• Date: 22nd Nov 2010
• Category: Design & UX
• Comments: 1

Bad user experiences. Moments when you just want to shake the electricity out of your monitor, throw your controller at your console or just plain go overboard.

Ok time to calm down if you do any of those things listed above. Here are some bad user experiences.

1. DVD & Blu Ray Loading Screens

For an industry suffering from software piracy you would think that the film industry's main goal would be to make the home viewing experience as pleasant as possible. Wrong!

Not only are you exposed to legal warnings and a Nazi propaganda-like clip telling you how pirating a movie is as bad as breaking into and stealing a car. No, that is only the start.

To follow are another half a dozen of intro animations for every company involved with the movie's production. Oh, and don't forget to press the Play button at the main menu screen. No wonder people choose to pirate movies.

2. Video Game Splash Screen

Video games aren't quite as bad but they certainly deserve a mention. At least they make everyone sit through their annoying intro, pirates and genuine customers alike.

I can understand the marketing team's assumption that forcing the user to watch a 5-10 second animation of their logo every time they want to just relax and play the game. Really, I'm sure users are totally delighted and left with a great impression about the company.

Here's what I don't get: The "Press Start to Play" screen. Why? Just give me the main menu, or even better load the game from the last checkpoint.

3. Playstation 3's Method of Re-charging Controllers

Other than the PS3 not being able to play half the video formats that I have acquired over the years, I really have no major complaints. It's a fine piece of machinery.

It does have one flaw which degrades its user experience though. In order to recharge your wireless controller, you need to connect it to the console via a USB cable. All good so far. Glad I don't have to buy batteries for it like with some other consoles. Here's the problem: The console has to be turned on while the controller is charging.

I can't just turn the console off, connect the controller and have it fully charged the next time I choose to play. The system doesn't adjust to suit my needs. I have to adjust to suit the console's needs.

I have to leave the system on and remember to come back later to switch the system off once the controller is fully charged. What a lovely chore!

4. Wrist-cut Pro

I like to place my laptop (which happens to be a Macbook Pro) on my lap when I use it. It's really comfy to just sit down on the couch and surf the web, although for guys this is apparently a health risk.

What definitely isn't comfy is the razor sharp aluminium case that pretty much cuts into my arms as I use the keyboard. Ouch!

5. Drupal's CKEditor

Wordpress was the first CMS I worked with. Actually it is not really a CMS, though it is very popular and gets the job done for most small-medium websites. Since I have moved on to Drupal, which I must say is very powerful. You can make some pretty sweet websites with Drupal! Unfortunately, it is still a CMS made by geeks for geeks and this reflects on the overall user experience.

In Drupal's defence, CKEditor is not part of its core system. It is a third-party rich text editor making up for the CMS's lack of a default rich text editor. In my experience it is the best one available for Drupal. It is better than tinyMCE and FCKeditor, but it still sucks.

Here's what is wrong with it:

• It fails to insert links properly. Selecting some text and making it a link will result in the link being placed next to the text, in about 70% of cases, for no apparent reason (see screenshot above). Sometimes you will click the "insert link" button and start typing the URL only to realise that your URL was entered as plain text in the content area. The "insert link" pop-up box failed to gain focus properly.
• It makes highlighting text difficult. Often it will select the text around the part that I try to select.
• Every now and then hitting backspace takes you back to the previous page instead of deleting text. Very, very annoying. I have to save regularly (no auto-save feature in Drupal) or face the risk of losing the blog post that I was typing up. Feels like Word '98 all over again.
• When editing content, you must firstly click the textarea that you want to add text to, then scroll down. If you do it the other way, CKEditor will take you back to the start of the content forcing you to scroll all the way to the end, again. This gets me every time.

Oh and CKEditor crashed on me while I was typing this very section.

Summary

Phew! Feels good to get all this out of my system. There are so many more bad user experiences I could talk about. I might leave that for some other time.

Interestingly, most of these annoyances are really quite small in nature and are probably easy to fix.

1. Instead of scaring your loyal viewers, praise them for choosing to support your industry. Perhaps after they have watched the movie? I bet the people in charge of making those videos would lol at this proposal.
2. Skip that silly "press start to play" screen. It is cute when you see it in Super Mario Bros. on a NES. It is not cute on a PS3 or Xbox 360.
3. Video game consoles don't need to be switched on to charge controllers.
4. I haven't used the newest range of Macbook Pros. I hope they still look good without cutting into your flesh.
5. CKEditor, fix your bugs.