My First Experience With A Bad UX
A crumpled note, a phone number turned into a word, and the case for testing your ideas before you ship them.
…and it was my own dumb fault.
Originally posted on Medium.com on April 29, 2014.
So, it’s 1994. I’m in a prominent local establishment when I see her. I knew from the moment I saw her that I’d be spending the rest of my life with this woman… We eye each other from across the room and I can tell that she’s into me too. I went over to say hello and began a relationship that’s lasted to this very day. That is, until I tried to totally ruin it.
It was after all the mid ’90’s. It seemed like everyone was trying to make their phone number more memorable by turning it into a word. Hey, I was a cool guy, why should I be any different. Shortly before this fateful night, I spent time trying to come up with some keyword that would make my number instantly recognizable. All I could come up with was, “FORGLIT”.
It was doomed from the start. Had I known then what I know now, I would have at least vetted it with some of my friends. One of them would have been bound by the code to tell me it was a bad idea. But alas, I didn’t and I decided to go with it.
At the end of our evening together, I mustered up a crinkled piece of paper and proudly wrote my phone number/ word down, folded it, and handed it to her. She never looked at it. She just tucked the paper in her pocket and we said goodbye. Consequently, she never gave me her number. The next day, she pulled out the paper and was going to call, she gasped as this is what she saw…
“FORGETIT”. Later, she told me that she figured I wanted nothing to do with her and threw my “number” away. It was only later that she went back and looked at it closer and saw my vain attempt to be hip and cool. She hesitantly dialed the number and the rest is history.
So there you have it. This is just one of the many reasons why it is so important to test your ideas before implementation. Believe it or not (sarcasm fully intended), there are still companies that have not heard the Gospel of UX. Because of this singular experience, I have become one of it’s apostles.