Every single credit card gateway's web interface I've used.
Ask HN: What are the websites that you rely on but have horrible UI?
31–40 of 149 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are the websites that you rely on but have horrible UI?
#32Paypal. Trying to find anything is a 10 minute exercise in spelunking through at least 10 different pages.
It's also way too slow.
Re: Ask HN: What are the websites that you rely on but have horrible UI?
#33HN? :-) If Reddit is "Spartan but functional", HN is positively Hittite. "We'll impale you on an iron stake and let you die slowly outside the city gates if you don't like it" user friendliness. Oh well, at least it keeps the barbarians out.
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?
Re: Ask HN: What are the websites that you rely on but have horrible UI?
#34Slashdot! Especially on iPhone/iPads. It randomly switches between normal and some large font special rendering for no apparent reason. The comments interface is barely usable on these devices too - no drag/drop of the comments filtering threshold, expanding a hidden comment on the ipad scrolls you off a mile down the page, fortunately with a small arrow showing the chosen comment when you scroll back up to find it....
And the ajax interface is so intertwined with the generated HTML I can't see an easy way to write a decent native app...
And trying to google for anyone else's thoughts on the matter just leads to more slashdot stories...
I'm so happy to have found HN for a sane browsing experience! (Not just the usability!)
Re: Ask HN: What are the websites that you rely on but have horrible UI?
#35Earlier 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!
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…
Maybe that improves the results. Your score is not a straight up vote from everyone, it's just a sampling from the subset of HN users that can figure out what the buttons do.
Re: Ask HN: What are the websites that you rely on but have horrible UI?
#36DNS Made Easy
You can't use the back button and you can't open links in a new tab/window
Re: Ask HN: What are the websites that you rely on but have horrible UI?
#37HN? :-) If Reddit is "Spartan but functional", HN is positively Hittite. "We'll impale you on an iron stake and let you die slowly outside the city gates if you don't like it" user friendliness. Oh well, at least it keeps the barbarians out.
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…
No - I think it is minimalistic, not bad. At one level the need to check your comments to see who has replied to you seems bad - but the resulting behavior patterns it results in seems quite productive to me.
Re: Ask HN: What are the websites that you rely on but have horrible UI?
#38All the banking sites I have used have highly unusable UI. The same with my mobile and broadband service provider websites. Sometimes it is just not about the UI. I can live without the best looking websites, but if the functionality is equally broken as the UI, then it is really frustrating. One of my biggest pet peeves is the back button not working in many websites. Many systems just tell you to log in again and i…
Oh god - don't get me started. I have one that enforces a crazily long password and then asks you for characters taken at specific locations from this password.
Which means that every time I log in I either end up scribbling down my password on a bit of paper or typing it into an editor window.
I refuse to believe this actually improves the level of security.
Re: Ask HN: What are the websites that you rely on but have horrible UI?
#39GoDaddy. I was going to cite some specific examples but really the entire site is a perfect case study for bad UI. On the other hand, it is extremely well optimized for revenue (but that's a different discussion).
I hate when I have to do anything on Godaddy. It might be optimized for revenue, but I find the added steps so they can upsell very annoying. I've been using namecheap a lot more lately and their UI is not much better, but I'm able to do what I need to do much faster.
Re: Ask HN: What are the websites that you rely on but have horrible UI?
#40CiteSeer. 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…
arXiv is not just for crackpot physics. A lot of the papers on arXiv are there to allow wide access to science research that would otherwise not be possible with the prohibitive cost of journal subscriptions. I know several fantastic physicists and major international collaborations that publish on arXiv 6 months before the paper is published in a journal.
It's true that you need to be an expert in the field to tell the crackpots from the experts, but if you don't understand enough of the paper to tell whether it is realistic or not then you probably will not gain very much from reading it.