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

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51–60 of 149 posts

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

#51
The most (and it has ben decades) badass UI of the web is the sun Java website which keeps you from downloading the right sdk/jde/jee/bleh in under 10 minutes !

edit: I'm complaining about their multiple bundles that make no sense at all , at least for me.

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

#53
post #40
post #8

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…

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…

Oh, I stand corrected then.

I discovered ArXiv over a decade ago, but from early on, it was filled with people of questionable insight, if not sanity, and I began to avoid it. There are some notorious USENET trolls who used it to build their credibility, and it kept me away since.

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

#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 playing with fire here a little bit if Google actually cares about the online document space. If they don't improve GDocs, someone's going to come take that market share from them, and Etherpad already showed a few easy improvements to make.

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

#55
post #7

HN? :-) 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.

you have no idea how glad I am that HN doesn't look like StackOverflow or Digg

I'm new to Hacker News, I've been searching but couldn't find the "save story" or "favourite" button

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

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You could use Wells Fargo instead - they limit you to 14 characters, which isn't even what I would consider a medium length password.

I'm guessing that he's talking about Barclays in the UK. There the only one's i know who do this.

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

#58
post #24
post #14

All 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…

Lucky you don't use my bank: it might just tip you over the edge :). Not only does the back button not work (most of the time), but they've also specifically added back-button detection so they can tell you why: For security reasons you’re unable to use the Back, Forward and Refresh buttons in your browser. Uh, ok...

Commonwealth Bank?

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

#59
post #7

HN? :-) 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.

I love the way HN looks and feels.

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

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you have no idea how glad I am that HN doesn't look like StackOverflow or Digg

I'm new to Hacker News, I've been searching but couldn't find the "save story" or "favourite" button

Stories you upvote are saved in your profile.
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