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Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956
Sometimes we take Web and user interface design for granted—that's the point of User Inyerface, a hilariously and deliberately difficult-to-use website created to show just how much we rely on past habits and design conventions to interact with the Web and our digital devices.
According to design firm Bagaar's blog:
Over the past decennium, users have grown accustomed to certain design patterns: positions, colors, icons... Rather than looking at a UI, users tend to act instinctively and take 90% of an interface for granted.
... But what happens if we poke all good practice with a stick and stir it up? What if we don't respect our self-created rules and expectations and do everything the other way around?
The resulting website is a gauntlet of nearly impossible-to-parse interactions that are as funny as they are infuriating. In one case, the colors for the male and female selection options in a personal info form are reversed compared to expectations: the white-backgrounded one is the selection, while the blue-highlighted one is the one you're not picking—and there's no non-binary option, either, of course.
The linked web site requires Javascript, or you can just look at the pictures and captions on Ars Technica to get a feel for the ghastly gauntlet in all its "glory".
For more viewing "pleasure", please see Web Pages That Suck and Mystery Meat Navigation.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 07 2019, @10:32PM (2 children)
If you want to see the true monstrosity in UX, look for school or academic systems for student management. For a significant money, they are just masterpiece of poorly coding, UI problems and field for ambiguous data inpus. They usually don't use fancy controls, but these supplied by browser, so it looks even worse. The worst thing I found was the puzzle - like this from old point-and-click games - which had to be solved to send message to student. The form looks like this:
Message Type | E-mail | SMS
E-mail [ ] | (o) | ( )
S.M.S. [ ] | ( ) | (o)
Where [ ] is checkbox, ( ) is radio button. Good luck solving this!
But the system has been beautifully screwed up internally too. Let's look at the internals of database. After 5 years of tortu.... USAGE, all new courses in all years got one additional student, let's call him Mr. Imadick. Generally similar hilarious and unprobable name. This student got "not present" grade all time, but was there, as the additional one. Finally someone started to ask questions and team had to respond. It has been shown that Mr. Imadick was "the gateway". What happened? Some "architect" decided to optimize database structures. Great, let's rewrite half of routines and make ID maximum of 65535, WCGW?
The system works perfectly in smaller universities, in larger after 5 years it just got an ID overflow. The patch was to use the additional data in a record, which used its unused Student's pass number field as expansion for ID, however, the last working ID was Mr. Imadick. This way, the system shown this "virtual" attendant all times.
(Score: 2) by sshelton76 on Monday July 08 2019, @05:56AM
Wrong site... You're looking for this one.
https://thedailywtf.com/ [thedailywtf.com]
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday July 08 2019, @07:25AM
I for one prefer browser-supplied controls to fancy controls written in JavaScript.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.