Adventures in the land of bad UI design Ep. 1 Redundancy of redundant information is redundant

Welcome back in a brand new episode of my collection of examples of bad UI design.

Two years ago the pilot episode was well accepted, so I decided to continue with a super-slow pace (luckily I have a real life out there)

I have now several topics to address, but a recent episode related to redundancy triggered my attention.

Small (redundant) disclaimer

As the rest of this blog, what I write is my personal opinion, it does not pretend to be the Truth and it is not related to my employer.

Additionally I would clarify that my intention is not to blame in retrospect the work made by others, this is a very unfair and boring behavior that seems to be very common, particularly with politician. I do my mistakes as well and the intention here is to think about how to improve.

Just say it once and clearly.

Suppose you have to notify the user with some important message, is duplicating the message the most effective solution? I don’t think so.

This is the lock screen of my phone:

Nothing special here, apart from a tiny detail:

About 2 weeks ago the name of the provider changed its label into “VF IT IoRestoACasa” (Vodafone Italy IStayAtHome).

Probably someone in Vodafone thought a nice thing to remember people to stay at home during the Coronavirus Pandemic, after all in this period this message is repeated in all the possible ways.

Honestly, I don’t think this example is really critical, however someone with poor confidence in technology may be concerned: “Maybe I did some mistake and I am now connected in roaming to a different network, with extra costs”. If you think I am overshooting consider that several italian newspapers and information sites published explanation because they reported about worried users.

Although unlikely, it may also be possible that changing the name of the operator could impact some ill-designed app that is using it for some reason.

Additionally, someone like me who is respecting the rules is getting bored to read the same message everywhere/every time. I know guys, really. Did it add significant advantage to tell people to stay at home in a tiny string placed in the corner of the lock screen?

Redundant messages remember me those nagging girlfriends continuously asking you to go to the cinema (or else/worse).

Final thoughts

More generally, on UI there may be solutions more effective than redundancy or repetition to display data:

• Consider instead to have “nested information” i.e. in case of an alarm you could have a generic alarm indication more visible and another indicator that provides you details of the issue placed in a peripheral area of your display.
• Do not mix information types: in the field of the network operator put the name of the operator, not messages related to my personal safety.
• Think as the user: repeated information may get him bored and he eventually may stop using your system. I personally stopped using a “Drive mode” App because every time I received a message it was telling me (speaking) what to do to listen to the message.
• If really necessary consider that the update of a duplicated information must be done in a synchronous way to avoid contradictions.
• Finally, duplicated information on a UI means overhead in maintenance, this is definitively not Lean and prone to errors.

Please let me know your opinion and if you would like to see another episode of this series. Consider that most likely the next post of the series will take more than 1 year to be published.