I guess it’s kind of like being a hair stylist who can’t help but notice every bad haircut they see when they walk through a crowd of people. As a User Experience Designer, I’m constantly noticing when everyday digital tools (and even real-life objects) have significant and avoidable UX failures.
Here’s a recent example that many of you may be able to relate to. I had been using ZOOM for about 6 months before Covid Mania, and have found two things about the UI that drive me nuts.
1. PLACEMENT OF THE ‘END MEETING’ BUTTON
One thing I always seem to be doing when running a Zoom meeting is resizing and re-arranging the windows on my Mac and External monitor. When I try to resize the Zoom meeting window by dragging the lower right corner of the window I see this:
Can you guess what the UX Fail is here? What unintended action could occur while trying to resize this window? You guessed it - I MIGHT ACCIDENTALLY END THE MEETING FOR ALL PARTICIPANTS just because I was trying to resize a window on my screen.
Now the people from Zoom might argue “Yes, but if you click ‘End Meeting’ by mistake there’s a confirmation dialog afterwards that lets you cancel the action if you hit the button by mistake”. OK, sure, but why make it so easy for someone to click something by mistake? All they have to do is move that button to the left about 100 pixels and that would completely solve the problem.
2. SHARE SCREEN OR DO NOT. THERE IS NO TRY. (Sorry Yoda, I couldn’t help myself!)
I wish I had one share of Tesla for every time I heard someone ask me “Are you sharing a screen”? And I answer “Yes” - only to realize that I’m not actually sharing the screen yet. Why does this happen? I think it comes down to a mismatch between the mental models of the user and the software.
The User’s Mental Model
Step 1: Click the SHARE button at the bottom of the Zoom meeting screen.
Step 2: The software asks me which screen I want to share. I click on it, and I expect that this action will share that screen.
The Mental Model the Software Assumes
Step 1: Click the SHARE button at the bottom of the Zoom meeting screen.
Step 2: User selects the screen they want to share.
Step 3: They click the blue SHARE button near the lower right corner of the Share screen. Now they are sharing their screen.
So the mismatch is when I told the software which screen to share by clicking on its thumbnail image, I was assuming it would: A) Know that I wanted to share a screen because I started by clicking a button called SHARE. And B) I told it which screen I wanted to share. This should be sufficient information to start sharing the screen.
I also received feedback from the system on the screen that I wanted to share - it had a coloured border around it. This further supported my mental model that the process was over at that point. It turns out that the colored border CHANGES color after you tap the 2nd Share button.
By the way, I was completely blind to the fact that there was a SECOND share button that the software was expecting me to click on - because in my mental model, the process should have already been completed. (And the second Share button is small and kind of far away from where I’m clicking on the screen thumbnail images).
So it’s easy to see why I thought I was sharing my screen even though I wasn’t. But the thing that really amazes me is that I CONTINUE to make the same mistake each time I run a Zoom meeting - such is the power of mental models and why they are so important to the practice of user experience design.
I’ll continue to share more examples like this as I discover them in the wild. And I’m interested to hear what #UXFail examples that you notice! Please share them in the comments section or email fred@uxedge.ca
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