Thread by @MrAlanCooper

I just looked something up on imdb.com. What a shitshow! It used to be a wikipedia for motion pictures, now it’s like walking through a carnival sideshow with sleazy barkers trying to sell me glimpses of birth defects. 1

A friend just had me get their Canon Pixma printer working again after it shit its bed for the umpteenth time. I unplugged/plugged it in. But it forgot what wifi it was connected to, so I had to re-enter it with a cartesian spelling torture rack. 2

There are those of you out there who think I’m a grouchy old curmudgeon because I complain about badly designed digital interactions. YOU ARE WRONG! This crap doesn’t have to be crap, and silently accepting it is going to condemn us all to lots more crap. 3

As an interaction designer, or user experience professional, or whatever your title, you are responsible for standing up for what is right, and not just for making pretty screens. 4

Your job doesn’t end with “design.” It ends when users are made happy.

Your job doesn’t end with more clicks and increasing revenue. It ends when users are satisfied.

Your job doesn’t end with the approbation of your peers. It ends when users are made successful. 5

Notice I said “users.” I did not say “customers,” “clients,” “developers,” “Scrum coaches,” “the board of directors,” “the boss,” or “the Procurement Department.”

I said “users.” Who touches your product? Who pushes the buttons on your product? 6

I got really sick from the smoke from the Camp Road Fire last year, so we bought a ridiculously expense Molekule air filter. It’s sexy and high-techy, but it’s just another shitshow of “design” that looks good in the boardroom and actually sucks big time in the home. 7

My wife signed on to it, but it wouldn’t let me sign on. I’ve been ping-ponging with customer service for 2 weeks now. Finally, they emailed me that they had removed my wife from the unit and I’m free to sign up. 8

OMFG Molekule! You didn’t fix the problem, you put a big band aid on it, and, en passant, I now know that you have a secret agent permanently stationed in my fucking bedroom! 9

The air filter has a bright blue light that stops me from sleeping. Your designers couldn’t put an $0.08 light sensor in the unit so it could turn the blue light off when my bedroom is dark. That would be too easy. 10

So now I can log on to the filter and schedule the blue light to go off, but there’s no facility in your app to schedule the filtration level. For that, I have to physically touch the unit’s screen. WTF? Why one and not the other? 11

I’m sure it’s an excellent air filter with all kinds of high tech goodness, but I HATE THE FUKCING THING. 12

The printed literature that came with the Molekule made clear that I need to monitor the status of the filters and change them on time. Fine. The app offered to send me notifications about the state of the filter, but it would also notify me of other shit that I don’t want. 13

I declined the notifications. I don’t want my air filter sending me emails or texts. But I do want to monitor the status of the filters, so I clicked on the app looking for the “Filter Status” selection. THERE ISN”T ONE!! What a freaking terrible design! 14

Now, I’m willing to forgive bad design from amateurs and from those who provide bare-bones technology to early adopters. 15

But the Molekule is a tour-de-force of design. Everything about it screams “I Love Apple Design.” From the website to the packaging to the plug, it’s extremely fussed-over purist, white, featureless, Rem-Koolhaas-worshipper designed within an inch of its life D E S I G N ! ! 16

The only thing they didn’t design right was the user experience. The function set is wrong, the presentation is wrong, the prioritization is wrong, the supporting hardware is wrong. They put in stuff that I don’t want, and left out lots that I do want. 17

So, California is clearly doomed to have lots more devastating firestorms, and hopefully the Molekule will protect me from the toxic smoke this time. But it is just one more nail in the coffin of my respect for the interaction design community. Are we really this powerless? 18

Have we really sold out this egregiously? Have we really accepted happy talk and sexy screens instead of user satisfaction? What have we traded away for our seat at the table? 19

This thread is NOT about the Molekule. This thread is about the design profession. The stupid air filter is just a bold example of the failure I perceive in the industry. 20

It makes me angry because the usability failures so rampant in the tech world are the same ones that frustrated me in 1990 when I began to work on solving them. From my viewpoint, it looks a lot like backsliding. 21