Week 1: What Makes You Hate Something?

The opening lecture — why looking ugly and working badly are two different problems, and which one this course spends the semester on

22 February 2027

Open the slides

Designing Things People Hate starts from a deliberately provocative title and a much less provocative question: if good design makes people’s lives easier, what makes bad design so effective at making them worse? The instinct is to answer with aesthetics — ugly buttons, garish colour, confusing icons — and this course spends its first three weeks talking students out of that instinct. A truly effective bad design is often popular, functional, even good-looking; it’s bad because of what it makes you do, not how it looks doing it.

Most of what makes something genuinely bad to use comes down to a handful of ordinary ideas, not a design vocabulary you need to learn first: whether it does what you expected, whether you could tell what your options even were, whether it told you anything happened when you pressed the button, and whether a mistake was easy to make and hard to undo. You already know the feeling of pressing something twice because nothing seemed to happen the first time — that’s the whole course, before it has a name for itself.

Outline#

• why the course’s real subject is behaviour, not appearance
• expectations, discoverability, feedback and errors — the four ordinary ways something fails you before you’ve even started
• Notice → Explain → Manipulate → Break → Measure → Design → Defend → Redesign — the shape of the whole semester
• what the Hate Wall does with today’s submissions, and how it becomes the Hate Catalogue
• what to have ready before the first session