'The more painful the UI is, the more satisfied users are.'

By Andrew Nusca


Can a poor user interface actually be a selling point for a product?

For financial information services company Bloomberg, it can. The company’s iconic terminals — some 75,000 portals around the world that spew endlessly updating financial data — offer streams of pricing, analytics and news in yellow and orange text on a black background, among other design no-nos. But when global design firm IDEO attempted to revamp the terminal in 2007 after studying user habits for three weeks, they discovered that Bloomberg’s users were very, very attached to its poor usability.

Dominique Leqa explains in UX Magazine: "The Bloomberg terminal is the perfect example of a lock-in effect reinforced by the powerful conservative tendancies of the financial ecosystem and its permanent need to fake complexity. Simplifying the interface of the terminal would not be accepted by most users because, as ethnographic studies show, they take pride on manipulating Bloomberg’s current 'complex' interface. The pain inflicted by blatant UI flaws such as black background color and yellow and orange text is strangely transformed into the rewarding experience of feeling and looking like a hard-core professional."

The more painful the UI is, the more satisfied these users are.

Despite an overly-complex interface that’s hard on the eyes and difficult to parse, the terminal is visual reassurance that financial traders are indeed 'Masters of the Universe', at least when it comes to wrangling complex systems.

Associated Link: Why a poor user interface can make users happy

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