Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What are the websites that you rely on but have horrible UI?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 149 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are the websites that you rely on but have horrible UI?

#121

Post by _delirium »

greyboy wrote: post #92
edanm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely agree: HN's UI is bad. I'm not talking about ugly or beautiful, I'm talking about very specific usability problems. For example, it's very hard to tell when someone replies to you, which means I would just drop out of conversations if they didn't appear on my "threads" page. (Although there is a solution nowadays, notifo). HN also has problem with the voting, like being unable to change votes, etc. That sa…

I would argue that it's hard to tell when someone replies at all. While I appreciate minimalism I think the comments page is lacking. Let me preface my complaint with the fact that HN is probably the only site I visit frequently, due to the quality of posts and commenters. My biggest complaint is this: I enjoy reading the comments of submissions, oftentimes more than the submissions themselves. It's really frustratin…

> Unfortunately, I'm not aware of anything that can be done to fix this.

For logged-in users, Scoop (Kuro5hin's software) keeps track of when you last visited a comments thread, and displays a [new] next to all comments posted since that timestamp.

Re: Ask HN: What are the websites that you rely on but have horrible UI?

#122

Post by dmlorenzetti »

moconnor wrote: post #94

Gmail. Everything's so small and needs so many clicks. Nothing optimizes for my typical workflow - read an email, archive it. Sometimes reply to one. Sometimes mark it for later.

Not to mention the fact that the button to delete an entire "conversation" is relatively big, and right at the top of the working area, while the control for deleting one message in a conversation-- a far more common operation-- is buried in a pull-down menu.

Re: Ask HN: What are the websites that you rely on but have horrible UI?

#124

Post by bendmorris »

GVRV wrote: post #108
pipeline_tux wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our University recently switched to Moodle, which is an open source competitor.

So did ours. The problem is that most faculty hates it. You need to realize that most professors are quite set in their ways and have been using Blackboard for years, so they're opposing the full roll-out. Even some of the I.T. Faculty want to stick with Blackboard.

Same reason our University had such a hard time switching from Internet Explorer, and is still stuck on Windows XP. Most faculty members are not power users and they want to stick with what they know, no matter how crappy it is.

Re: Ask HN: What are the websites that you rely on but have horrible UI?

#125

Post by AdamTReineke »

jarin wrote: post #33
smiler wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is horrible about it? It doesn't get in your way and allows you to post quickly. This is the only place I've engaged in online conversation for years and that's because it's just so quick and simple. Compared to forums and commenting on blogs & entering captcha's it's very usable!

Take a look at your settings page sometime. Would you have any idea what notifo, showdead, noprocrast, maxvisit, minaway, and delay meant if you didn't look them up or goof around until you figure out what they do?

New HN user here, and I still have no clue. I even looked for mouseover text. :-(

Re: Ask HN: What are the websites that you rely on but have horrible UI?

#126

Post by AdamTReineke »

lionhearted wrote: post #54

Don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth and I still love the product, but Google Docs hasn't improved all that much since it launched. I loved Etherpad when it came out, then I was really excited when Google bought Etherpad... but they haven't implemented some of the basic stuff Etherpad had. Still love GDocs and I'm really hesitant to complain about something I'm getting for free - but I do think they're playin…

What are some specific problems you have with GDocs? I see a small bug once in a while, but nothing major.

Re: Ask HN: What are the websites that you rely on but have horrible UI?

#127

Post by AdamTReineke »

moconnor wrote: post #95
moconnor wrote: post #94

Gmail. Everything's so small and needs so many clicks. Nothing optimizes for my typical workflow - read an email, archive it. Sometimes reply to one. Sometimes mark it for later.

I'm sure the keyboard shortcuts would be awesome if I'd ever had a browser / OS combination that they worked on.

What doesn't work? FF + Windows has always worked for me.

Re: Ask HN: What are the websites that you rely on but have horrible UI?

#128

Post by grayrest »

simonft1 wrote: post #119
swombat wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How often have you mis-clicked on an down arrow instead of an up arrow (or vice versa)? Have you ever asked someone who's not a regular to upvote something? That's obviously not something that should be done (but I guess we all sin sometimes... call it a wild unruly youth), but if you do, you'll find that most people don't even see the voting arrows, let alone figure out what they mean. If advanced users still make f…

Why do some people have down arrows?

You gain the ability to downvote once you've crossed a certain karma threshold.

Re: Ask HN: What are the websites that you rely on but have horrible UI?

#129

Post by tremendo »

pieter wrote: post #65
wh-uws wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really believe this market is ripe for disruption. Like right now.

The problem is that as soon as you are any threat to them, they'll either sue you (they have a ton of e-learning related patents) or buy you. Not sure you want to go into that area.

:) Recently acquired by Bb (from Elluminate). Not a user of the software so I can't really comment on that, I'm a Web guy. My Wife uses it and does occasionally complain to me now that I work for Bb, as if I could do something about it. I like the team that I work with though, good people.

Re: Ask HN: What are the websites that you rely on but have horrible UI?

#130

Post by ivank »

AdamTReineke wrote: post #126
lionhearted wrote: post #54

Don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth and I still love the product, but Google Docs hasn't improved all that much since it launched. I loved Etherpad when it came out, then I was really excited when Google bought Etherpad... but they haven't implemented some of the basic stuff Etherpad had. Still love GDocs and I'm really hesitant to complain about something I'm getting for free - but I do think they're playin…

What are some specific problems you have with GDocs? I see a small bug once in a while, but nothing major.

I was using Chrome and imported a .doc into GDocs a week ago. A ton of words were marked misspelled; it was internally seeing "wor d" instead of "word". Deleting and retyping the words didn't help.
Post reply on HN