It was meant to be.
Back in the days when I was still actively developing User Interfaces, I chanced upon the “This is Broken” page from GoodExperience’s Mark Hurst and loved it so much that i subscribed to it. For 2 years or more, I remember waiting for the site’s newsletter every week to get a good laugh out of some of the gems like these:
I did not realize when and how I graduated from having a hearty laugh to start looking for “broken things” on my own. I started noticing things better, I started to point out to myself: This message does not seem right, this logo does not seem to convey it’s intent, this signboard seems out of place, the elevator buttons are confusing…
I also started validating my observations with people around me. Did they find it confusing too?
I was slowly but surely converting… morphing from a quick fix, get-it-to-work developer to someone with a “Does this make sense?” “Will this look broken?” perspective.
That probably was my formal initiation into the design and user experience and user research world.
Eventually, Good Experience fell off my radar as I got assigned to solving real UX problems on my own. A little bit of searching revealed that it is now a blog, with last entries on there dating to 2013.
It did bring back fond memories, though… and a smile on my face! 🙂
It's by Design 