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I appreciate your feedback, and you are mostly correct. I have actually thought of making a website to document "shitty" things.. from annoying graffiti, to ter

I appreciate your feedback, and you are mostly correct. I have actually thought of making a website to document "shitty" things.. from annoying graffiti, to terrible websites, to awful interfaces on popular products and software. It's an issue of time and commitment, both of which are in short supply lately. > The second part is why it should affect you so personally. When it's a public service where exorbitant amounts of money are spent on it, and where it needs to serve the public and fails miserably. One thing that comes to mind is NYC transit, which replaced giant paper maps on the platforms with small non-touch LCD TVs that show a blurry, barely legible map -- that is, when they are not showing advertisements, promotions, or what amounts to government propaganda. In the above example, I know the cost associated with this change was huge, and that it utterly fails at its design goal, and that had anybody loaded the image on the TV just once before deciding to spend millions replacing all of perfect usable paper maps they would have seen how awful it looks -- and yet there it is, in front of me, at every platform. Again with the above example, I fully realize it may not even be the fault of the "designer", per se, given the budget, politics, time constraints, whatever. Maybe it's because they need to cut labor costs by having a way to update service announcements without having humans replace paper postings on every platform. Whatever the reason, though, the shitty LCD tvs are in front of me every time I'm on a subway platform. I cannot escape it, I pay to see it, and I cannot change it. Another reason for the personal offense is difficult for me to describe, but imagine an injustice were to happen to you, and you ask the person in charge: "You know this is wrong, but why can't you fix it?" they reply: "that's just the way things are", or "well, life isn't fair".

karmakaze 7y ago
I really feel for the position you're in. I've been in similar ones, but in smaller, more direct scopes (e.g. within a company) regarding technical issues other than UX. This reminds me of "23 Minutes in Hell" which I've never read but was struck by the description of hell as 'annoying'. At first I thought that seemed lame, but then on further thought I realized at over eternity we could get used to many intense things. Annoying things no matter how annoying will always be annoying unless you can somehow psychologically reframe it. Similarly, a girlfriend of mine used to always complain about a particular garage door which took forever to open. After hearing this many times and having shared her annoyance, I said that she should either do something about it or don't mention it as it will only linger in her mind amplifying it. It's really unfortunate that these things are below the level where you're motivated to take action but elevated to the point of being intolerable. In hopes that you can get to the bottom of this, I'll just point out that you described this as 'an injustice that were happen to you' as where I would say that the injustice was inflicted on the public at large. I think it was something about you being hypersensitive to bad UX since you've come up with a plausible rational explanation of the situation but it doesn't lessen the experience. At least you don't also have an exceptional sense of smell. I'm always moving myself about in public transit to minimize my exposure to the wafting trails of former passengers.

karmakaze 7y ago

I really feel for the position you're in. I've been in similar ones, but in smaller, more direct scopes (e.g. within a company) regarding technical issues other than UX. This reminds me of "23 Minutes in Hell" which I've never read but was struck by the description of hell as 'annoying'. At first I thought that seemed lame, but then on further thought I realized at over eternity we could get used to many intense things. Annoying things no matter how annoying will always be annoying unless you can somehow psychologically reframe it. Similarly, a girlfriend of mine used to always complain about a particular garage door which took forever to open. After hearing this many times and having shared her annoyance, I said that she should either do something about it or don't mention it as it will only linger in her mind amplifying it. It's really unfortunate that these things are below the level where you're motivated to take action but elevated to the point of being intolerable. In hopes that you can get to the bottom of this, I'll just point out that you described this as 'an injustice that were happen to you' as where I would say that the injustice was inflicted on the public at large. I think it was something about you being hypersensitive to bad UX since you've come up with a plausible rational explanation of the situation but it doesn't lessen the experience. At least you don't also have an exceptional sense of smell. I'm always moving myself about in public transit to minimize my exposure to the wafting trails of former passengers.