Bad designs; unfortunately, they’re everywhere. At Design M, we always ensure that our designs are well thought out, logical, user friendly and above all else, that they work exactly like they are intended to. So, it really annoys us when we encounter designs that are bad. It gets us wondering, why didn’t this issue/fault/problem get picked up during the design or testing stage?

Sometimes we will find these bad designs on websites that we use. One such example which springs to mind is a popular online groceries’ site. It used to be good, but then one day some bright spark decided to update the desktop layout and now so much of the top and bottom of the screen is taken up with unnecessary ‘stuff’ that the actual window where you can view products is irritatingly small, which means the ordering process ends up taking much longer than it needs to. And this isn’t a small company who can use a smaller budget as an excuse (not that budget is ever an excuse for bad design). It’s a well-known supermarket. They must have an entire team of design and marketing experts on hand, so there really is no excuse.

But it’s not just websites, it can be anything. Uncomfortable chairs, illogical supermarket plans, confusing parking payment machines and ill-conceived new road layouts. But for this blog, we are going to focus on something which irritates us on an almost daily basis, and only seems to be getting worse… television apps!

These days, no longer can you simply turn the television on and watch a programme within seconds. No, first you have to sign in. Cue the time wasted trying to remember which family member used their email to register on this particular app, and even if you do get that part right, remembering the password… well we all know how that goes. You end up trying every single password you’ve ever had, nothing works. Why? Because when you registered or last re-signed in, this app probably wouldn’t let you use any of your usual passwords because they’re ‘not strong enough’ anymore and, ‘your password needs to be made up from 23 characters and 6 special symbols’, so the last time you used the app, in desperation, you just set it up with a completely obscure password you’ve never used before, and obviously you didn’t write it down because that would’ve made sense, and you just wanted to watch television and relax (and even if you did write it down you can’t remember where it is now), and by this point you’d already wasted forty minutes just trying to sign in, so you stupidly thought, ‘I’m sure I’ll remember it’, then two months later you’re trying to log in again and guess what? That’s right, you can’t remember it!

And breathe…

That’s not to mention the apps that require you to take a photo of a QR code or confirm your mobile number so you can be sent a one-time password, which will only work for five minutes, for you to discover that your phone battery is dead. The whole process can end up taking so long you forget what it was you wanted to watch in the first place.

I mean, we shouldn’t complain about needing to sign into television apps – it’s clearly a very important and necessary design feature. Maybe if we just opened the app and were watching our chosen programme within mere seconds, we wouldn’t really appreciate it. Maybe our experience would have been so easy that we wouldn’t feel like we had really earned our relaxation. And television companies really do need to monitor what we watch and when we watch it, because if they didn’t have this information about us, well, the world might actually stop spinning, and then where would we be.

You might think that there would be at least some benefit to having to sign in to a television app. Wouldn’t it be nice if the app at least remembered what you were last watching and had it right there, waiting and ready for you to continue with as soon as the app opened? That would be such a useful design feature. Some apps do have it, but from our experience, many apps absolutely love to hide this feature. Instead of seeing a ‘continue watching’ option at the top of the home page, the apps either make you scroll all the way down the page, on and on, past lots and lots (and lots) of completely irrelevant programmes you wouldn’t want to watch in a million years (so much for algorithms). Or they don’t include a continue watching option on the home page at all, and you end up having to search for the programme from scratch again. This in itself is a painful experience, because the search functions are often slow and tedious and even when you’ve typed in practically the full name of the programme you want to watch, it will still insist on bringing up a completely different set of programme suggestions!

That’s not to mention all of the other issues regularly encountered. Some television apps can be very blippy (we’re pretty sure blippy is a word, and if it’s not, it should be). Random, unpredictable things going wrong for no obvious reason. This can result in pixelated screens at the beginning of programmes (and when returning from ad breaks), or simply pausing a programme might mean it won’t replay, and our favourite ‘blip’ of them all… when everything just freezes up for no reason whatsoever and the only way to get it going again is to come out of the app and go back in (which usually happens about three minutes before the programme was going to finish anyway) and means you have to sit through all of the adverts again (all eight of them, and not different adverts either, but the exact same adverts).

Before you know it, you decide that today’s television session is over, and you’ll watch some more another time. And then you’ll get to go through the whole sorry rigmarole again.

But why are some television apps so badly designed and frustrating to use? Aren’t there huge teams of people whose job it is to get this stuff right? Don’t they test the apps to see how they work before making them live?

We can only conclude that being a large design company isn’t necessarily a guarantee of good quality work – we are often astounded that we have stumbled across an error or broken link or confusing website layout (and anything else which falls under the umbrella of ‘bad design’) on websites of big brand companies, who either use their own in-house design department or they outsource to an all-singing, all-dancing branding agency, yet they will quite often have ‘bad’ design elements and mistakes within their products. At Design M, we’re a very small family team who do everything ourselves in-house, and we pride ourselves on doing a great quality job, quite often even better than much bigger website design departments or design agencies. This is because we really care about our work. So, you can be assured that your small business website will be as good as it can be, and your customer journey will be a happy one.

It’s just a shame we don’t design television apps…

(Yet!)

 

If you have a website project you would like to be designed well, with care and consideration, contact us today for a competitive quote.