A Good Example Of Bad User Interface Design

In: Advice|Updates By: Brian Armstrong

1 Apr 2009

Check out Time Magazine’s web page for the top 100 most influential people of 2009.

Lots of people on this list are emailing around saying “hey I’m at #25 right now, vote for me please!”

So when you click to their individual page on the website, you move the little slider over to #1 (you want them to be #1 right?) and click submit.

Unfortunately, you have just ranked them as “least influential” which is subtly labeled.

They have two competing paradigms going on here – is #1 the best or 100 the highest score? Consistency is important here. There is no telling how many people have actually voted the opposite of what they intended on these pages.

It reminds of the butterfly ballots that caused all the fuss with Al Gore, or on airlines when they say “now boarding rows 10 and higher” – the rows closer to the front of the plane are certainly higher in that they are better and closer to #1, but what they mean is “numbers greater than 10″ or perhaps more clearly “rows 10 to 30″.

Further confusing things on the Time site, there is a number in the top right saying “34 of 204″. Is this their current ranking or just the next one in the list?

Not to mention…the whole idea of a slider with values from 1 to 100 is not correct for something like this. It’s an artificial level of accuracy to say “I think this person is the 29th most influential”. Most people won’t know who everyone on the list is – they just want to either vote yes or no.

Good user interface design is important and worth studying. I think it’s responsible for much more of a products success than people give it credit for.

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8 Responses

Matt Thomas

April 1st, 2009 at 6:27 pm

Great points Brian. Being consistent is very important and you don’t want to leave ANYTHING to chance that might confuse your visitors.

You should always design to make an interface as simple and intuitive as possible, and if certain menus can be made even more simple, its probably better that way.

Brian Armstrong

April 1st, 2009 at 11:13 pm

Yep very true Matt. I like reading http://www.usabilitypost.com/ and http://www.37signals.com/svn to learn about good UI design. Any other favorites out there?

Erica Douglass

April 2nd, 2009 at 5:08 am

Other than the fact that Southwest doesn’t board by row, this was a good post!

-Erica

Brian Armstrong

April 4th, 2009 at 1:02 pm

Whoops :) Yur right that must have been another airline, changed it – thanks!

College Town Menus (CTM)

April 2nd, 2009 at 10:14 am

Agreed. You always hear people say “I’m #1!” instead of “I’m #100!” haha. It’s funny, you ask people to rate an item on a scale of 1 to 10, and even without saying the scale, people assume 10 is the better number and rate higher. But in typical RANKING people “top 100 best people”, the scale is reversed. On one side, I agree with them because people (I think?) naturally pull the slider to the right. However, they should have been more straight forward and say “Most influencial” or “Least”, take out the numbers, and let the slider do the math for people so it’s less biased.

But on a side note, I like seeing your support for Dr. Paul! I stuck with him the entire time in the primaries, and although he pulled out of the final presidential ballet, I still wrote him in and stuck with my guns.

Brian Armstrong

April 4th, 2009 at 1:04 pm

Really?? You wrote him in? Haha…wow that’s impressive. I didn’t go that far, but I’d love to see him be president. He’s 73 though…better hurry.