Designing Bad Interfaces

Workshop & Talk

As designers, how often are we allowed to do things badly on purpose? This workshop provides a sandbox for designers (and non-professional designers as well!) to play with concepts that they would never use in their daily work.

Through designing absurd interfaces, the participants make conscious efforts to produce bad systems – they might end up using dark patterns, trying to annoy users on purpose, … but their designs must still be able to work as expected.

I designed this workshop at More than Metrics, and invited people from different teams to join. Designers, developers, HR and our lawyer, all had fun producing clever and evil interfaces for clocks, calendars and newspapers / news sites.

Later on I talked about designing bad interfaces on various conferences and online events.

Push Conference

In 2019 I was invited to host this workshop and do a lightning talk on the main stage at Push UX Conference.

Laura Vidal on stage at the Push UX Conference during the talk
On stage at the Push UX Conference. © envis precisely events GmbH
Audience of Push UX Conference during Laura Vidal's talk
The audience of Push UX Conference during the talk. © envis precisely events GmbH

HCD Coffee time

In April 2020 I was invited to host this talk at the HCD Coffee Time, an online event organized by Gerry Scullion of the Human Centered Design Network, a lively community of designers, researchers and other design professionals.

Other conferences

In 2020 I would have talked about designing bad interfaces at the Doers conference in Budapest and T3chfest in Madrid. Unfortunately, both events were cancelled due to COVID-19.

T3chfest online event

The organisers of the T3chfest held an online conference a few months after the main event was cancelled because of the global pandemic. I was invited to share my talk on their event, you can watch the recording (in Spanish) on the T3chfest Youtube channel.

If you'd like to book this workshop for your team or event, get in touch.

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