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(Temple of Poseidon from Wikipedia.org)
In my 10+ years doing product design, one of the more counterintuitive learnings is something I call the Paradox of Bad UI:
The worse an interface is, the more valuable it is to its users
When doing discovery research on complex products, we would commonly find that the most challenging interfaces tended to receive high praise from their regular users.
This was usually an interesting disconnect between the stakeholders driving the product decisions and the people actually using the software. The stakeholders were often very negative about the product — it’s old, out-of-date, dull, terrible, etc. — yet the users would say the opposite in interviews — easy to use, simple, straightforward, etc.
Why?
A few well-known issues help explain the issue:
There’s a classic story about Diagoras of Melos, a man in ancient Greece known for being an outspoken atheist. A friend tried to convince him of the existence of gods by taking him to a temple of Poseidon. The temple was built by sailors who had been shipwrecked, but facing imminent death, they had prayed to Poseidon and been swept miraculously ashore. Diagoras’s response was “Is there a temple built by the sailors who prayed to Poseidon and drowned anyway?”
Someone is a regular user for a reason. That’s because whatever the faults may be of a particular design, this user has chosen to keep using it. Research efforts where participants are selected from the existing userbase are necessarily missing a key segment of the userbase — those who quit.
But the Paradox of Bad UI was stronger than this — if people were just “surviving” by tolerating a bad design, it didn’t explain the loyalty and positive affect that I commonly saw.
When talking to invested users, many were happy with the design because they had spent so much time with it that everything was perceived as “easy.” I’ve watched over people’s shoulders as they exported things out of their UI as an Excel sheet, did a series of transforms in Excel, then imported it back into their UI to finish the task.
If you only do interviews, you’ll rarely catch problems like this because the users are so used to the bad experience that it’s no longer perceived as "bad." Observing people as they actually do tasks (whether in-person or over a screenshare) is an essential component of UX research because of this “bad experience blindness.”
An even worse case is when you have users with Bad UI trauma, where it took them so much effort to learn the current UI that they are terrified of any proposed redesign or change for fear that it will be equally hard to learn the new design.
To get at issues like this, make sure to include new users who are just learning the software. Newer users who aren’t as accustomed to a particular software product’s idiosyncrasies can help point to potential trouble spots. During initial discovery, “What do you spend the most time explaining to new users?” is a great question to ask customer support staff who handle onboarding.
On the other hand, if the product solves an acute-enough problem in a good-enough way, it’s possible that the design is Good, Actually. In this case the stakeholders / designers may be seeing problems that aren’t there, or may be substituting their personal judgement for what their audience wants.
Two perennial examples are Craiglist and Wikipedia, which are stripped-down, text-heavy interfaces that improve the lives of tens of millions of users. People love to make these “look good” as student projects or for portfolio pieces, and it’s rare to come across a redesign that actually seems like an improvement.
There are many products, especially in complex or specialized niches, where the users want or need information-heavy, expert-user products. That’s not to say these products can never be improved, but that it requires deep understanding and research to understand why these interfaces are valuable despite their “bad” qualities (the details of the recent Wikipedia redesign are fascinating and well worth a deep dive).
As always, the key learning is that you need to know the ins-and-outs of the product and its workflows, the needs of its users (both experts, novices, and future audience), and do the research to make sure your vision for the design fits. In UX, as in life, there are no shortcuts.
But it’s important to be aware of the Paradox of Bad UI so that have a strategy when going into research to go beyond the surface-level answer and to tease out where the real problems lie, and where the real value can be unlocked.
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Also I’m on bluesky now: https://bsky.app/profile/ejexpress.bsky.social
