition.
7. I have to go through 6-7 questions/steps before I can actually cancel my subscription. (Since the system struggles to recognize my responses, this is looking like about 24 attempts to answer questions by this point…)
8. At each one of those steps I hear a long spiel about some fantastic offer that I now have to extend my subscription…I have to listen to the whole thing before I can move on to the next step in the cancellation process.
9. And here’s the kicker: I can only cancel one magazine at a time. So, I have to repeat the entire process for my second magazine subscription. That’s about 48 steps to cancellation…
And in the end, I am not actually 100% sure that the subscriptions were cancelled. It seems I’m getting a refund for one, but not the other (who knows why). Exasperated, I do exactly what they hoped I would and give up. I just can’t take it. Objective achieved. I wonder if Money Magazine and National Geographic Traveler know or care that this vendor designed a system to lock me in.
I have no idea what name of this company is…but if you feel like reminding yourself that yes, user experience designers do, in fact, have the opportunity to make the world a worse or better place…please call this number and enjoy!
Entries (RSS)
July 16th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
There’s many cases of intentionally bad or difficult user experiences. Cancellation is often one of them; canceling your AOL service is perhaps the extreme example. Another case is McDonald’s chairs, which are supposedly intentionally uncomfortable (so you’ll not sit in the restaurant for too long taking up space) and supposedly intentionally heavy (so you won’t re-arrange the chairs).
July 16th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
Ah, that explains why I always feel the impulse to race out of McDonalds as soon as I get my order but ignore my impulse to grab a chair and take it with me on my way out.
July 17th, 2009 at 7:56 am
I do KNOW a few places that have made call centers or other customer-service direct interactions with additional friction, in the hope you’ll abandon it. Seems usually foolish, as all you are is more dissatisfied, and how can that help your brand in the long run.
Never sure about the fast food comfort, etc. but I do know of some guys working on (e.g.) university residence hall common area furniture, that made it all too difficult to move so it would stay there, too large to fit through doors so it could not be stolen even with effort, etc. This was ur-slanted-design, now that I think of it. Not “bad” so much as discouraging unwanted behavior in favor of encouraging desired behavior.
Whether the desired behavior is “good” or not is a moral and ethical question, not a design question.
July 22nd, 2009 at 7:50 am
Another example is casino design… mirrors on walls and ceilings, circuitous pathways, obscurely located exits. Deliberate confusion/disorientation.
Clearly, talented designers created these patterns to further the “business goals” of getting people to hang around and throw more money into slot machines. Not particularly customer focused, especially for the common use case of “get me to a restroom”…