Products that made it big despite terrible user experience

Just to dispel the myth that UX is everything, and Africans are behind because we can’t do UX, I’ll kick off this thread for companies that are huge despite terrible user experience:

  1. Zynga (pathetic gameplay, pay to advance, skinner box tactics, 2d graphics with no texture innovation, copy-paste tactics)
  2. Instagram (restricted sizing, no hyperlinks, restricted download function, deprecated web experience, no photo repost, poor searchability)
  3. Babylon(pure spam toolbar, inserts itself into registry making uninstall impossible for casual users)
  4. LinkedIn(limited use of AJAX resulting in constant page loads, URLs from hell, blocking content to force account creation, notifications that won’t go away)
  5. Java(JRE, just malware)
  6. Reddit(cluttered interface, requires tabbed browsing to work, yet does not open in new tab automatically, has special syntax for formatting, allows hate speech)
  7. VEVO(VEVO videos on Opera Mini say ‘not available,’ VEVO.com player is slow as hell with videos being excessively large even at low resolution, artists’ VEVO channels are cluttered with irrelevant content, deprioritising the artist’s actual videos that you have come to see)
  8. Groupon (pressuring vendors into insane discounts, flooding them with bargain hunting customers, resulting in poor customer service for those who come in)

Add more, these are just from the top of my head

Save LinkedIn which is fighting a number of existential battles right now, these are not very good examples of successful companies. And I were to list the companies that are successful because of good UX by market cap, there will be more than a few billion dollars to drown your list in a a good hundred times or more. So I’m gonna assume you are just yanking our collective chain and wait for someone else to make the list.

EDIT: Instagram doesn’t have a bad UX, constraints are part of good design, putting them in that list is borderline heresy.

EDIT: Wait, so based on these sterling examples, African startups should dismiss the need for good design as hot air, amirite? Seen.

3 Likes