What is the worst user interface you've ever had to use? One that made you want to somehow locate the creators over the internet, personally fly to their location, and then beat them severely with a large trout.
What made it so terrible? Was it too many screens, ill-marked buttons, or just really annoying dialog boxes showing up everywhere? Screenshots are a plus.
Related question:
Also related:
Worst UI you have ever used on the User Interface SE site.
Gimp. Hands down. It's a pretty powerful editor, but its UI is pretty difficult. It may be pretty powerful once you learn it, but there are other image editors out there that are just as powerful and easier to learn (albeit cost money).
Telelogic Synergy is pretty bad. There is no consistency between pop-up dialogs... i.e. some have a 'Save' button and some don't and buttons aren't placed where you would expect from one dialog box to another.
It also remembers what you had selected on windows that are no longer open so if you tryto 'add selected' to a task you get some fairly random collection of objects.
In general, every program written with Xt library. They are a bunch of monochrome rectangles with idiotic (or non-existant) keyboard shortcuts. No other thing comes close.
Most of the SQL management tools - Enterprise manager, OEM of Oracle, SQL Plus are all painful.
A long time ago Oracle had an application similar to Microsoft's query analyzer where you could type in pl/sql - but the window where you entered code was about 8 characters wide by 10 characters long (OK I am sure I am exaggerating a bit). You could never see more than a tiny fraction of what you were coding. There was no way to increase the size of that little window.
The IM software Miranda. Try opening up their configuration dialog. It is absolutely hopeless to find even simple things like highlighting or auto-joining IRC rooms.
Facebook is currently my top worst interface.
The toolbars, tabs and widgets are a mess and the various "dialogs" that require input are hard to distinguish from ads.
I once provided front-line support for an application that presented the user with a menu of options. It looked something like this:
[1] Do something
[2] Do something else
[3] Do another thing
[X] Exit
At this menu, my users were required to press "8".
Photoshop, completely confusing, and requires training. I guess that is how they can justify what they charge for it. Preview does almost the same thing as Acrobat and it's free!
+1 vote for Lotus Notes - absolutely horrible.
MS office is an ok UI, but I have to complain about when they change the location of functionality and features from release to release. AIIIRRGGGH!
Most web UIs also stink.
Serena PVCS for web is another "winner"
sorry, no time now for screenshots or descriptions
I'd say the Control Data NOS text editor. Combine an interface that makes teco look straightforward with not quite achieving the expressive power of notepad.
Search for a string? Sorry, you have to rewind the file first. Yes, those are separate commands.
In OSes that had, say, somewhat more market penetration than NOS, I'll go with DEC's VMS text editor. Not bad if you were on a DEC terminal, but miserable if you had another vendor's TTY hooked up.
I'm definitely going to second the vote for Blender. I have never been able to figure out quite how to use it (though that could be partly because I'm rather inexperienced with 3D modeling).
I must agree with blender, It's what I learned on. But trying to go back to it after using 3DS Max for a while is impossible. Everything is buried under so many tabs.
I'd say Windows Explorer. That "user-friendly" interface with nice shortcuts turns an average computer newbie into a completely clueless idiot after a couple of years. Re-educating somebody who clicks without reading and thinking first is very hard, because this becomes a rock-solid habit and affects the way one thinks.
Just about anything done with Remedy/ARS.
Why?
Because these applications are in the worst place: Created by DB-engineers according to business process managers. Neither of which will ever be forced to actually use the system themselves.
(You can find Remedy on the forth place of Dreckstool, a german I-Hate-This-Software-Hitlist.)
Countless websites with forms for entering addresses while the input text field has a max limit of 10 characters.
I would add any interface that tries to draw its own non-rectangular background window, that is, where it has rounded/curved corners in an attempt to look "cool". JarretV has an excellent example posted above. I have yet to see a single app like that that wasn't awful.
The Report Editor in Microsoft Access.
Nowhere near Lotus Notes, but to this day, I still absolutely hate Visual Basic only for the reason that it reminds me of building Forms and Reports in Access, even though it's not VB's fault
Z-Brush, although a very powerful tool left me baffled and confused. I'm an experienced user of photoshop and 3d studio, but Z-brush really makes me aggressive.
Maybe I could get used to it. Anyone here who works with Z-Brush regularly and can tell me what you think after prolonged use?
The search in Fogbugz. The version we use at work has a search box and has no advanced search page so if you don't know the query language for the box you're buggered.
I used to work at a hardware store, and the retail management system we used was just AWFUL. It was written in FoxPro and had many delightful features:
While this is stricly speaking a UI, it's not something I use, but it ranks right up there along the worst of UI design with the pros.
Warning Put on protective goggles before opening the following link:
I couldnt go thru all the posts (protecting my eyes), but Crystal Reports suck pretty bad!
The Realtek sound control panel. Because you obviously need an equalizer setting to 'sewer pipe', 'underwater', or 'cave'.
System properties, if you right-click 'My Computer' on Windows PC
Any SAP UI ruined my day. Large parts of it are transactional which means you'll run across some weird behaviour and will type everything 3 or 4 times.
Microsoft outlook. While I'm ok with the rest of the office suite this one just leaves me baffled. Why have email, calendar, tasks and whathaveyou combined in one application when there's no real integration between them? The search is ridiculously slow and "oh you wanted to search in other places than your inbox? well just click here and here and here".
I guess what it boils down to is combine the stress and burden of your emails with a subpar interface and you have the recipe for a really unpleasant experience.
I have never seen a time tracking application with a good ui. (I'd be delighted to be proven wrong though)
I won't say what my companies app is called incase I get fired but it looks just like this.
The godawful "Select Folder" dialogue on Windows XP and all its ilk (I do not know if it is in Vista).
Prepare to browse the entire structure of your disk through a tree view inside a small, non-resizeable window. And no, you can't just copy paste the full path to the directory you want because there's no text box to do so in.
It would be merely annoying if it wasn't used in every Windows application and installer ever.
I dislike gimps UI. For the sake of multiple top level windows, or windows in front of windows which have no taskbar entry. Hell no.
PeopleSoft
our university forces us to use it, it sucks, I hate it!!!
The tcsh shell.
It's vilely inconsistent and buggy.
As a small example, set/setenv/alias all use different notations for assigning variables (or aliases):
dbr% set something 'a'
set: Variable name must begin with a letter.
dbr% set something='a'
dbr% setenv something='a'
setenv: Syntax Error.
dbr% setenv something 'a'
dbr% alias something='a'
dbr% alias something 'a'
Even little things like the history is reformatted when you retrieve it..:
dbr% if(1) echo something;
something
dbr% if ( 1 ) echo something ;
There's much bigger issues I've run into at work (with an older version of tcsh we're basically stuck with), but the above transcript is from tcsh 6.14.00 (the most recent is 6.15)..
There are a lots of articles on it's buggyness, for example this one from 1996 or this, and quite a few of the bugs are still around in the very recent version shipped with OS X Leopard..
I once worked for a company that had a web-based UI that had a transition page with a button containing the text 'Do not press this button' on it. Pressing the button caused it to grey itself out and display 'Do not press this button again'.
Photoshop is an otherwise fine example of a good GUI imo, but they did get one thing horribly wrong: F12 which is "save as" in Office is Revert to last saved change in Photoshop - No questions asked and no undo!
Allen-Bradley's ControlView. It was one of the first SCADA's, built onto an MS-DOS based, so-called-real-time kernel which pre-empted threads every 500 milliseconds. It featured EGA (640x350, 16-color) graphics when 800x600 SuperVGA's were becoming mainstream, Microsoft-only mouse support when even Microsoft supported Mouse Systems Mouse emulation, it had to be installed in a C:\ACCESS directory whose name was pretty much hard-wired all over and which contained all sorts of obscure sub-directories with three-letter names... but the real PITA was its graphics editor, called "Mouse Graphix". It had a built-in mouse driver clearly written for a 5-dpi-or-so mouse, so a very firm hand was a must, otherwise you were almost sure of selecting the wrong menu item; needless to say, next to one of the most used items there was the infamous "Clear All", whose confirmation dialog box was absolutely the worst piece of UI ever conceived. It went like this:
Cancel this operation? (Changes will be lost)
YES NO
"Obviously" you had to answer NO to confirm and YES to cancel.
"Obviously" changes would be lost if you answered NO.
"Obviously" there was no Undo. Oh wait, there was an Undo feature, but you had the option of disabling it altogether and we usually did, because it slowed down things to the point where every single operation would cost you 30 seconds of waiting for the hard disk to apparently grind coffee.
To make things even worse, Mouse Graphix automatically moved the mouse pointer to the default button every time it displayed a dialog box, just as Windows can do, but with no option to avoid it. And, its built-in mouse driver had no hysteresis applied to the button states, so any less-than-heavy click could easily turn into two or three click events... need I really tell you which was the default answer to the dialog above?
Other parts of ControlView were not so bad (I just loved its real-time database and PLC communication features, for instance) but Mouse Graphix, man, I've had nightmares about it for years.
phpMyAdmin is increadibly bad in the terms of user interface.
I am especially frustrated with new version where developers decided to switch functionality of table selector.
There always was the name of table which led to structure of table and tiny unclickable icon that led to data of table. It was bad, but when you got used to it, it could be used. Now they switched it and as we manage more servers with different version it is always trial and error to get to where you want to.
Many more bugs and anti-features plague this product, but I am afraid that there is nothing better to be used.
I haven't used it in a few years, so hopefully it's improved since.
One more: Microsoft Project. And for the ultra-hardcore fans out here: Microsoft Project Professional with Project Server 2007.
I think it's the Lotus Notes of Project Management Software.
I'm going with any Mac OS prior to OSX. Everything was the same color.
Or iTunes.
Super converter. The application is really useful, but just look at this...
Main window:
Context menu:
And you really don't want to see the "skins" that come with it....
I wrote this XPath Tool and agree with much of the first 'nomination' comments (though 'despise' was a bit strong - it illustrates well just how emotive UIs can be). Various aspects of the UI are unconventional (some even experimental) and therefore unintuitive. Also, guilty as charged for not hiding more controls from the 'average user' - quite a lot is hidden already - but I could have done more.
This product was written to fill a gap, which it hopefully does, but further work is scheduled to improve the UI.
.
Screenshot of SketchPath
[Update] Seen below is a 'worst-case' for the SketchPath successor. This deals with 10,000 files instead of 1, but hopefully learns lessons from earlier criticism of the UI? (Vertical panels inspired by TweetDeck)
Vista & Office 2007 - moving the location of learned functionality of previous iterations for the sake of calling it improved is not only subjective but maddening
The login window for the Lotus Notes utilizes a security "feature" to defeat would-be onlookers from learning your password.
I vote for the old ZoneAlarm interface. it was awful. Fortunately the latest update really cleaned it up, but I don't have a screenshot any more...
I'd have to say GroupWise client. It's obvious it wants to be Outlook, but can't quite cut it. Display settings are often lost and have to be reset. Most options are not found in the Option dialog. Just tweaking the UI is a pain. If I want to rearrange my folders, is it in the View menu? No. View | Folder List? No. Maybe Actions? No. Window? Tools? Tools | Options? No, no and nope. Try the Edit menu. Wha??? Totally unintuitive.
I just saw an IP phone software yesterday that a friend wrote. The UI looks fine - looks like a cell phone - but behaves in a most unusual and surprising manner. Right clicking on it brings up the options dialog (ok that's kinda acceptable if there's nothing else to be put on the context menu) but if you double click it...the application exits. Most applications on Windows maximizes on double clicking and those that use a different look than the default Windows look (or don't want to be maximized) disable the double click, but it was most shocking to see a Windows application exiting upon double clicking (to be honest, not even linux or mac applications do that). He said their UI designer had said he wanted to give users "a new experience". One might as well hire a monkey as a UI designer then.
I find the MSDN (online) navigation slow and a tedious way of putting together about 100 books.
Would you find a book like this in a library? 9 different categories before you reach the chapter you're after. Obviously most people just use the search or site:msdn.microsoft.com on google
MSDN now has a low bandwidth version which is a lot nicer to use
It's a bit off topic but this is Google search bookmarklet for MSDN (make a new bookmark, copy this in as the url)
javascript:q = "" + (window.getSelection ? window.getSelection()
: document.getSelection ? document.getSelection() :
document.selection.createRange().text);
if (!q) q = prompt("You didn't select any text. Enter a search phrase:", "");
if (q!=null) location="http://www.google.com/search?btnI=&q=site:msdn.microsoft.com%20"
+ escape(q).replace(/ /g, "+");%20void%200
Vodafone Mobile Connect Lite
Most of the UI is acceptable at best.
Points of particular annoyance:
Also why hasn't anyone mentioned Comunity Server yet
I'll be impressed if I get any votes for this, but I suspect that most people out there that have tried this product would agree...
Campaign Cartographer, by ProFantasy.
This is a piece of mapping software, where you can draw landmasses, drop on some widgets like cities or mountains, etc. This sounds very straightforward, but trying to do darn near anything in this product is incredibly difficult.
To erase an item, for example, you would think you would click on the item, and then press delete or backspace or something like that. Not so.
Instead, you must first find the erase button, among the many mysterious buttons that line up around every side of the app window. You click that, then you must draw a box around the item you want to delete. Then you must right-click elsewhere on the page, and select "Do It" from the pop-up menu.
It only gets worse from there.
Maybe not so bad compared to some others, but I always shudder in fear when I have to use Super (c) video converter
AIM Messenger....
Why? Everytime see someone use it and regardless of the platform they're on...
It's hideous!
All of the default apps on Windows Mobile. Phone is just could not be used as such without third-party replacements. They look ugly and they can't do they job at all.
I would have to say Word 2007 for Windows, at least on first use. I upgrade from 2003, and bam!: "Where on the earth did my icons and menu bar go?". And why is there a freaking start menu?
Thankfully this corruption never hits the Mac version.
Oracle SQL Developer and its wonderful ability to freeze for minutes every time I click somewhere, on every machine I tested it on.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office's patent search pages.
I've just been searching for some patents a friend has. Difficult search interfaces like this make you so grateful that Google came along when it did.
Should be easy, but it's really hard. Just searching by Inventor Name has lots of little gotchas. You start by typing in Joe Blogs no answer, you try Blogs, some patents come up, you look at them, realise names are listed like Blogs; Joe A. (obvious eh!?), try searching for Blogs; Joe A., get nothing, mess around and eventually realise that Blogs; Joe A gets you what you want. Gah!!
You can also query using this strange DSL where you can do things like search for: in/"Joe; Blogs" AND an/"XYZ Corp" to get patents for Joe Blogs on behalf of XYZ Corp. Quirky. Probably powerful if you take the time to learn it. But who wants to do that?
A mexican banking site called BancaNet, accessible through banamex.com - the worst banking site I've ever seen.
I'm going to be general here and just say "Any UI that has all the options in the main window"
The main window should be clutter free and only perform the main action. If you want to perform some other action. Then you should move away from the main window, into another main window, where the main action is the action you requested.
I would say the Windows Vista/Networking configuration tool (TCP/IP, wireless networks, etc).
Even with some experience in it I can never find what I want without clicking the wrong items, or without opening at least a couple of (modal!) windows.
Try explaining (without a computer in front of you) to your grandmother over the phone how to delete a wireless network and reconnect to it because the security has changed from WEP to WPA (A completely fictional example by the way :)).
I think Modal dialogs are one the most horrible and overused UI elements, and generally not necessary.
Lotus Notes (especially the so-called 'designer') is a good second.
Any website that uses a table to limit the width of the content to <800px.
Like wordpress, or blogspot.
Additionally, if I use my browser to zoom in, i get one word per line, and HUGE empty space on the sides.
BridgeTrak. I finally convinced the project manager the database password so I didn't have to use it anymore.
Actually, since they hosted it on our old dev server, I had the sa password anyway. However, because of the annoying way it set up its schema, it was almost impossible to query unless you used its own user.
These days, sales reps are a bit impressed that I can look up info faster than they can by typing into query analyzer (BridgeTrak takes forever to load).
Windows Explorer definitely. Copying files from one folder to another is tedious. Also the command prompt should be in the bottom of it like it is in Total Commander.
Any application with a curved border even when maximised, such that clicking in the top corner of your screen will miss and close the application underneath it!
Apple Safari for Windows used to be guilty of this.
EFTPS.gov: They have these long complicated tax forms, with helpful looking little ? boxes next to some of the fields. I got 2/3 of the way down one of the forms and wanted more info. I thought, "no... they wouldn't do that to me, right?", so I clicked the question mark. It took me to another page and cleared my original form. (Clicking "back" took me to the blank form)
A website I use to pay one of my credit cards gives you a transaction # (~20 characters long) at the end (which I like to put into Quicken rather than print out) but their body has the following attribute:
<body onselectstart="return false;">
Which means I have to view source and then find text around the transaction number, just to copy/paste it. It seems so arbitrary, like the developer thought he was clever by coming up with it. I cannot imagine how it could help the experience, and in this case (that the devs might not have considered) it hurts.
Gotta but the escape button in theDraw (an early 90's ASCII drawing editor) being the Help button.
an ERP application originally written in ASP had a large animating telephone GIF on one of the pages, it was constantly moving and very annoying!
I think tab index
when it's not set properly, using the software can be a pain
Progress bars that aren't accurate. I hate a progress bar that reaches 100% (or 99%) after a minute or 2 and then sits there for another 20 minutes before "completing".
Two things:
Oh, it's three things:
SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Manager. Not a single dialog window can be resized so you're left scrolling textfields with the keyboard in order to see their content, and scrolling through a list of all your tables that only displays 5 at a time when you've got an enterprise database back there with over 200 tables on it. Beggers belief that no one at Microsoft put this through its paces.
I have to say that in over 30 years of using computers, Clarity has by far the worst interface ever. Clearly the designers never actually tried to use what they came up with. Discussions take too long to load (and you can only see one message at a time, so useful for a project that takes months or weeks), so people don't bother with them, instead they send emails, so details of actual decision are not documented in a project. There is literaly no way to see what project you are in half the time (especially if you come inthrough an email link) and no way to sort by client (or even see what client the project belongs to on most screens) or put something on hold and on and on. Every task takes a ridiculous number of keystrokes to perform and simple things that should be availble to anyone involved in a project aren't. Designers clearly never actually tried to manage multiple projects from this thing. Thank you for letting me vent.
My interface feature pet peeves are:
Straying too far from the style of the environment you're developing for, i.e. Apple software on Windows.
Don't alienate existing users by completely changing your interface paradigms between versions! i.e. Microsoft Office.
If your software requires a 50 page manual just to explain the lexicon of the subject your software covers, it's too complex. The learning curve should be shallow for the target audience. If the end user has to apply any different concepts than they already understand for their everyday job, then they should be as simple to understand as possible. Don't make them have to learn to do their job completely differently to understand your software. In fact, if at all possible, don't even make them think!
Why don't installers follow the same design concept as other software? I don't understand them and no matter how much reading I do on them I just don't seem to get it. Why am I limited to template forms, and why are they such a pain in the a$$ to build? I should be able to write forms (a la C#) and insert them into the workflow just like I can on any regular C# application. Is this one of those concepts you either understand or don't? like pointers/recursion? A build script is similar - written in XML... consequently I just don't understand this whole genre of software. How can you build a piece of software from essentially a database? So I guess this whole genre of software comes under my software design pet peeves. WiX, InstallShield, Windows Installer, Wise, InstallAnywhere... All the tools out there for this appear to try and renovate the same concept in the same but slightly more useful way. Someone needs to completely renovate the entire underlying concept to something more dynamic and intuitive.
Web Interfaces - Use the label's "for" attribute to tie labels to their respective controls so that when I click on the label, the cursor is put in the control.
Use the correct tab indexing so that I can tab through fields in the right order. There's nothing worse than tabbing to the next field to find you're not in the field you should be.
Don't use auto-postback on fields that don't require auto-postback, there's nothing worse than having to wait to fill in the next field. Use AJAX if you need dynamic fields!
Don't automatically assume I want your software run at startup or put in the task tray, ask me and I will choose if I want that or not!
xkcd - I love xkcd, but the tooltip picture title never shows long enough to read it, and when I mouse back over the picture it won't come back unless I click on a different window first. Usually I have to view source to read the whole thing!
StackOverflow pet peeve - when I click on a link it doesn't open in a new tab/window. It takes me off to the new page, then I can never remember which window had StackOverflow in so it takes me a minute to get back to the question I linked from! I have to remember to right click the link and select open in new tab/window.
Outlook Web Access for Exchange 2003 - The change font drop down never seems to work, I have to fiddle with it for ages to get it to select the font I want. And then sometimes, it seems to change the font through some combination of keystrokes I have no idea of and then I can't put it back because it won't let me select any of the fonts in the drop down as it keeps flicking back to the currently selected one!
A graphical programming environment with barely any interactivity: like visually laid-out flowcharts with no ability to rearrange or connect or disconnect nodes in the graph using the mouse.
Any web page with highlighted words that you mouse-over and a popup wants to redirect you. Most of the time the highlighted words have no relevance whatsoever to the story you are reading or are redirects to advertising.
Double clicking on a word sends you to another page even if the work is not a link. It's killing me since I'm always double clicking randomly while reading a page. I know, I have issues...
Text on a web page that is disabled and not selectable. Why can't I select the text???
Mouse right click displaying "No right click on this page!"
Links opening in new windows without warning me
In the second version of a popular football game for the PC, there was no room to add another interface piece, so the decision was made that you'd get a detail menu by DOUBLE-CLICKING on a radio button!
Obviously no one would ever find it on their own, so the instructions had to tell you how find the menu.
Disabling right-click on a web page. Especially when coupled with a javascript alert to tell you it's been disabled.
Forms that clear all the inputs when there was a minor validation problem in one of them
Basically any program that overrides standard keyboard shortcuts like command+C and command+V for copy/paste (or in the windows world when control+insert doesn't copy or shift+insert doesn't paste it really ticks me off).
My favorite is when itunes renders all the text labels on top of each other after any type of session restore (lock, sleep and especially hibernate) or when it renders the entire window black
The fact that the Express edition of SQL Server doesn't come with any real UI besides VS which I suppose reflects it's market a little but they have released an express edition of Managemnt Studio, why they dont ship with that I don't know
The Office Assistant, any place at all where Microsoft Agent is used, especially when it's used as an ActiveX control on a web site.
The Safari preferences UI on windows doesn't have an OK button, I am aware that simply closing the window constitutes a save on OS X but when I'm on windows it's disconceting to use the close button on a dialog when not abandoning changes. The annoying growing / shrinkinhg animation on that dialog when you change tabs
Synergy, aweful aweful buttons and background colours, reminds me of VCL buttons a.k.a. Botland buttons. Windows media player 7 8 9 and 11 when used on vista, the massive overuse of Aero glass in that UI Infinite loops in Access when trying to close a form and you havent filled in a required feild with an input mask your unsure of
Small footprint mode in Task Manager
Without a doubt for me it's the "are you sure you want to exit" popup that some apps seem to insist on displaying. 99.99999% of the time I'm certain I want to exit, yet 100% of the time I have to respond to this dialog.
Fortunately not too many apps do this, but when I encounter one it drives me up the wall.
Web pages that "cleverly" turn off the right click (in a purported effort to prevent users from saving/copying information or images).
Grrrr...oss!
Automatically putting focus on the "user-name" field of a login form. I can't tell you how many times I entered part of my password in the "user-name" field just because I didn't want to wait for the page to finish loading.
Flash websites. They're slow, annoying with all the animation, and you can't right-click / "open in new tab" the hyperlinks.
Go to http://www.gazza.com.na/, enter the site, and check out the navigation menu at the top: every item opens a single subitem that is identical to itself. Not so much annoying as puzzling and pointless, that one.
On the other hand, Gazza is a sweet musician, in my opinion. So all is forgiven.
Personalized Menus. You know, the ones where menu options are hidden because you don't use them very often, and then you have to completely open up the menu to get to the other options.
I remember where things are in relation to other things (by proximity), so when a program hides menu options, I get lost.
Also, multi-row tabs, where you click on a tab in the middle row, and suddenly all of the tabs are shuffled around. Now I have to read all the tabs again. In general, I don't like it when programs move things around. I like them to stay in one place where I can remember where they are.
Too many options. For example, Windows Start > Log Off / Shut Down / Hybernate / Sleep / Lock
Also, dialog boxes that won't let you focus/ALT-TAB anything else.
drop-down menus that go more than two levels deep, and have a short timeout to close - so you have to try and select the option 5 times before getting it right.
excessive use of modal windows in a web app.
See just about anything Bruce Tognazzini has been writing about for aeons, my (least) favorite is applications that steal focus.
The unanchored multi-select used by iTunes is ridiculous. If you hit Shift-Down to select multiple items, pressing up will expand the selection from the top rather than shrinking the list from the bottom. You then have to start over or use the mouse to fix your selection.
Any web page that starts playing music or video without me explicitly clicking something to do so... I am IMMEDIATELY out of there and never coming back.
"Controlled Single Document Interface"
See: http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/windows-primary.html.en#csdi
Also see: GIMP, http://www.gimp.org/screenshots/
Instead of menus and toolbars and such, we'll just stick entirely separate windows all over your desktop! Who wouldn't want that?
Javascript hyperlinks which you can't open in a new tab.
Websites where the pages gets dynamically shifting URL:s which you cannot bookmark or link to, but have to link to the main page and describe the sequence of clicks....
Most annoying feature I've seen was in an old simulation language (Simscript I believe) if you typed:
c:> simscript /?
The response from the program would be:
Enter simscript /h for help
No other missed command line would do that, just the '?'. It new what I wanted but refused to give it to me.
javascript dropdown menus that goes horizontal first then vertical. You need gamer mouse accuracy to follow the thin horizontal line to get to your selection.
Also radio buttons/checkboxes that would not allow you to click on text to toggle. This is because some clever programmer decided that it wasn't cool so they juxtaposed a label next to the actual button
Partially loaded pages in Firefox (and possibly some other browsers) don't enable all of the location bar buttons. Two problems with this:
There's no point in any level of any page load that I might never wish to interrupt. In particular, those obnoxious pages that set the focus to their search or login. So when I click in the location bar because I've browsed to the wrong page, half of the url ends up in the location bar and the other half ends up in the page's useless search field. Another option is those obnoxios pop-unders adverts that annoy you when you try to close them, but if you stop them quickly enough they might not get the chance.
Sometimes I'll want to refresh a page that hasn't even loaded yet. Most often this is because the server is unreachable the first time I've tried. Once I get the connection up or the server listening for requests, the page will load fine. Except that the browser never saw a page and I have to click in the url field and press enter, or some other such hassle.
Not so much a part of the application UI itself, but I hate it when the installer creates a Start Menu folder using the company's name and then the application's name as a subfolder. Makes finding the shortcut again very difficult, because now I have to remember who made the program rather than what it's actually called.
Nested tab controls can be particularly exasperating. Some internal business systems I've seen had up to four levels of nested tabs ... ugh!
They do what they can to create close-to-usable user interfaces in Java, but honestly, I haven't seen ONE Java-written UI I could say I like. The look and feel of every Java application is just strange.
Btw, has anyone noticed how in Eclipse you sometimes cut stuff out of the editor and it magically disappears from the clipboard before you try to paste it? The way Java programs handle mouse/keyboard events is odd. If you disagree, please provide an example of a Java-written UI you are satisfied with.
Telelogic Rhapsody. (Now it's Rational Rhapsody since IBM bought Telelogic)
One of the most important thing for me while using an application is the ability to carry on doing things using only the keyboard, without the aid of the mouse. But Rhapsody has a great policy: "Refresh the dialogs and lose the input focus whenever possible". That just drives me crazy.
The text editor on an old Data General.
Client: "You ever used vi?"
Me: "Ugh...yes."
Client: "Well this is going to make Vi Look like Word."
HummingBird's information mining tool, was it written by the same follows behind Remedy
Windows Update's balloon notifications (from the Windows XP era). Every time I click a button it minimises to the system tray and pops up a notification. I click the notification to dismiss it and the dialog comes back. It's whack-a-mole hell.
Windows windows that can't be resized and should be made resizable.
Why this isn't made resizable is beyond me ...
(the latter is mentioned in this Microsoft Connect request)
The Microsoft Certification Exam application - both the practice one you get with those Microsoft Press Training Kits and the real-deal one. Poor keyboard support, unresizable, seemingly overtly hostile towards scrolling in every way imaginable.
Most of the posts here are UIs that are more complex than necessary, this is the opposite. Simplicity at the cost of utility.
It's incredibly complicated to actually accomplish anything with overly sensitive vertical scroll/clicking pad in the middle, along with the completely unpredictable buttons on the sides (I still don't know what the curved arrow with the dot button in the upper left does, all I know is you exit your current playlist when it gets clicked, which you can't get back to easily).
The touch pad in the middle that controls both scrolling and clicking is by far it's worst feature; it seems to have an shockingly accurate ability to sense which you're trying to do, and chooses to do the opposite.
Creating a playlist of more than a few songs is completely out of the question, as is diligently controlling the device in anything other than a completely stationary context (ie running or in a moving vehicle). If you click when you're supposed to scroll you can get anything from moving to a different screen unpredictably to exiting and losing a playlist you were in the middle of building.
Also if you plug into a computer and copy songs using the usb mass storage device feature you get an unpredicatble number of entries in your song list. I have some songs that are on my playlist as many as five times because of this.
Solomon IV Service Series was awful. No, that doesn't do it justice. Solomon was impressively F*#@-ed up.
I had almost forgotten the horror, but thanks to this thread my long-repressed memories have bubbled to the surface. So much for all that precious time and money spent on therapy and hypnotism!
We had to upgrade all of our systems to machines 2-3x as fast, with 4x as much RAM, just to run it. Even with the blazingly fast new workstations, Solomon still ran (er...crawled) slow. We commonly joked that the faster machines just allowed Solomon to crash faster and let us reboot more quickly. Sadly, it was only a joke for the first couple of days...after that, it was just a very disheartening statement of fact. Originally we were still running Windows 95--that had to go, too, because only an enterprise-class operating system like Windows NT 4.0 could handle Solomon's frequent crashes without requiring a reboot. Well...almost. We found out later that WinNT couldn't always handle the crashes, but at least we were sometimes able to save any other files we had open and semi-gracefully reboot the system.
In order to do anything, you had to memorize seemingly random patterns of buttons and menus to click on. There was no logic to the order in which you opened up new screens to enter new customer data, look up existing tickets, etc. There were several different ways to do do almost everything, but nobody could get the same series of steps to produce the same result (except for hanging the system--that feature was implemented particularly well).
To top it all off, Solomon Service Series was apparently built on top of a set of lobotomized VB libraries, which meant Solomon didn't "work" (if you can call it that) like any other Windows application any of us had ever used. The text fields' behavior sometimes wasn't even consistent within a single screen. A few cases in point:
After several months of blood-boiling frustration due to system hangs and lost productivity, we discovered that you could sometimes interrupt a system hang and regain control of Windows. The on-site "Solomon Expert" from the third floor finally got tired of hearing us complain about the lock-ups and came down one day to demonstrate that the system worked perfectly for her.
I noticed that, as she zipped through the screens filling out a support ticket, something on the left side of the screen kept flickering on and disappearing, and she frequently reached all the way to the left of her keyboard to do something. Being the Windows 95 Power User that I was, it didn't take me long to catch onto what she was doing: she was pressing Ctrl+Esc, which is the keyboard shortcut for bringing up the Start Menu (none of our keyboards had "windows" keys, so I don't know if that would have also worked). As she continued demonstrating how great the system worked, I pointed out the Start Menu flicker to some of my colleages and we asked her, "Wait, what did you just do?" She showed us several more times as we tried to get her to notice that she was using an undocumented "feature" that nobody had ever told us about, but she didn't even realize she was pressing any extra keys until we told her to go one keystroke at a time and stopped her in her tracks when she reached for Ctrl+Esc. Somehow she had figured out a "hack" that allowed her to just barely trick this unusable software into working well enough for her.
In my free time, I started working on a replacement GUI app that would interface with the same database as Solomon, but which would actually "work," so to speak. My code-name for it was "DSD," for "Die, Solomon, Die." Unfortunately, I only had a copy of Visual Studio.NET Beta 1 to work with, and the GUI editor in Beta 1 really wasn't ready for prime-time. The time it took to refresh the GUI editor was apparently n!, where n was the number of components added to the Windows Form. On top of that, my tenure as a student was drawing to a close. I was about to get a new job, far, far away from Solomon, and nobody else really seemed to have the appropriate background or enough time and interest to pick up where I left off.
Oh, what we all would have given for a UI as sleek, robust, and user-friendly as FileMatrix.
VMware Infrastructure Client
It is slow! It doesn't work, and it breaks all the time.
Try to create a new VM. As it is being created, you can see it on the list of VMs. Now right click it and select Edit settings.
How can you edit settings on a machine being created? You can't. You get a freaking null reference exception!
And it has way more flaws than you could ever imagine.
VMware and the concept of virtualization is great. But the Infrastructure Client is the Worst UI I've Ever Used!
I've got to say the interface to find servers and join games in the Battlefield series games. (Battlefield 2)
They should all be slapped.
Today I've met the:
That's the oddest settings manager I have ever seen.
It is ultra counter intuitive.
It took me about 10 minutes to realize: "That was not a picture"... and other 5 to figure out what to change.
Right click -> advanced:
Yes advanced please!
This strange page from adobe with a lot of text shows up. Usually I just quit at this point. With a strange feeling of What did I do wrong???
What did I do wrong?
Now, where to go from here?!!
Ok eventually and after reading and clicking all around, I came to this page ( well actually somebody drop me the directly to it )
And I did what I guess most users do when they get this far ( if they do ). I stare at the page wondering what to do next.
As I knew there was "something" there, I .. read .. :P
Oh THAT's not an image that's the actual setting manager. What is it doing in the Adobe site?
Oh that's not an image
Ok, changed something here.. now what? Should I save? mmmhh nope, just close the window? What? What?
I have to just close the window, the this was the strangest experience I have ever had.
It does against all the habituation's we have formed using computers.
Did you knew were the Flash players settings are?
The worst UI I've ever used is not one found on a computer screen.
I hate the 'vocal' interfaces you get when you call a company (read: wireless companies and financial institutions) and they try to impress you with their voice activated menu systems that a. never gives you the options you need, b. can never quite understand everything you say and c. needs you to start banging numbers a couple of rounds, or swearing to get to a person to have a conversation and try to get exactly what I need.
If I wanted to do the simple stuff (e.g., check my balance, pay a bill) I would have done it online. I call because I have a specific problem that I need to solve, and every time, their voice menu system just throws me into loops of frustration.
I think www.naturgrise.dk is pretty much a textbook example of how not to do web design.
The page is currently down with the message "Naturgrise er midlertidig lukket pga af sygdom" which translates to "Naturgrise (Nature-pigs?) is temporarily closed due to illness".
You can see how it looked before it closed using archive.org.
IBM's Rational Rose. Had to use this at school, and I think I'd have preferred SAP over it.
We've got this Oster toaster oven. Probably large enough to cook a turkey, but is seldom used for anything larger than two slices of bread. I don't even want to think about how much energy this thing wastes heating up the entirety of its enormous chamber.
Anyhow, the buttons on this thing are those idiotic flush pressure type. Buttons marked "start", "stop" and "toast", which you'd expect to be prominent, are buried within a poorly arranged cluster of about a dozen buttons. I have to stare at this piece of garbage for ten seconds to figure out how to make toast or to stop it once it's incinerated another perfoectly innocent slice of bread.
Not sure if this is the worst, but certainly took the cake in the most frustration and time wasted. It would be the web interface in Microsoft Project Server!
There used to be a great website called the user interface hall of shame. That had some fantastic additions and notes about why the listed pieces of software were so bad.
Amazon website. How do you log out once you have logged in?
There is a button that says "Not " but why would you click that when you are you!?
A telephone for any IVR application. No way to enter individual letters since each key corresponds to 3-4 characters. No display of entry, even no password ones. Many must wait for whole message before entering. Excessively long messages. Useless messages "to ... press 1 on your phone" (as if I was going to press 1 on the microwave).
Stupidest dialog boxes ever.
Mac shareware version of Risk
I am sure you will read this one twice.Couldn't control myself laughing at it.How worse can something be?
Microsoft's SQL Server 6.5 -- Enterprise Manager
I always loved the brilliant idea Microsog had in Office to make menus simpler by showing the full menu "after a short delay"
SharePoint. Hands down awful for the user community. What were they thinking? You have constantly scroll and click way too much when configuring web parts. And don't even think you'll be able to train users to update content - it's way too complicated, and people who have other CMS systems revolt when they have to click Site Actions, find the web part, click Edit, scroll to right, scroll down, then type a URL - oh wait, I forgot to copy the URL so I have to start over.
Pro Engineer beats them all. There are pop up menus and status bars from every conceivable place. No dialog is self consistent in the application. Doing anything unless you've been taught how to do it is difficult. Take the simplest thing you might want to do in a cad system: measure something. Takes a lot of clicks.
Modal dialogs to do everything. It should go back to Unix from whence it came.
They recently converted 1/2 the application to the MS 2007 style, and left the rest alone. Help has improved, but still sux.
The only reason we bought this was because one customer required it. Would have gone with Solid Edge if we had any choice.
This was an "Error" which occurred while installing Net Beans.It do suck.
Designing user interface without customer will be worst user interface for the customer.
Our new Internet Banking app from Standard Bank Mauritious, the irony is now they released it we have to pay 30 bucks a months to use it. I could go on about various things and how impossible it is to use but what takes the cake is
A Fatal Error Has Occurred
[ Yes ] [ No ]
If I say no does the error go away and I can continue to do my banking?
Toad!
Perhaps this is just the result of my frustrations in migrating from SQL Server (and having tools like Enterprise Manager and Query Analyzer) to Oracle (and trying to do certain things in Toad), but it seems to me that even the most simple tasks are unnecessarily complex. I can tell that it's a very sophisticated piece of software capable of doing some really incredible things if I can ever figure them out, but the UI is so difficult to navigate that I have a hard time doing the not-so-sophisticated things.
I'm rather surprised nobody else has said this. Perhaps I'm just a noob, but like I said, it seems to me that transitioning from SQL Server tools should be a lot easier.
Anything I wrote for personal use that I thought would be a "one-time temporary solution."
Seriously, I've written "UI" for myself that consisted of a bunch of spaghetti modules in VBA within Access with absolutely no commenting and no GUI interface. When I originally used the app, I simply pressed F5 on the keyboard while within a certain procedure and then waited for the magic to happen as it subsequently jumped through a dozen or so different procedures. The next time I went into the app, I had no idea where to start and couldn't even use it :-/.
I apologize if someone already mentioned this, but I hate when windows tries to do me a favor by selecting the space after the text I am trying to copy.
Cars have a pretty bad UI. Whose idea was it to put the "go" two inches away from the "stop," then hide them both down by your feet?
I've heard of a ton of completely preventable accidents caused by "I meant to hit the brake, but hit the gas instead!"
Also, the placement of the horn is not something you want drivers to have to think about in a time of emergency; unfortunately, it's non-standard, being in the center of some cars and the edge of the steering-wheel in others.
Back in the days before air-bags, there was a big round ring that you could press on anywhere to cause the horn to go off.
Cars today need to improve upon that idea, by keeping the current, less-dangerous-to-smash-your-face-into design, while allowing users to push anywhere on the center of the wheel to honk the horn. This should be standardized, or even enforced by law, to prevent as many accidents as possible.
Hibernate on Windows XP.
Who would of thought of holding down the Shift key!
My hand watch / pulsemeter from Polar.
It has 3 buttons and a pretty simple LCD screen with 5-letter alpha display, standard 88:88 digital number display and some fixed LCD elements.
It would seem that should be enough for "up, down, OK" and a cancel option for a consistent menu-driven UI of "previous, next, OK" and each menu containing a "cancel" or "next, OK, cancel".
But in fact it feels like about 5 different apps, each using buttons according to their own system and changing their meanings as you go. Like, press left to enter alarm setting. press right up to switch from alarm setting to time setting. press left to increase minutes. press lower right to switch to hours. press and hold lower right to toggle 12/24h. press upper right to enter setting date. press again to exit time setting. now pressing it again will enter the file menu, where all keys have a different meaning again (you need to pressleft to exit it...)
The Microsoft Office Products' GUIs aren't too bad normally. But on EVERY SINGLE NEW VERSION THEY ALWAYS CREATE A NEW UI. Sorry for caps, but it seems as soon I get accustomed to using PowerPoint (Seems to be the most common multimedia tool at our school D: ), the school gets a new version of it and I have to start learning the UI from scratch again.
The SUPER video converter website. It takes three hard to find "Download" links to get to the download itself from the homepage, the first two of which lead to another unorganized page consisting of either lists of features or instructions on how to do complicated things.
Then there's the interface of SUPER itself.
Modal Dialogues!!
I hate modal dialogue boxes. Especially in apps that supposedly have multiple independent windows. You pop up a dialogue box on one and suddenly, you can't do anything in any of the other windows either. Especially select and copy information to enter into the dialogue box.
Autoraise on focus.
On Windows, I use "focus follows mouse" (aka XMouse from the TweakUI kit). IDE's (and our old friend Lotus Notes) are the worst offender for raising their main window over all other windows when they receive focus.
My mouse accidentally strays over the IDE window and wham! Suddenly it obliterates the window I was looking at and raises itself over the top of all other windows. Why can't they make that an option?
And yes, I know that the alternative would be that the IDE can gain focus while its window is obscured behind the program I'm debugging, and that's confusing.
Maybe I'm not just enough of a conformist.
Apple Logic. The only Apple application I'm aware of that has two different menu bars. EEk.
Eclipse isn't that great either compared to it's competition (netbeans for example) but the absolute worst UI that i have used would probably be hotmails
dd
"if" as an abbreviation for "input file"
"of" as an abbreviation for "output file"
Maybe Safari for Windows is just trying to help users out on right-clicks, but… I hate how a right-click on any word will select it. An ultra-short context menu comes up instead of allowing me to get to the "View Source" item that I really want.
I am somewhat surprised that no one has mentioned this yet, but the BMW iDrive is absolutely horrible. Nearly everything except driving -- changing the volume/radio station/current mp3, setting a GPS destination, changing the A/C or heating, etc. -- is done using a single knob, which you can spin, press in four directions, or push down on (the image is of the newer version, which mercifully adds a little more functionality):
This is the interface:
Making this even better is that to get to most things, you have to navigate multiple nested menus -- typically something like 3-7 -- to do anything at all. Better still, if you accidentally went barking up the wrong part of the menu tree, in the original iDrive you couldn't go back to the parent node; instead, you had to start at the root.
Now, admittedly, BMW made the system a little more usable in the current iteration, by adding programmable buttons and a modicum of voice control, but god help you if you bought a BMW with the original in it. The iDrive is proof that sometimes, minimalist interfaces are bad. BMW should have left i-prefixed devices with minimalist interfaces to Apple.
Windows cmd.exe
Why can't I select text (using the mouse as usual, or shift + arrow keys) and use Ctrl + c to copy and Ctrl + v to paste text to it, like in every other Windows application?
Additonally the edit > mark "feature" cmd.exe has is not line based but rectangle based, so most of the time you have unwanted stuff in your selection as well.
And it's really cool that it doesn't support UTF-8, but uses codepage 437 (or 850).
EDIT: Just noticed, that you can temporarily change the codepage to UTF-8 in console programs, but you cant set UTF-8 as default encoding.
Everybody's old (not)favorite - IE6. Forgot about its pop-bar?
Worst nightmare ever, I must say. :D
YouTube, which cannot scroll through comments without blowing the video frame off the screen.
