I dare you to sign up to this

A humorous take on UX design rules by creating a deliberately frustrating sign-in page that breaks common usability principles.

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Key Takeaways

Good UX design follows established rules to ensure ease of use and user satisfaction.
Breaking UX rules intentionally can highlight how frustrating poor design choices are.
Users expect consistency and simplicity in sign-in pages to avoid confusion and abandonment.
Load times and responsiveness are critical to retaining users.
Allowing some flexibility in user input improves user experience.

What the video covers

The video explores common user experience (UX) rules for sign-in pages and intentionally breaks them for comedic effect.
Rule 1 emphasizes making pages visually appealing to imply functionality, but the creator chooses to make it look bad as a design choice.
Rule 2 warns against giving too many choices to avoid overwhelming users.
Rule 3 stresses chunking similar information together, which the creator disrupts by swapping elements randomly.
Rule 4 advises making websites similar to others for ease of use, which is subverted by toggling normal keywords to weird ones.
Rule 5 cautions against information overload, referencing Miller’s law about memory limits.
Rule 6 highlights the importance of fast load times, but the creator purposely adds delays and freezes.
Rule 9 (skipping some numbers) encourages allowing users to do 'weird stuff' and be forgiving, but the creator makes checkboxes hard to click.
The video includes humorous commentary on the frustrations caused by these broken rules, such as invisible screens, unclickable elements, and page reloads.
The creator concludes by inviting viewers to try using the dysfunctional sign-in page themselves.

Chapters

What is the main purpose of this video?

The video humorously demonstrates common user experience rules by intentionally breaking them in a sign-in page to show how frustrating poor UX can be.

Which UX rules are discussed in the video?

The video covers rules such as making pages visually appealing, limiting user choices, chunking similar information, maintaining consistency with other sites, avoiding information overload, ensuring fast load times, and allowing user flexibility.

How does the creator make the sign-in page frustrating?

The creator adds confusing elements like unclickable checkboxes, random swapping of UI elements, forced delays, invisible screens, and unnecessary distractions to break UX rules and frustrate users.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

Speaker A

Hey, you may have noticed that all sign-in pages look the same, and that's because designers want you to have an easy time understanding what to do. In fact, they even made a bunch of rules called user experience rules to make sure your nobody like me would make a sign-in page. Anyway, so today I'm making a sign-in page. It started out relatively normal, but at the end, do you know what try and I yeah, we'll see.

Speaker A

Here's an example of some normal user experience rules. Okay. Rule one, be nice to look at. Intuitively, if a web page is visually nice, you'll assume that it works well, too. So, while I'm making these next designs, you may

Speaker A

notice a trend towards looking bad, but that's not laziness, it's a design choice. Yeah. Rule two, don't give too many choices. People get easily overwhelmed and will just give up if you give them any more than probably three

Speaker A

to five choices. All right, so we got our types of accounts, which is super important, definitely. Uh yeah. Wet towel user, you know, just normal types of users, maybe a business account or uh you know, user who enjoys ice cream.

Speaker A

Rule three, chunk similar information together. You see, if Duolingo looked like this, I can assure you it would have a couple less users. Well, if I make a button that just randomly swaps elements, then it'd be literally impossible for me to chunk similar

Speaker A

information together properly. The only problem is, how do I get users to actually click it? Well, let's just get it again in the way of the password field, so people will be bound to accidentally press it. Man, I just love

Speaker A

it when buttons get in the way of what I'm trying to click. Rule four, be similar to other websites. You probably aren't spending most of your time on my website, which means if mine is too different from other ones, you won't

Speaker A

easily learn or remember how to use mine properly. So, what I'll do is I'll toggle this checkbox here, then all the normal keywords are swapped with weird ones. Rule five, don't overload information. In the '90s, they loved to

Speaker A

stretch this rule, but just like choices, any form of information can overwhelm people. Miller's law says that people can keep only about seven things in their head at once. Personally, I think we probably have millions of neurons, but whatever. All right, so

Speaker A

we've got our email, our username, and our password, all the normal things that we want to have. And then we also got an FPS because, you know, that's really vital to a sign-up screen. And then we need our puppy image, of course, and if you

Speaker A

don't pet the puppy, then bad things happen. We got to have our spaceships. Let's add those in. And you might have noticed these weird spikes that are just floating around. Let's just make some more of those. And if you're unlucky and you accidentally

Speaker A

press one, or then it just reloads everything. Oh, that's that's great. That doesn't rake in the five-star reviews.

Speaker A

I don't know what will. All right, so rule six, don't make load times too bad.

Speaker A

At 400 ms is kind of like the threshold of being noticeable to the user. Load times longer than 3 seconds actually are proven to make 50% of users leave like immediately. So, let's make the website wait for 3 seconds, just automatically

Speaker A

for fun. And of course, I can randomly freeze the browser anytime the user presses something.

Speaker A

Okay, pause. Wait. It's a nice idea. It would actually break the REAL RULES, LIKE FBI, [screaming] OPEN UP!

Speaker A

BROWSERS don't really want us developers to be able to freeze them. So, instead, I'll just make the screen go invisible for a random amount of time when you click. Like this. And then the user won't be able to do anything and just

Speaker A

have to wait, basically like I froze the browser. Rule nine, let users do weird stuff. It's known as Postel's Law. And for example, if your username is "I am a giant shizen" with a capital A, and if you spell it with a lowercase, it should

Speaker A

still be allowed because the user could understand the general gist of what's going on. Video games have a similar concept that you may have heard of before called coyote time. Basically, in games, if you try to jump in the air,

Speaker A

that doesn't usually work because you're in the air and you can't jump when you're in the air. But if a the just left the ground and you know, like they they're still in the air technically and the game will usually be like, "Okay,

Speaker A

we'll we'll figure it out. Well, we can strike a deal here." But, we don't want users to be happy or have a life. So, instead, if you want to click any of these checkboxes, I'm just going to make it so you have to put your

Speaker A

mouse right in the very center pixel of it to do so. Nice. Finally, rule 10.

Speaker A

There are too many rules, but I think that should do it for now. Okay.

Speaker A

Does this pass the Dean test? Hello. Hello. Yeah, I don't know what's going on here.

Speaker A

So, I guess Oh, see this see that whatever that was. So, this doesn't work.

Speaker A

[laughter] But, if I type in Type it in normally, then it's fine. I think that's just cuz of the font. I might I might want to change that.

Speaker A

What is unnecessary info? And why does it do this again? Uh This actually feels like I'm in the backrooms, bro. What the heck?

Speaker A

I can't Why does it keep on doing that? Is that when it reloads the page it It's just to be annoying. You should do the user with a cat. I think that's the most likely. Uh Sure. What is this?

Speaker A

How many sides? Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. I don't know, man. [laughter] What is this? Are you base That's terrible. What is that? I can't click anything man.

Speaker A

Address? Address? I'm not giving you my address, bro. [laughter] Sign up. Please Okay. Why? What am I even supposed to do?

Speaker A

8,008 Cool Lane. Okay. Oh, yeah. That should do it. Huh. I can't complete anything else.

Speaker A

I It doesn't work. [laughter] What am I supposed to do? Like I don't There's no point to this.

Speaker A

think you just got to check all the check boxes, you know? Like you you haven't checked anything yet.

Speaker A

I No, wait, like it won't let me. I'm clicking on these. I don't know, man.

Speaker A

What is this? Maybe you might want to re- reload the page cuz I think it's been too corrupted by pressing swap elements too often.

Speaker A

This These boxes don't work. Like I can't click any of them. me, they do. Can you just not see them?

Speaker A

No, you can see it. How many times do you have to click it? Like right in the middle?

Speaker A

Oh my gosh, you are terrible, man. Bro. [laughter] Okay. He got spaceships up and spikes, too.

Speaker A

Isn't this the best? Oh. No, [laughter] it reset my progress. Okay, we're going to reload one more time. Username.

Speaker A

How patient are you feeling today? Plenty patient. Oh, yeah. You think you're actually going to be able to do it?

Speaker A

Yes. What does don't show progress do? It makes it so that all the check boxes don't show up. So, even if you've clicked them, it won't do anything.

Speaker A

Oh, that's terrible. Yeah. I don't want that to happen. Sign me up. Oh, I got it red.

Speaker A

Beautiful. Do I have to click this one too for it to work? Yep. Also, I think you should do you should change your type of account cuz I don't think happy users is the one you want.

Speaker A

What? The shape is not have many What? [laughter] I Did you have to say one?

Speaker A

That says a side, right? It's just a one big side. Okay. Sure. Okay. [laughter] No. No. No. Do I cancel?

Speaker A

Oh my gosh. it. Yeah. You know what? That was That was kind of fun. Now, you know what?

Speaker A

You heard the guy. It's fun. So, you guys can go prove yourselves. Uh link's in the description. See you.

Speaker A

You heard the guy. It's fun. So, you guys can go prove yourselves. Uh link's in the description. See you.

Topics:user experienceUX designsign-in pageweb designusabilitydesign rulesweb developmentuser interfacewebsite frustrationinteractive design

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