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

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

#91

Post by JoachimSchipper »

nagrom wrote: post #63
mahmud wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's got no data quality checks, so you need to use it with caution, but something like http://arxiv.org/list/hep-ex/recent is a really nice tool for High Energy Physics (you can see quite a few of the first results from the LHC there, for example, without paying any journal subs.) But it's a much better academic tool than a commercial one, and I would not be surprised that a lot of cranks put stuff up there and clai…

Actually, getting your paper into arXiv isn't that easy - IIRC, it essentially requires you to work at a university.

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

#92

Post by greyboy »

edanm wrote: post #28
swombat wrote: 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.

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 frustrating to read a post with many comments in the morning (lets say, 40), then come back at lunch and browse the same comments when there are more (say, 45 - I often leave interesting posts open in tabs to look at later). Obviously these numbers are arbitrary - think of 10 new comments on a page with 100 or more! Without a clear indication of what is new after a page refresh, I have to re-read every comment and compare post times (or effectively recall reading that comment previously) in order to see what's new. Compounding that is that the post order can change.

Unfortunately, I'm not aware of anything that can be done to fix this. To me, that is a usability defect. Enough for me to stop visiting? No!

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

#93

Post by mambodog »

niyazpk wrote: 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…

As far as banks go, I'm really impressed with NAB (http://nab.com.au).

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

#95

Post by moconnor »

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.

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

#97

Post by nagrom »

JoachimSchipper wrote: post #91
nagrom wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's got no data quality checks, so you need to use it with caution, but something like http://arxiv.org/list/hep-ex/recent is a really nice tool for High Energy Physics (you can see quite a few of the first results from the LHC there, for example, without paying any journal subs.) But it's a much better academic tool than a commercial one, and I would not be surprised that a lot of cranks put stuff up there and clai…

Actually, getting your paper into arXiv isn't that easy - IIRC, it essentially requires you to work at a university.

I think that you must register as being present at an institution, but I am not sure how strongly they check that information. Maybe they take your subs off if you are caught lying, but what are the chances of being caught?

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

#98

Post by ANH »

The Virginia Business One Stop (https://apps.cao.virginia.gov/IDC/index.html). It's not something I have to use very often, but it's on the top of my mind because I just formed an LLC. Its primary purpose is to help new companies get formed in the state by providing a "wizard" to help you gather in one place all the information and forms required by the state and Fed. When I finally found it through word of mouth (it's Flash-based and doesn't show up in my Google search results), I had already formed my LLC but was wondering if there were any important forms I had missed in my manual dredging of the State Corporation Commission's site. I could go on about the poor user experience, but suffice it to say it makes incorrect assumptions, forces repeated data entry, sends you to sites (the IRS) that have an even worse UX and hang without saving, and makes you pay $20 for the privilege.

On the plus side, I've now gotten my first bad business decision out of the way.

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

#100

Post by smackfu »

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…

Trip Advisor also has this weird thing where the reviews are in pages of three.
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