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

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

#101

Post by gordonguthrie » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 1:48 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #38

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…

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.

The reason for this is that they use the same password in the call centre. So when you phone up they say "give us the 3rd letter of your password" and the 2nd digit of your Pin Number. The point of it is to make it hard for a call centre operator to get hold of your password. The internet banks are all built on top of the Direct Bank systems and ported that model in whole or in part to the internet. Legacy systems issue!

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

#102

Post by jeffclark » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 1:55 PM UTC

Craigslist. It is insanely hard to manage multiple anything.

Whether you've got all of your furniture up for sale or are interested in more than 2 apartments. It's just such a mess.

But dammit, it works... and I'm not sure I've ever personally experienced a second of downtime.

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

#103

Post by retree » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 1:56 PM UTC

pipeline_tux wrote: post #71

pieter wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

My university tried to write their own. But then each faculty decided they didn't like it and then wrote THEIR own.

Now I have to log into about 5 different systems to get anything done.

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

#104

Post by jcromartie » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 2:01 PM UTC

rallydev.com

It's really quite awful and cumbersome in certain respects. It's a useful tool but it makes you go through so much to do some really basic things (like adding items to an iteration) and the search is next to useless.

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

#105

Post by ErrantX » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 2:08 PM UTC

illdave wrote: post #81

pieter wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Royal Bank of Scotland does this too, though they don't enforce crazy long passwords.

Lloyds TSB in the UK, too.

HSBC do this, but limit you to 10 digits

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

#106

Post by bengl3rt » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 2:11 PM UTC

United.com, especially the mileage plus section. Had to write a script to screen scrape the data I wanted out into CSV, where they could just offer an API/export feature.

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

#107

Post by desigooner » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 2:17 PM UTC

ajaypopat wrote: post #69

Pretty much any Indian website that I use including: www.icicibank.com/ www.bangaloreone.gov.in/ www.bookmyshow.com/ (Mainly the payment processing piece) www.irctc.co.in/ (I challenge anyone to find a website that has 4MM unique visitors/mo. and that has worse usability) timesofindia.indiatimes.com/ (Popovers/unders, floating ads. Annoys the crap out of me each time I use it. But I still use it. Go figure)

how about rediff .. the entire screenspace for 5-6 links per tab.

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

#108

Post by GVRV » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 2:19 PM UTC

pipeline_tux wrote: post #71

pieter wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#109

Post by alphaBetaGamma » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 2:19 PM UTC

mahmud wrote: 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 mostly for crackpot physics" ???

The entire string theory community publishes all their papers on hep-th before sending sending them to journals (which nobody reads as everything is on ArXiv). Of course, maybe you will argue that string theory is crackpot physics...

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

#110

Post by GVRV » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 2:21 PM UTC

dangrossman wrote: post #17

Blackboard, at every university.

Is Blackboard still horrible? I mean I know my University uses some old obscure version of Blackboard which is right out of the 90s, but judging by the blackboard website right now, it looks like their current UI might not be so bad. Too bad you can't find any sort of information about their products from the website - all they want is for you to call them.