App Building Horror Stories: 5 Design & Development Nightmares to Avoid
Designing and building software can be challenging. It’s always great when things go according to plan, but sometimes apps become cautionary tales. Bad design, poor idea validation, and insufficient research can come back to haunt you!
Read on for some scary design and development horror stories from recent years, and our tips on how you can avoid them for your app.
1. Citi lost $500 million due to bad design
What went wrong:
In 2020, employees using Citi’s poorly-designed internal software accidentally sent $900 million to a client’s lender. The lender refused to return the payment, and a judge ruled in the lender’s favor. The employees knew how to perform this type of transaction, and they had multiple checks in place to prevent errors… but the interface was confusing. The user making the transaction thought that the system did one thing, but it did something else.
How to avoid it:
A usability test would have quickly identified this type of problem. Observing a user making this transaction and listening to their thought process could have helped to uncover just how confusing the interface appeared.
Additionally, the system was very outdated – a UX refresh could have helped Citi meet modern design standards, preventing the error.
2. Investors lost $1.75 billion on Quibi
What went wrong:
At first, Quibi looked like it was going to be a success in the streaming service market. Their team was able to raise substantial funds, and they had the backing of A-listers and heavy hitters. But things quickly spiraled downhill – the service shut down just 6 months after launch. Leadership blamed the pandemic, but at the end of the day Quibi simply didn’t have the content or usability that connected with end users.
How to avoid it:
When apps don’t solve users’ actual problems or provide value, people simply will not use the app. Quibi would have benefited by investing in user research… from the very earliest stages of idea validation, all the way through launch and beyond. User research is the best way to really understand users’ behaviors, motivations, goals, and values. This includes whether your idea is useful to them, and whether they’ll actually use your app. Not only would this have helped in the beginning stages, but once they launched and the writing was on the wall for a potential failure, doing user research could have helped them pivot to find their niche.
3. Taxi Hold'em: a problem with a bad solution
What went wrong:
Taxi Hold’em was an app that let users display a taxi label on their phone. They could stand on the street and wave the phone at passing taxis to let them know they needed them. Unfortunately, it meant that taxi drivers had to look over at people standing on the road, then squint to try to read their tiny phone screen. It resulted in several taxi accidents, and was pulled from the app store.
How to avoid it:
This is a good example of a real-world problem (people worry they won’t be able to hail a taxi) where the solution went terribly wrong. The Taxi Hold’em team likely spent a significant amount of money developing the app that was not only unhelpful, but in some cases actively harmful.
A high quality discovery process with intentional focus on idea validation could have helped the Taxi Hold’em team think through the solution to determine if it was the right fit for the problem. Thinking about it from the taxi drivers’ perspective (not just the app users) would have uncovered the safety issues early on, before they spent money developing the app.
4. A bad user interface led to the Three Mile Island Disaster
What went wrong:
You’ve probably heard of the 1979 nuclear disaster at Three Mile Island, but did you know that design flaws were responsible for the severity of the accident? When mechanical failures began to happen, plant operators misread the confusing and contradictory readings on their equipment. This meant that the problem escalated while the team on the ground struggled to understand what was happening. Three Mile Island became the worst nuclear accident in US history.
How to avoid it:
Three Mile Island had some critical usability flaws in their system: A status indicator on the control panel seemed to indicate that a valve was closed, but in reality it indicated whether the valve was powered on or not. This meant it gave a false, confusing reading at a critical moment, and plant operators were not able to correctly diagnose the problem for hours. A very simple design change could have helped plant operators read the controls more clearly and quickly identified the problem. This would have been uncovered by usability testing, but could have also been solved if designers had considered the context of the control panel when it was being designed.
5. Asking the wrong question cost $1.85 billion
What went wrong:
User research can significantly improve outcomes, so Walmart was on the right track when they decided to survey customers in 2009. Unfortunately, the asked the wrong question. In an attempt to learn how to compete with Target, they asked, “Would you like Walmart aisles to be less cluttered?” Naturally, the majority of respondents said “yes”, so Walmart removed 15% of their inventory. It was a big mistake. Walmart lost $1.85 billion in sales and fired the team responsible for the decision.
How to avoid it:
We know that user research can help to avoid bad outcomes, but it’s imperative to do the right research. Walmart’s fatal flaw is that they listened to what their customers said instead of what their customers actually did. This means that they weren’t really paying attention to the real motivations and behaviors of their customers, so they didn’t come out of their research experiment with good data. When conducting your research, strive to ask questions in an unbiased way to get data on actual customer behaviors. Emphasize what the customers will really do in any given scenario, not just what they say they’ll do.
The cost of bad design
So how much is good design and user research worth to you? For Citi, Quibi, and Walmart, it might be millions or even billions of dollars. In the case of Taxi Hold’em and Three Mile Island, it might be worth human lives.
Validating your idea and deeply understanding your end users are the first steps to preventing your app from turning into a nightmare scenario.
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