A UI/UX Fail

It’s not all cakes and pies.

Last week was the Laracon Online event and the morning of the event we had to give all the ticket holders a link and a password to start their live stream on their device.

When this went live it was set up like this:

The problem arose in the UI of the streaming service and it asked for a password. A lot of people missed that the previous page had a password on it and kept trying to use their account password. Only to get frustrated and email us.

As you might imagine I got swamped with emails. I’d say at least 40 or 50 in a span of just a few minutes. I knew we had a problem but everything was starting in a few minutes and I wanted to make sure everyone had access.

The first idea we had was just reverse the order:

This actually helped but people were​ still missing it, although the number of people missing it was vastly lower than the other way. Looking back at it now we should have the streaming link open with a target “_blank” so they would have the old tab still open and could maybe see it easier.

I still don’t know what the answer is, but at least now I have a year to think about it and come up with a better solution. I’m sharing this because this is one of the few times of my life where feedback on bad UI/UX was so swift and constant. At the same time, I had a very narrow time window to get it resolved and to get everyone their streaming access.

It made for a stressful​ morning but looking back I learned a lot of little things. That’s what creating is all about right? Paying attention to the small things and caring about your users.

P.S. UI/UX have are some of the most confusing terms to me.