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User Inyerface – A worst-practice UI experiment
- moistly 5y agoDoesn’t appear to work on my tablet… so goal 110% achieved! Edit: oh, heck, it does work—I completely missed the obvious misdirection!
- genewitch 5y agoi had to view source - for a second i thought this was a notpron-ish sort of game. Then i had to look again. There's no indication that you're hovering over something.
- Weryj 5y agoI absolutely hated that, guess that's a success.
- java-man 5y agoI feel like I've been in this experiment for the last 20 years...
- systemvoltage 5y agoI have a personal punishment policy for any obvious violation of UX/UI - they will permanently and irrevokably lose me as a customer. Even if they fix it, I won't budge. Leadership needs to use their own products and if they allow this to go to production, I wonder what they're doing behind the scenes. Small battles that I pick, but by god it is so satisfying.
- doomroot 5y agoSo a small shop that can only pay 1 fresh bootcamp dev who is trying their hardest doesn’t get your business because they can’t keep up with several hundred Frontend google devs. Seems a little silly and absolutist.
- ryandrake 5y agoMost horrible UX comes from too much software, not to little. If it was a single dev, they’d probably not have time to implement all the popups, dickbars, newsletter reminders, full screen interruptions, and dark patterns. Horrible UX takes large engineering effort.
- systemvoltage 5y agoIt is usually the opposite - large enterprises have horrible UX than a mom & pop small shop. Furthermore, just because you're small doesn't mean you cannot fix UX of the user. I don't throw my money at them in charity or pity for being small. There are some great small businesses, and many not so great. Absolutist argument is perhaps in the point you're making. I run a small side business with $2k/month in revenue and I damn well make sure that there are no annoyances to the user. This is standard expectation and has nothing to do with how big or small you are. We should all strive for excellence and not perpetuate mediocrity. Regarding silliness - it would be silly to keep going to a restaurant that has rude service. That's what you're saying essentially.
- analog31 5y agoIt's a win-win. The small shop also can't afford to deal with this customer. Not to disparage either, but a first lesson for small businesses is that you can't chase every customer.
- bschwindHN 5y agoTo be honest google makes pretty awful frontends so I'd say the small shop has an advantage here.
- MattGaiser 5y agoEh, a very basic form can offer a solid (if ugly) user experience if you do not need too much validation.
- contravariant 5y agoThere are levels of badness that can only be achieved through sheer talent or diligence. Both are red flags.
- mabedan 5y agoI know I’m supposed to hate it, but at first glance the color scheme reminded me of NC and I … I … liked it
- leff_f 5y agocannot stop laughing!
- leff_f 5y agoExpand in the place of the close button is the best part.
- davidmurdoch 5y agoAnd the best part is that I clicked it twice thinking the second time would do what I wanted.
- jtvjan 5y agoI love the double indirection on the cookie dialog. You're used to the small, unhighlighted option being the one to click to reject cookies, but here the question is asked the other way around, making the big button the one you want to click instead.
- Causality1 5y agoI appreciate this. I'm so sick of seeing links hit the top of HN that are utterly broken in landscape orientation because some stupid pop-up renders with the close button off-screen.
- narush 5y agoThis was actually hilarious, and honestly better than half the screens I've designed :-)
- enjoyyourlife 5y agoReminds me of job applications
- loa_in_ 5y agoNot enough repetitive questions. The birth date one was appropriately frustrating though!
- toxik 5y ago5:59 on an iPhone, why did I do this I don’t know
- throwaway4pooxi 5y agolove the help chat bottom right only has a increase height button.
- simlan 5y agoThat was hilarious i gave up at the slow scrolling cookie consent template. Thanks for the laugh !!!
- beprogrammed 5y agoThanks for the ideas, I will be sure to implement them in my next project.
- dt3ft 5y agoWe should make this a thing. Enough with catering to user’s wishes and making everything idiot-proof :)
- easterncalculus 5y agoI was expecting the benny hill theme to eventually start playing, this is hilarious.
- pelagicAustral 5y agoI rage-quitted on the third captcha
- jumelles 5y agoI ended up getting through by selecting them all.
- qwertox 5y agoThe worst was the initial scroll offset. I was wondering why the last row had no checkboxes below the images, and was unable select those images. After three or four times submitting that damn dialog I noticed that I can scroll up. I also had to scroll down the terms and conditions dialog twice because I thought I could just click the text in order to toggle the checkbox. 8 minutes and something. Very painful.
- jrochkind1 5y agoI selected them all -- on every one it looked to me like they all were the thing -- I did not pass. At least not if getting another captcha means you didn't pass.
- Asraelite 5y agoI gave up after the 6th captcha or so. If the answer is to check them all then that's a bit dishonest, because some pictures technically don't apply. For example, glass windows are not "glasses".
- m3kw9 5y agoIt’s so bad I didn’t want to go past the 2nd page.
- m3kw9 5y agoA complement actually
- arthurcolle 5y agoGod this is painful
- hpen 5y agoI got the fuck out after i clicked "no"
- CamperBob2 5y agoThat's some Douglas Adams[1] grade work, there. Bravo. 1: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Bureaucracy_1987 https://archive.org/details/msdos_Bureaucracy_1987
- soperj 5y agoI laughed at various points. well done.
- xophishox 5y agoI cant stop laughing trying to fill out forms.
- wtetzner 5y agoHow do I get past this? > Your password is not unsafe
- WrtCdEvrydy 5y agoneed to be Password1234
- grawprog 5y agoYou may need to add a cyrillic character...
- zild3d 5y agothat means its fine (not unsafe is safe)
- float4 5y agoI wasn't getting through because my domain was "domain". When I changed it to "gmail" it was fine.
- jrochkind1 5y agoThere's nothing to get past. Your password is not unsafe, which is what you want, you're good. Just click next.
- kristopolous 5y agouse A1AAAAAAAAAA and be A1AAAAAAAAAA@gmail.com
- wtetzner 5y agoThanks, that worked.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dang 5y agoOne past thread: User Inyerface – A worst-practice UI experiment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20344565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20344565 - July 2019 (255 comments)
- Jipazgqmnm 5y agoAnd here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20353724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20353724 on July 4, 2019 and here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20345826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20345826 on July 3, 2019 and here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20351023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20351023 on July 4, 2019
- dang 5y agoTrue! it's just that the convention is not to link to past submissions that didn't get interesting threads. Otherwise users get cranky when they click on the links and find nothing interesting there.
- qwertox 5y agoOh my nerves... what a stresstest.
- grawprog 5y agoWell...I did it...somehow...I did... 00:06:57 That seems too fast...apparently i've experienced these things far too much. It actually was filling me with rage. I came close to saying fuck it...I really did... Well done to the creators...you managed to, with 100% accuracy, capture every single thing that's horrible about signing up to websites. That bow thing though...gotta admit, was worth it just for the chuckle I got as I realized...
- dr_orpheus 5y agoI nearly quit when it said "your age and birthdate don't match". Glad I got through because the bow and check also gave me a laugh.
- romwell 5y agoI absolutely expected that. Having both birthdate and age was the Chekhov's gun on that form. The only thing better would be to have them on different form pages.
- romwell 5y agoI got nearly the same time, 06:58. Spent the most time on the bow. If you liked this, you will enjoy the Phone Number UI from hell[1]. Surprisingly, I did see stuff like that in the wild - and from Google, of all places![2] [1]https://qz.com/679782/ https://qz.com/679782/ [2]https://i.redd.it/gns5ci5hp2yz.png https://i.redd.it/gns5ci5hp2yz.png
- fernandotakai 5y ago
- slowmovintarget 5y agoI laughed out loud at the expansion control in place of the "close" X in the corner of the T&C modal.
- sodafountan 5y ago"Send to Bottom" of the help box is hilarious
- Pxtl 5y agoIt took me way longer than I wanted to admit to figure out how to get rid of that, and then it starts slowly.... crawling.... downwards....
- kgantchev 5y agoTook 8 mins to complete...
- luke2m 5y ago00:03:53 Much easier on mobile than desktop
- canada_dry 5y agoFor Canadians... I love this one: ENTER YOUR POSTAL CODE: A1A1A1 <- ERR! A1A 1A1 <- ERR! A1A-1A1 YOU MAY PASS. Lazy %@$# front-end devs that can't reformat the input!
- shric 5y agoI'd say it's the backend's job to accept any of those and reformat accordingly. If you rely on the frontend the backend would still have to validate it anyway.
- IggleSniggle 5y agoYup. If you’re going to do validation on the frontend, it should be for the sole purpose of improving user experience, not for making life worse!
- ceejayoz 5y agoMy email address has a dash in the domain and it's remarkable how many sites (and big ones, too!) reject it as an invalid domain. Discover.com, for example, rejected it when I did a card application, but disabling JavaScript let it go through on the server-side validation. Bloody weird.
- sneak 5y agoLots of websites reject email addresses at entirely valid domain names as invalid, too, such as any at some of the new TLDs like .email.
- dr_orpheus 5y agoEvery time you click the "help" button its just says "Please wait, there are X people in line." and just keeps going up every time.
- mike_d 5y agoOh, I wondered what our UI designers had been working on for the past month...
- inoffensivename 5y ago5:08 of my life that I'm not getting back. Congratulations, that was infuriating :)
- c0nsumer 5y agoI think I found a bug. When I put 4-Aug-1978 for birthdate, and 41 for age, it said age and birthday don't match. It validated successfully on 42. Although maybe that's part of the game?
- dr_orpheus 5y agoNot sure, I didn't want to do math so I just put in todays date and an age of 0. Worked!
- nneonneo 5y agoSide effect: you've now created a child account and will have to wait 18 years for all of the website features to unlock! And don't dare make a second account, or you will get banned for sockpuppeting! At least one popular mobile game has a policy that the account's birthdate will not be changed under basically any circumstance, and child accounts are severely restricted compared to adult accounts. Parents wanting to take over their kid's account (happens more often than you'd think) end up seriously frustrated with the restrictions.
- kbelder 5y agoYeah, my daughter has been eighteen since she was five.
- jammaloo 5y agoIf you were born in August 1978, you would currently be 42 years old.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 5y ago(2018) 2 years ago Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20344565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20344565
- infogulch 5y agoLove all the little details. Some favorites: * Clicking 'expand' button on any dialog (T&C) expanded the dialog to cover the page but doesn't expand the contents to match * Tiny flag icons to select country * The age slider that went from 0-180 years and didn't update as you slid it (fun on a trackpad) * number input for house number that required clicking on the arrows to change it one at a time * utterly ambiguous human verification instructions
- kvirani 5y agoMy current real world frustration: a date picker for birthdate which starts in current year and I believe the native selector in Android/Chrome doesn't let you select a year. You hit left arrow to go down month by month. Am I crazy and did I miss this? Ive seen it a few times now!
- 411111111111111 5y agoThere usually is a way, but it's often non obvious. I.e. the picker might have a header like July without any visual offset, but clicking could still switch the view to the year picker. I usually just try various stuff and I can't remember a single time where I didn't find an option eventually, but they're sometimes well hidden
- httpsterio 5y agoUsually you can hit the year number and it'll let you skip whole years. But yeah.
- Pxtl 5y agoiirc the Android 4 date picker had a microscopic hit-area on the date where, if clicked, would display a year-key-in dialog. I don't know if newer ones have this. I hate date pickers so much that I use the Google Assistant in all its hellish, buggy glory to create appointments for my calendar on my phone.
- 5y ago
- fullwaza 5y agoNew Windows 11 UI preview?
- vlunkr 5y agoMy favorite thing is the painfully slow animation when you send the chat box to the bottom.
- dshanahan 5y ago4:11 OMFG this is brilliant and somehow made me happy and angry at the same time. Well done.
- CodeWriter23 5y agoI can appreciate Nihilism-derived Humor.
- sgt 5y agoThat country dropdown selector had me cracking up. And all the flags are not only unordered, but in black and white!
- cobbaut 5y agoIn fact they are ordered by alphabet.
- easton_s 5y agoI hated it. Good Job!
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoWow. That is painful. I recognized a number of those issues from a number of sites I've visited.
- ParanoidShroom 5y agoLovely to see a small company I worked with seeing end up here!! If someone is looking for an agency, super fun and great people over there!!!!
- Pxtl 5y ago03:51 I laughed out loud when I got to the bottom of the last page and didn't see checkboxes and realized the checkboxes were above the pictures and not below and had to scroll to the top.
- paulddraper 5y agoI noticed that after a few seconds, but I had to go though like 8 screens and it took 3+ minutes.... Did I just keep getting the Captcha choices wrong?
- whelming_wave 5y agoFor all the captchas on this site you have to check every box, IIRC.
- suyash 5y agoLOL what a nice joke on UI!
- fredley 5y agoThis could be so much worse. Why does the form retain my information when I get something wrong? It should reset, or go back to the start.
- beforeolives 5y agoI genuinely gave up after two unsuccessful clicks. It probably says something about my personality or current state of mind.
- jliptzin 5y agoOnly thing missing is deleting everything you entered into the entire form any time there is an error message
- hsbauauvhabzb 5y agoAnd an obnoxious GDPR message with intentionally confusing sliders (am i disabling all tracking or enabling all tracking? Why is the ‘accept all’ button in the placement of the ‘accept’ button, why can I not just hide this form and not complete it at all)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gpm 5y agoNo, clearing 2 random fields every time. You probably won't notice that way ;) Had a real website for a real store do that to me a few days ago.
- iab 5y agoI can’t remember the last time I was this angry
- drosan 5y agoI gave up on "password" field - can't figure out how to make it "unsafe" for the life of me OTL
- SavantIdiot 5y agoI remember when <blink></blink> was the most annoying thing about HTML. Ooof.
- jrochkind1 5y agoi could not figure out the captcha, did not complete.
- gbvy 5y agoMissed one worst-practice: I was able to paste a password
- vecinu 5y agoI rage-quit when I couldn't scroll the T&C fast enough. I guess my patience has gotten a lot worse as I have gotten older.
- eyelidlessness 5y agoNice touch pre-scrolling the terms, and making it scroll up quickly but down slowly
- brailsafe 5y agoCouldn't do it. Burn everything that does this.
- ihunter2839 5y ago4:52, but I had already given up on the first page once and then had to give it another go. Like others mentioned here, a lot of these are unfortunately common in the wild - the ones that always set me into a rage are placeholder texts that remain in the field as I type and the inability to tab through fields.
- lizardking 5y agoI hate it. I love it.
- bawolff 5y ago"Your password can have at least 1 cyrillic character" Rofl
- everyone 5y agoToo realistic!
- marsdepinski 5y agoGood one. Bravo!
- nojs 5y ago“Select all checks” was my favourite. Half the time when I’m shown crosswalks I know they aren’t crosswalks but also know that I’m expected to click them, maybe, sometimes. So infuriating.
- Aeolun 5y agoIt… doesn’t feel all that bad. Maybe more par for the course? Sure, some button styling is a bit messed up, but…
- Rumudiez 5y agoYou must be a UX researcher
- estranhosidade 5y agoTruly frustrating, well done!
- jodrellblank 5y agoSee the Bad UI Battles Reddit about these kinds of patterns https://old.reddit.com/r/badUIbattles/ https://old.reddit.com/r/badUIbattles/
- siraben 5y ago00:02:53 I don't think it was bad, there are were some frustrating moments such as having to put one's age as well as birth date, uploading an image, and reading the password requirements.
- aetherspawn 5y agoI started laughing hysterically when I pressed "send to bottom" on the agent chatbox and it animated to minimise over ~30 seconds.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago8:52 on iPhone because I was laughing at checks with the chess photos. It’s hard to find good satire anymore, appreciate their work.
- dustractor 5y ago7:03 amazing.
- uudecoded 5y agoThis is interesting and potentially has value. To the end of deriving public value, is there source code or (non-)business logic that can provide an explanation to the choices made in developing this form? Alternatively, and pessimistically, is this simply a successful marketing endeavour by a digital agency?
- kbouck 5y agoReminded me of The Moron Test.
- superdisk 5y agoMy favorite part was the giant array of checked checkboxes and the instructions to only check three. I started mindlessly unchecking all of them and then accidentally hit the randomly placed "select all" checkbox once I got near the end. Legitimately made me laugh out loud at how absurd it was.
- Doxin 5y agoDid you also notice the uncheck all option a bit further down? I didn't until I already unchecked everything by hand twice.
- dt3ft 5y agoMasochistic xD
- mpva 5y agoDrat! it took em: 00:09:23. That bloody accept terms and those checkmarks at the end got me good. Nice game and great way to get people to want to apply. Kudos to the creators.
- devoutsalsa 5y agoIt's better than some websites I've used!
- steveskinner 5y ago10.22 that was frustrating...
- VSerge 5y agoI found the country selection by black and white flag to be deliciously horrible. And the bow captcha was just hilarious. Kudos to the creators for the level of absurdity of this form.
- arendtio 5y agoActually, I have spend more time on some 'real' sign up pages... At least this time, I was constantly laughing about the somewhat absurd combinations. But I am missing some of the harder parts, like forms not showing because they are only loaded when you disable your ad-blocker or forms working in specific browser versions only. However, that would probably make it too hard/realistic. I love it! PS: Just to give an example: The login form for the German Vorwerk website does not show in Firefox https://www.vorwerk.com/de/de/s/shop/login https://www.vorwerk.com/de/de/s/shop/login and when you opt to register, the button just disappears, but nothing else happens... And yes, you need that form to actually buy products.
- tethys 5y agoThat Vorwerk form works fine for me in Firefox (Nightly, with uBlock Origin).
- arendtio 5y agoSounds interesting and indeed, when I take a fresh profile, the website loads just fine. So I suppose some one of my settings or some extension causes the issue. Thanks for the hint. Edit: I don't quite get it yet. Even starting my default profile in safe-mode (disables all extensions and themes), the page doesn't work. The dev console shows this error: Failed to execute ‘postMessage’ on ‘DOMWindow’: The target origin provided (‘https://account.vorwerk.com’) does not match the recipient window’s origin (‘https://www.vorwerk.com’). So I am pretty sure it must be some kind of configuration that is causing the issue, but so far I didn't find the related option in about:config
- trymas 5y agoThanks, I hate it (or love all the dark patterns in one place :) ). On mobile I have tried to go through the first form and rage quit after 3 minutes. How do you close that hurry up modal? You could only expand or lock it, but did not see how to close it.
- minusSeven 5y agobla I couldn't find any acceptable password......
- throwamon 5y agoI haven't laughed this much in a while, well done! (Or... the opposite of that?) I was just a little disappointed when I clicked the back button and it actually worked instead of the game hijacking it and filling my tab history with garbage.
- okareaman 5y agoSomewhere a web designer is thinking, this is a lot like our website. What is so wrong with it?
- neycoda 5y agoThe Help box grew over the page so I couldn't get past that.
- gonzo41 5y agoI really like the box in the bottom right corner. That made me laugh out loud when it kept growing.
- zwaps 5y agoMy newest object of rage on many websites: the subscribe to our newsletter pop up you now get whenever your mouse moves to close the tab
- 1472852 5y agoYeye
- ElectricMind 5y agoI hate you. Scrolling down terms and conditions felt like colonoscopy in slow motion . motherferken :D
- z3t4 5y agoDidnt hijack the back button
- mkaszkowiak 5y agoI gave up after the "age and birth date don't match" pop-up. Nice site :)
- nayuki 5y agoSimilar ideas: https://termsandconditions.game/ https://termsandconditions.game/ ; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27191795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27191795
- Romulus968 5y agoThat shit made my anxiety skyrocket. Nice demonstration of the "Never do this shit" philosophy.
- chanrenee 5y agoHello
- chanrenee 5y agoUm why isn’t this working for me