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

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

#1

Post by bearwithclaws »

I love travelling and use Wotif.com a lot to find great hotel deals. The things is, Wotif has horrible user interface. For example, if you go to its homepage, you need to do multiple scrolling to select your destination on a country list with the size of 1 inch. Another example is airline websites, but thankfully this has been solved with Hipmunk (yay!).

So I'm asking you guys here if you share any frustrations with me on the websites that have really bad UI but we need to use it anyway. I hope this post will inspire these companies to either fix their UI, or more likely, somebody starts something better to replace them.

Thank you.

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

#2

Post by danilocampos »

TripAdvisor. Terrible UI in that everything was too green and too dense. It used to be especially hard to use on the iPhone.

If it were me, the mobile use case would be among the first I'd solve for a travel site, but it took them some time to get around to it.

Meanwhile, you'd load up Trip Advisor on Mobile Safari and get either browser pop-ups or worse, content-obscuring overlay ads you had to swipe around the screen to dismiss. (Best part: these popups were trying to sell me airline tickets for the town I was already in.)

It became so bad I just stopped using Trip Advisor, but I endured it for awhile every time I traveled. Now I use travel guides and other sources.

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

#3

Post by brianwillis »

Slightly off on a tangent here, but with the recent influx of Digg users to Reddit there's been an unusual amount of chatter over there about usability. The newbies seem to think Reddit is ugly and hard to navigate, whereas the old-timers think of it as spartan and utilitarian.

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

#4

Post by acharkin »

danilocampos wrote: post #2

TripAdvisor. Terrible UI in that everything was too green and too dense. It used to be especially hard to use on the iPhone. If it were me, the mobile use case would be among the first I'd solve for a travel site, but it took them some time to get around to it. Meanwhile, you'd load up Trip Advisor on Mobile Safari and get either browser pop-ups or worse, content-obscuring overlay ads you had to swipe around the scre…

I think when you're talking about the mobile site you're probably referring to when they didn't have a mobile site yet. Over the year they've released an actual mobile website.

I do agree that the full site ads are pretty annoying, and the mobile site has its issues, but it's more usable than what it was before (which was the full site on mobile).

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

#5

Post by bemmu »

My bank's website. For example to get my account statement, I have to select which company I want, which account I want and what type of statement I want. Even though I have exactly one company, exactly one account for it and exactly one possible statement I can ask for.

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

#6

Post by danilocampos »

acharkin wrote: post #4
danilocampos wrote: post #2

TripAdvisor. Terrible UI in that everything was too green and too dense. It used to be especially hard to use on the iPhone. If it were me, the mobile use case would be among the first I'd solve for a travel site, but it took them some time to get around to it. Meanwhile, you'd load up Trip Advisor on Mobile Safari and get either browser pop-ups or worse, content-obscuring overlay ads you had to swipe around the scre…

I think when you're talking about the mobile site you're probably referring to when they didn't have a mobile site yet. Over the year they've released an actual mobile website. I do agree that the full site ads are pretty annoying, and the mobile site has its issues, but it's more usable than what it was before (which was the full site on mobile).

Yeah, I was using it on iPhone before they had a proper, mobile-optimized site.

And wow, just tried it out. Much easier to use than muddling through the full site before.

Maybe I'll give them a try again. I was turned off by their aggressive sales pitches.

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

#8

Post by mahmud »

CiteSeer.

I spend most of my non-work hours there and it's horribly broken. Case in point, I just went there now to tally the most visible aspects of its brokenness, turns out it's down, again.

Yeah, CiteSeer is horribly broken. ArXiv is mostly for crackpot physics and has a tiny CS/EE index. What else? I refuse to pay ACM, Springer, or IEEE.

Google Scholar just .. looks "search enginey" and doesn't have the summary bar with citations, years, etc. Also, it heavily links to the above "resources" that I refuse to pay for.

CiteULike is just as lame as CiteSeer in terms of UI, but lacks the info-bar on the side, and adds crappy social elements.

CiteSeer gets the caching right though, which is why I keep going back to it.

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

#9

Post by moultano »

brianwillis wrote: post #3

Slightly off on a tangent here, but with the recent influx of Digg users to Reddit there's been an unusual amount of chatter over there about usability. The newbies seem to think Reddit is ugly and hard to navigate, whereas the old-timers think of it as spartan and utilitarian.

Ugly? maybe. Hard to navigate? I don't know how you could make it any easier. Maybe making everything bigger?
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