Yep you read that right, good bad design. Design made bad, not by mistake, but on purpose.

Sometimes violating core principles of design, such as ease of use, are actually exactly what we need, paradoxical right? Well not really, and we’ll understand a bit more about why in this article!

Tricky Basement Doors

You’ll find that some basements have a specially designed basement door / access method, and this usually difficult to perform action is created with intent by the designer.

A huge metric from fire escape studies showed that people, in the case of a fire, would sometimes skip past the exit door and go straight down into the basement, with same-same stairs that gave no indication that you had reached the ground floor. Obviously, you don’t want to be in the basement during a fire, and that’s why making it difficult or noticeably different was the perfect design decision to solve this user error!

Nuclear Protocols

Whilst in comics and popular media the idea of a nuclear button is WAY too easy to click, it’s much harder in real life, for good reason too.

Many nuclear activation protocols utilise several steps, one of these procedures follows: Opening the Nuclear Briefcase which follows the countries leader at all times, attack options reviewed, special code identification, authentication code confirmation, and many steps in between!

There’s no better error prevention than the end of the modern world, hey?

Just Out of Reach

Imagine a children’s school seated just near a busy road or street. Now, consider the adventurousness and exploratory nature of young children. Okay, and now let’s put a door between them and the road. What kind of door do you picture?

The right answer here is a door with latches, bolts and locks WAY out of the children’s reach, as whilst it may make it slightly harder for the adults to access at times, it will most definitely be very hard for even the most ingenious of kids to open!

Double, Triple, Quadruple Locked!

If you’ve got a safe at home (I’m not phishing to find out which of my fans’ houses I can break into, don’t worry…) then it’s probably built with the traditional lock system; A dial lock with a backup key. Ever watched Lockpicking lawyer? Yeah, that safe doesn’t seem so great now, does it?

Simple solution; make it require multiple activation protocols at once, preferably ones that only you can access. Digital systems utilise this and name it ‘2FA’, an incredibly powerful security system that adds an external shell to the already existing, and hopefully secure, password.

Deletion Confirmation Passphrase

This one isn’t so much ‘bad’ good design, rather something that can get annoying when you have to do it multiple times, but after personally experiencing the value that we can provide to our users purely through forcing them to confirm their action (preferably by making them type out exactly the action they’re about to perform) is incredible!

This method has become more and more popular in the recent era, used in places such as Webflow to confirm deletion of a website (Wouldn’t want that in the trash can would you!), or even video games like world of warcraft!

In Summary

Understanding the concept of creating actions that aren’t so easy for users to make their way around can be a very powerful tool, sometimes error prevention plays a more important role in experience than any other principle!

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