Bad user experience angers and depresses me – what can I do about it?

Become an open source contributor.

OSS has some of the worst UX in the world. Look at Inkscape. Look at the GIMP - probably the only piece of software in existence where the name is bad UX in itself.

But because it’s open source, you can fix it.

You won’t be able to fix all the bad UX in the world. But you could make a massive difference by applying yourself to just one project like this.

Sadly the most helpful comments will be voted to the bottom.

If the world around you is making you angry and depressed (regardless of reasons), then perhaps consider professional help for your mental health.

I would say, try to see world from others eye. eg. If door nob is to low -> for children, Fonts too big--> For elderly, Website so dumb --> for accessibility reasons etc.

Change your perspective, Always ask why to your self like If you find something dumb and also in abundance, there must be reason why it is still being used. Walk in others shoes, make your product/daily decisions thinking the same way. It will not just work first time, Every day do meditation for 15-20 minutes and think for what you saw last day and repeat, you will have your answers. May be you get new business idea doing so ;). That would be the best way to handle it in my opinion.

It can be a combination of multiple things.

It can be your environment, some places are designed by people who don't care. Some places even are adversarial.

It can be you, either from lack of something (sleep, magnesium, ...). It can be you missing some understanding. Or you just don't getting that most people either don't have your attention to details, don't care, or don't want to do anything to improve their environment. It can be you not being the intended audience. It can be you not putting yourself into the intended usage.

But either way, you can choose to accept it or change it and be proactive about it and don't whine as it reinforce learned helplessness. Pick your battles. The environment is dynamic. For example try littering and see what happens. Or you can make some improvements to it. Or you can point and shame on the internet.

Giving feedback in the real world is quite easy. You can carry a pen and a stack of stickers, or a spray paint can to mark things. For example you see ambiguous handles just mark one red sticker/dot on the handle which is closed and a green dot on the handle which is open, (or do the opposite and set-up a live twitch :) )

You can write letters to the mayor. You can also notice the positive small details left by people who care, and reward them.

There's this story about the two shoe salesmen. The first one visited this hot climate country, and nobody was wearing any shoes. He got really depressed, said "Nobody is wearing any shoes here, goodbye" and left hurriedly with the next train. The other guy smiles arriving while looking excitedly around, and then exclaims: "Wow! Everyone is a potential customer. Nobody has even one shoe. I must set up shop immediately!"

Ive sent a few emails to Website Support or Newspaper Editors when I see something that is bad and I can offer a constructive solution. In a brief message, stating the subject what's wrong and a short suggestion for improvement. (maybe with an example image or PDF. Rarely get feedback, sometimes I see the issue addressed. Either way, I can at least be satisfied knowing that I did something to improve the situation.

I'm not a UX person by any means but do appreciate good ergonomics and begrudgingly tolerate the bad.

My first thought is that you should create a website with the worst offenders found day-to-day and tag them with the manners in which they fail. It would be both fun and crowdsource the popular opinion of what really bugs people.

The second part is why it should affect you so personally. My guess would be that you have built a career on good UX and seeing examples of bad UX undermines its importance. For this I think getting some perspective is useful. In many cases bad UX is good enough. Unfortunately you are very attuned to good/great UX and see any deviations as gross misses. It's like someone with amazingly acute pitch hearing listening to what's imperceptibly off pitch for the rest of the population. In this sense, the hypersensitivity may actually be about you. Just my 0.02

>So, I think to myself, is the whole world just lazy? Stupid? Apathetic? Why would somebody make this thing the way it is, and think it is acceptable?

In my personal opinion, yes, the designers probably don't care about your use case, or about the product at all.

The designers were probably happy to collect a check and go home.

This is relatable!

What can I do about this?

1) search for alternatives (e.g another app, not always applicable) 2) report the issue. Contribute if open source. 3) maximize your chillness: learn stoicism, meditation, ASMR, music, social interactions, problem solving etc in order to better cope with your cynicism intake. 4) change humans/society, e.g by improving education or any other hard task (can be in intersection with effective altruism goals) 5) suffer.

This is mostly a disjonction of cases of what you can do about this :}

Edit: wow this is meta! As you can see, my numbers do not have newlines. While writing it I did inserted newlines but somehow because I'm on mobile, hackernews got it wrong. This is a beautiful example of common mediocrity that cause eternal avoidable "suffering" or at least needless suboptimalities in our daily lives.

I'd say you have to view it differently. You said, "So, for the sake of helping me, please just assume that my assessments of certain designs are accurate, and that they are undeniably awful, and had the designer(s) attempted to use their design once they would have realize this -- and that it's not just me." So, you'll have to enlarge your context on this. You can, perhaps, try to empathize with people not exposed to the notion of good design, or people that can't conceive of it, or live impoverished enough inner lives to have no concern for it at all. You should realize that you yourself certainly have equally large and glaring blind spots invisible to you, and sympathize with the human condition.

If you continue to view it as simply indefensible, you'll never solve anything. If you feel strongly about it, perhaps you can start teaching design, or raising awareness about design. But, in the end, you have this restricted circle of concern, this bad design attacks you personally and you cannot forgive it.

This piece seems insightful about this point: https://www.concordmonitor.com/Bertrand-Russell-conquest-of-...

“I am persuaded that those who quite sincerely attribute their sorrows to their views about the universe are putting the cart before the horse: the truth is that they are unhappy for some reason of which they are not aware, and this unhappiness leads them to dwell upon the less agreeable characteristics of the world in which they live.”

“Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to center my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection.” - Obviously, you've already directed your attention outwardly, but in this case, I think you need to widen your perspective and circle of concern until these issues seem small. You get tunnel vision on them.

“The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.”

“The wise man thinks about his troubles only when there is some purpose in doing so; at other times he thinks about other things, or, if it is night, about nothing at all. . . . It is amazing how much both happiness and efficiency can be increased by the cultivation of an orderly mind, which thinks about a matter adequately at the right time rather than inadequately at all times.”

Anyway, my $0.02

Shouldn't you adjust your expectations as the evidence comes in? If you think something should have been done differently, next time don't expect so much?

By updating your priors as evidence comes in, your disappointment is reduced.

I see incompetence everywhere, but I don't feel angry and depressed.

One thing that I've found essential is to have a reservoir of people who are dependably competent. A few guys who can actually code, some who understand the topics I'm interested in, and some who know some fields I'm not so good at.

Not sure it will help but as reading this, I recalled that Tao Te Ching quote:

“What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher? What is a bad man but a good man’s job?”

more here: https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/u.osu.edu/dist/5/25851/files/2...

Have you built/coded/made/delivered things to other people? Being on the other side of the table, so to speak, may help - as receiving their criticisms (and knowing internally why you didn't think of making it better, or knew but didn't have time/funding/certainty) can give a window into what was going on when you see examples of poor design. In a way, it's narrowing the window of "indefensibility".

In the same vein, you could consider learning more about why the poor design decisions are the way they are. At all levels (from building and city UX to individual products), there are myriad uncertainties and trade-offs when building something.

Some commenters are gesturing at to mental health issues - I don't know you well enough to feel comfortable with making a judgment like that, but on some level, if this is bothering you deeply, anger and depression may be symptoms of a deeper mental health issue: this might help! https://ncase.me/mental-health/#toc_4

The more you look for these patterns the more you'll notice. It's how our brains work. I myself notice a lot of what you mention as well, and I do my best to file it away in a "mistakes to avoid when I get to be the one making decisions" folder in my brain. Not much more I can do beyond that, because so much of this is a byproduct of poor incentive structures, bureaucracy, or plain negligence. Attacking it all at once will feel like trying to boil the ocean.

And specifically, on the doors issue. Vox has a great video on this.

"It's not you. Bad doors are everywhere."

https://www.vox.com/2016/2/26/11120236/bad-doors-human-cente...

Television has bad UX. To fix it, I can suggest: Don't use the cursor movement function. Allow the numbers to be used to specify channels, input selection, timer for sleep timer and recording duration and others, and whatever else you might use it for. Allow commands to have optional numeric prefixes (like vi does). Don't add functions that will delay after the command is entered and then execute it; if the user has not finished entering it, then the user has not finished entering it. Allow OSD to be disabled. Don't use so much fancy UI animations and that stuff. Don't use virtual channel numbers.

If you want to feel worse, take an interest in something in your neighbourhood that seems wrong. After a bit of research, you will find that it is indeed wrong, so you will get in touch with your local representatives to get this obvious stuff fixed. That's when you will realise that they don't give a damn, that they won't fix it even if it is their responsibility and duty to do it, that they don't give a damn about that either, and that they have done plenty of similar wrongs everywhere around and plenty of other wrongs too, once you start paying attention to it (and the more informed you get about a subject, the more wrongs you find). Then you understand that you can do whatever you want, you're never going to get them to fix them, even though they are obliged by law to do so, and you realise at the same time that you lived happier before you tried making stuff better or just normal.

I'd suggest you explore the world of Stoicism. You could start with https://twitter.com/dailystoic

No point getting angry about things you cannot and never will be able to control. Focus on what you can control and take pride in that.

If I were you I would work it from the inside

You should first treat those bad UXs as childplays:

- Some of them might be working back then

- Some of them were patched so to accomplish other thing but accidentally render them unusable

- Some of them might be a result of rushed work due to pressure from higher ups

- Some of them are simply lost in translation due to time

Being angry and depressed is frustrating but you should redirect those energy to something more worthwhile.

If you really want to contribute, broadcast your intent. Get close to someone having authority to those stuffs with bad UX, use subtle social approach to get things done, consult to people who could yields better UX becaus there must be a better person doing it™.

As a child I used to be angry if my personal drinking bottle isn't put on the table from an exact distance between two sides of the table.

I use that energy to develop instinct to design a well-architectured software, maximizing development speed and customer satisfaction at the same time.

If this bothers you enough, you may want to seek out a therapist. I don't want to and can't diagnose you over the internet, but certain phrases you use suggest to me there are some elements that they may be able to help you with.

On the self-help front, you may want to pursue mindfulness studies, with an eye towards the sort that helps you interrogate your own mind about why you feel the way you do. You may be surprised where that leads. Studying stoicism or other philosophies around acceptance may also help.

However, let me both open and close with the suggestion that professional help may be worthwhile. I do not mean that in a bad way, but a helpful way. I am all about self-help and independence and learning things and doing my own thing, but there's a limit to how far that can reach and sometimes you need direct external help.

I work in a public sector and I surely have pissed off people like you. I would like to give you the benefit of the doubt, that had you been tasked with creating a working thing with all sorts of budget and reglementary and scheduling constraints, that you would have succeeded at all.

Good UX requires empathy. Your feelings are the understandable result of this, i.e. the lack thereof in products. In general, decision makers hardly care, even if they say they do. A good UX is expensive. Results are extremely difficult to quantize and good design is at best the promise to enhance the experience. Furthermore, the methods of the practically ubiquitous UCD are almost entirely focused on maximizing profits, not make good tools. If you want to learn or get insight how to make a difference with good tools (not products) take a look at activity theory-based interaction design.

I had listed examples, ranging from NYC subway gripes, double doors where one door is locked and the handles are ambiguous, cell phone gripes, google maps, windows, etc, but there is no space for it in this post.

You can add a complete list as a comment. Please?!

Whatever you think is the reason, you are depressed. Against depression and known to work, there is: - physical exercise - contact with nature - professional advice

BTW, SAP is hiring!

'hope that made you smile :)

Meditation helps compartmentalizing your thoughts, so if you meditate, you might still notice the problems and be angry at them, but you might be able to better control the anger and tame it.

Also, it sounds like you may be angered by something else, so you are on edge, and it’s easier to be angered at a door than at someone or at some situation. Going to a shrink may help disentangle the anger.

And yeah I am with you: fuck google maps.

People would suggest two main solutions:

1) Avoid things with bad design.

2) Find a way to accept bad design, so it doesn't affect your emotions.

The real solution is to fix the world so it has less bad design. This is about both making people act more intelligently in the present, and ensuring that at the very least, people do not become stupider in the far future (and, hopefully, become at least a little smarter).

This solution involves significant changes to the entire world.

One thing that's important, I think, is to recognize in the moment that you're getting upset, that in that moment right there, it's not the design itself that's causing you pain, but your reaction to it. It's not gonna be like a "AHA! Cured." sort of revelation, but practiced repeatedly you'll start asking yourself whether that's the ONLY option available to you, or maybe there is something you yourself can do so as to not to suffer.

The second thing, and this I learned from Yoga, is to actively look for what's okay. When it gets pretty uncomfortable, I try to do what my teacher once said, which was to focus on the bits that feel well. In your case, the door might be shitty, but the roof ain't leaking; the new maps may be crap, but the electricity is on; Google maps is rubbish, but the phone's screen is working alright. It's not that one good design compensates for bad design, it's that the poor design is enmeshed in a far bigger picture, in which there are good things, and it's your freedom, perhaps the greatest freedom, to choose where to direct the attention to.

Third, I've rarely seen a brilliant first iteration of anything. Every so often it happens, but more likely is to start with something and get better. So the map replacement is one: the vision for these screens may be 1. As a revenue stream, 2. Help the visually impaired, 3. allow more functionality - like calling a staff member quickly (whatever, I don't live and NY, this is just examples). The implementation is rubbish, but if it's the first iteration, that was always ever going to be the case.

Finally, here's a bit of mirroring, do what you like with it: Clever people take great pride in their cleverness. They like that they're smart, and they like the sharpness in their brain. And so, this often creates a blind spot to how miserable that smart brain of theirs can make them. Like in your case, where you said: "oh, I don't think treatment can help, but if you could list some ways in which it might" etc - that's your proud clever brain speaking, entrenching you in a position where you're just angry all the time. But the rest of you recognizes this is a shitty way to be living, hence you posting to begin with.

So maybe there are some time when it's quite okay to tell yourself your clever brain is actually getting in the way, and use things that are not reason-based, like trust, and emotional monitoring, and get help from someone who worked their whole career at helping people deal with anxiety and anger.

Must be nice to live such a privileged life where you worry about trivial imperfections.

seek professional help

Exercise

Read a book on coping with narcissism.

Go on a very long hike in a forested nature preserve.