Recognizing Bad UX

There is a particular kind of frustration that lives in the gap between what a product promises and what it actually delivers. The kind that deserves a UX award. Not the glamorous proud kind, but the slow, dripping annoying kind. The kind of annoying drip that accumulates keystroke by missed keystroke, tap by unregistered tap, until you find yourself staring at your screen wondering how something this broken shipped to hundreds of millions of people.

That frustration is what this UX award is for.

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Why This UX Award Exists

I have spent years working with organizations on their digital products — their websites, their interfaces, their user flows. And in that time, one thing has become clear: bad UX is not always the result of neglect. Sometimes it ships from some of the most well-funded, most design-conscious companies in the world. Sometimes it comes with a keynote presentation and a waiting list.

That is, frankly, worth talking about.

The Chipped Cup Award exists to do exactly that. Each quarter, TeazMedia selects one digital product, app, or website that has distinguished itself through a failure of user experience — something specific, documentable, and consequential enough that real people changed their behavior, flooded support forums, or simply gave up.

The name comes from something straightforward. A chipped cup still holds liquid. It still technically functions. But it cuts you if you are not careful, and you are never quite sure it will not crack further. The results soak you in frustration. That is the category of failure we are interested in — not broken beyond use, but defective in ways that should have been caught, that erode trust, and that reveal something uncomfortable about how decisions get made at these organizations.

This will in turn provide examples of the type of UX any organization should avoid to protect their brand image.

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What This Is Not

This is not a pile-on for the sake of it. I am not particularly interested in dunking on small teams with limited resources, or products that are clearly in early development. The Chipped Cup Award is reserved for products with the budget, the talent, and the user base that make the failure genuinely inexcusable.

I am also not interested in purely subjective complaints. Every quarter’s selection will be grounded in documented evidence — support threads, published bug reports, user data where available, and real-world behavioral impact. If users are abandoning a feature, disabling a core function, or considering switching platforms entirely, that is signal worth examining.

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How Winners Are Selected

I will be honest — this UX award is an editorial call, made quarterly, based on what I am observing in the field and what users are actually experiencing. There is no committee, no public vote, no algorithmic ranking. The criteria are roughly these:

The product must have a meaningful user base. Obscure tools with three users do not qualify. The UX failure must be specific and demonstrable, not just a matter of personal preference. And the gap between the organization’s resources and the quality of the experience must be wide enough to be notable.

The goal is not to be cynical. The goal is to take UX seriously enough to call out failures with the same specificity that the design industry uses to celebrate successes.

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A Note on Timing

I was sitting in a tea shop recently, trying to reply to a client message, and I watched myself type the same sentence four times before it came out correctly. Not because I was distracted. Because the keyboard I was using — on a device I paid over a thousand dollars for — was dropping keystrokes and substituting letters without warning. I sat there and thought: this is not a me problem. And it turned out, it was not. Thousands of people were reporting the exact same thing.

That kind of moment is where this idea started.

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What Comes Next

The Q1 2026 winner is selected and will be announced in a separate post. It involves a product that billions of people use every day, made by one of the most valuable companies in the world, and a failure so fundamental it took months to officially acknowledge.

You probably already know which direction this is going.

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