throwaway894028

That would feel like a drop in the ocean. It's not going to change the frequency of my encounters with bad UX, and it's not going to change how I feel whenever such an encounter occurs.

> If this bothers you enough, you may want to seek out a therapist.

This is probably good advice, though I am skeptical it would help. I think it would be helpful if you could tell me which elements that they may be able to help me with.

> I see incompetence everywhere, but I don't feel angry and depressed.

Well, that's where you and I differ, I suppose. It upsets me that I'm often on the other end of this incompetence, and that I am powerless to change it. My only recourse is to endure it. It feels wrong, and it bothers me.

I often arrive at this same conclusion, and I find it depressing. I find it difficult to sum up the feeling beyond "losing faith in humanity".

I appreciate your feedback, and you are mostly correct. I have actually thought of making a website to document "shitty" things.. from annoying graffiti, to terrible websites, to awful interfaces on popular products and software. It's an issue of time and commitment, both of which are in short supply lately.

> The second part is why it should affect you so personally.

When it's a public service where exorbitant amounts of money are spent on it, and where it needs to serve the public and fails miserably. One thing that comes to mind is NYC transit, which replaced giant paper maps on the platforms with small non-touch LCD TVs that show a blurry, barely legible map -- that is, when they are not showing advertisements, promotions, or what amounts to government propaganda. In the above example, I know the cost associated with this change was huge, and that it utterly fails at its design goal, and that had anybody loaded the image on the TV just once before deciding to spend millions replacing all of perfect usable paper maps they would have seen how awful it looks -- and yet there it is, in front of me, at every platform.

Again with the above example, I fully realize it may not even be the fault of the "designer", per se, given the budget, politics, time constraints, whatever. Maybe it's because they need to cut labor costs by having a way to update service announcements without having humans replace paper postings on every platform. Whatever the reason, though, the shitty LCD tvs are in front of me every time I'm on a subway platform. I cannot escape it, I pay to see it, and I cannot change it.

Another reason for the personal offense is difficult for me to describe, but imagine an injustice were to happen to you, and you ask the person in charge: "You know this is wrong, but why can't you fix it?" they reply: "that's just the way things are", or "well, life isn't fair".