HCI Homework – June 14th, 2019
Stephen gave us this awesome homework assignment of finding two things that have a bad and not intuitive design. I personally love activities like this because it really gets you thinking about what has a good and bad design and what might be frustrating. I have a web and physical example of bad design. The online example is actually a website that Stephen gave me when we had our talk which is hcibib.org. It is a site that has a lot of HCI resources and I thought it was hilarious how it is supposed to be a website talking about UX design, HCI, Accessibility, etc. and it is a poorly designed site. The physical object is the cabinets in our apartment. They don’t have exterior handles so it is impossible to know which way the door opens unless you just try it.
Example hcibib.org
Here is the Home page of hcibib.org on a mobile device. As you can see it is very cluttered and confusing. 
This is what happens when you click on one of the topics
Example Kitchen Cabinets
Can you tell which way you open the cabinets? 
This is how they open
How could we improve these? The way we could improve the website would be a lot of things. The colors and spacing could be a lot better. There could be a more organized way to set up the links maybe in a menu or something better. With the cabinets even a simple handle on the correct side to open it would be helpful.
Those cabinets make me so upset 😤. Simple logic yet made so complex by the cabinet installers, shame on them.
haha totally agree! Like such a simple thing they could have done to fix it >.<
The website one is interesting, because the usability depends some on what your goal is. If you were the designer, and you had built that entire hierarchical site and knew it well, it might function well for you like a well-organized file drawer. But most of us have other goals, and the site requires a lot of combing through, like thumbing through a pile of postcards in a store to find just the right one.