UX fail

Last week, in an effort to broaden my horizons, I joined a bunch of groups on Meetup, including one for “UX” (User Experience). There was a meeting scheduled for today (Wednesday) at 6:00pm, and I clicked the button to indicate that I’m planning to go.

Almost immediately, they announced that they were moving all future communications from Meetup to another similar service which appears to be mostly oriented towards start-ups, something which I’m not at all interested in. (Been there, done that, lost my t-shirt and 17 SAN.)

Then they announced that they were changing the location, but they weren’t sure where they were changing it to.

Then they announced it was at the “Center for Student Innovation” at RIT, but with no further details of where in this building.

I got there at about 5:40. There were no signs indicating where it was. I went on-line and discovered that they’d announced a room number at around noon today. The room was in use, and it looked like a class or a seminar going on. I sat down to wait for 6:00. 6:00pm came and went, and whatever was going on in the room never broke up, nobody entered, one person left, but the door remained closed. Nobody else appeared to come up to the door to try it or ask where the meeting was. I decided that either the group I was attempting to meet was in that room, but nobody had told them that an open door is more welcoming than a closed one, or the regulars saw the closed door and decided to go somewhere else without bothering to put up a sign or troll the lounge area looking to see if anybody was waiting to join the meeting. Either way, I felt unwelcome so I left.

So the User Experience experts managed to give me a lousy User Experience and wasted my evening. Thanks guys.