I’ve recently been thinking about the phrase “death by a thousand cuts” for the cumulative effect of bad UX experiences daily across different tech and services.
I seem to be a major sufferer of this problem, where almost everything I use has a minor or major aggravation,
Case in point, I just literally threw my phone on a table after a walk because
- it decided to reboot itself when I walked out the front door and wanted to play a podcast;
- I lost service – yet again – and had to reboot, yet again;
- it turned onto accessibility mode and I had to Google how to turn it off when I got home.
Or, trying to do emojis in Teams after you’ve used Slack?
- you can’t do standard emojis;
- typing “:” starts the joyemoji, which seems half-baked, and has no search, and
- when you type “:p” automatically used the original Skype emoji tongue out.
What product developers fail to realise is a small design or UX annoyance in their product is not isolated – at least, not for the user. For a user perspective is “one more” issues in a larger set of products they have to deal with. When you come that across a day and a week, that makes for a lot of extra work, effort, unnecessary attention and not to mention aggravation for the person.