Bad UX is (Often) Good

The world is obsessed with improving user experience of interaction with tools, machines and services. This is of course driven by the economy (the smart elite) manipulating the crowds (too lazy to thing or make effort). Designers cry rivers over badly designed microwave dials. Hey, is this really a problem? Except that this model will not sell as good as the ones which have more intuitive design? I would not mind having one like that in my kitchen. A little bit of daily brain exercise would help us maintain the primate status... The brain needs exercise as much as the rest of the body (or perhaps even more) to stay fit. Bad UX helps :)

But of course other than consumer appliances, there are areas where good UX is important. Like safety critical systems. I remember my first paraglide flight, with an instructor and using a winch. During the pre-flight briefing he explained to me the two safety releases: you pull the one on the left to release the winch rope and you pull the right one to detach the paraglide from your harness. Or the other wy around. They looked identical. There must have been some other safety measures to prevent a trainee from detaching himself (and the instructor) from the wing when in the air, but anyway he managed to scare me.

Another area where UX matters is when policy makers have good intentions to help citizens, but rely on their interactions with "systems". One of the biggest fails in this area have been the web site cookie and personal data collection rules. You know - the pop-ups you try to get rid of when visiting a web site. They are extremely annoying and the only thing people do with them is trying to close them, without reading the legal disclosures and considering their options. 

There is a light in this tunnel though - the proposed HTTP standard which would allow to set your preferences in a browser once and have them automatically reused for all visited sites, eliminating the super annoying popups nobody reads anyway. Sounds simple, right? And one may ask why has it taken so long to figure that out. Well, most probably this is one of these things which are good for people but bad for businesses. As in the end most of us will choose not to accept any cookies.