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Five Reasons Some User Interfaces Suck on Purpose

Authored by Rohit Bhargava on January 18, 2007 - 7:23am.

Once upon a time I used to focus my efforts on helping my clients create great user experiences. I even wrote a Masters level thesis on User Interfaces and the user experience. Somewhere along the way, I realized that my real passion was in marketing - but those days of architecting usable interfaces comes in handy all the time now. As I review sites, as I help clients promote their online properties, the quality of the user interface still plays a big role. Yet one of the truths that I learned early on was that there are many moments where what a business wants an interface to do is in direct contrast to what a user may want. The most obvious example is an airline ticket site, where a user goal is often to find the cheapest flight from point A to point B. The business goal, of course, is to sell the ticket at the highest price. This is the nature of business vs. user conflicts.