

Ask HN: What are the websites that you rely on but have horrible UI? - 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!).<p>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.<p>Thank you.
======
niyazpk
_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 it
just freaks me out.

~~~
arethuza
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.

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

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

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

~~~
illdave
Lloyds TSB in the UK, too.

~~~
ErrantX
HSBC do this, but limit you to 10 digits

------
swombat
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.

~~~
smiler
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!

~~~
swombat
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 fairly critical usage errors because of small,
opposite buttons right next to each other, and newbies can't learn the
fundamentals of the interface, i'd say that makes it fairly bad.

On the other hand, as I said, it keeps the barbarians out.

~~~
bendmorris
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.

~~~
dejb
> it's just a sampling from the subset of HN users that can figure out what
> the buttons do

Or those who don't experience layout problems. Often there is a significant
part of the down arrow that results in an upvote or vice versa. Generally
happens in FF for me. I feel like I need to check the URL before clicking.

------
mthoms
GoDaddy.

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).

~~~
techiediy
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.

~~~
leftnode
It would be nice if GoDaddy had an option for your account like: "I'm never
ever going to buy a shopping cart, or email addresses, or any of that other
stuff from you, just take me right to the payment page, please."

------
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.

~~~
nagrom
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.

~~~
mahmud
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.

~~~
nagrom
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 claim respectability by
association, especially in theory or mathematics.

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

~~~
nagrom
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?

------
msy
Paypal. Trying to find anything is a 10 minute exercise in spelunking through
at least 10 different pages.

~~~
jonah
It's also way too slow.

------
dangrossman
Blackboard, at every university.

~~~
wh-uws
I really believe this market is ripe for disruption. Like right now.

~~~
pieter
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.

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

~~~
GVRV
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.

~~~
bendmorris
Same reason our University had such a hard time switching from Internet
Explorer, and is still stuck on Windows XP. Most faculty members are not power
users and they want to stick with what they know, no matter how crappy it is.

------
smileysi
Slashdot! 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!)

~~~
chopsueyar
I agree on the Slashdot iPad issue. Expanding a hidden comment is useless.

------
vitobcn
Craigslist. In spite of the UI, it's still the best place to locally buy/sell
used stuff within the US.

It has been like this for years though, so at this point I doubt they'll make
any significant changes to the user interface.

~~~
minalecs
They recently made changes, but I really love the simplicity of the UI.
Minimalist. What is it that really makes it a poor UI, lack of gradients or
lack of ajax. I think it does what its supposed to do exactly how it should be
done.

~~~
keefe
it takes too much of my time to do simple tasks

------
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.

~~~
Mongoose
Seconded, at least for my Chase accounts. Credit unions' websites are often
much better than your average BigCo bank (ex: <https://www.becu.org/>).

------
ajaypopat
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)

~~~
blntechie
icicibank.com is ok and gets the work done for me at least compared to HDFC
and other internet banking sites.I agree with other sites. Especially IRCTC.
The new beta interface and the frequent,infamous and random errors makes me
want to kill myself. But we are stuck with that. Another hobby of me is to
check popular indian university and college websites and they all are pretty
much ugly.

I can add many to the list - moneycontrol, rediff and any news sites. Also,i'm
pretty sure the sites i have never visited such as in.com, ibibo etc. will
also be awful.

------
darklajid
MSDN.

They improved it a bit with somewhat recently added layouts with less scripts,
navigation trees, iframes and whatnot, but it's still unusable without Google
(or Dukgo -> !msdn) for me.

~~~
nhebb
I call it NASCAR navigation. I keep clicking links, thinking each will lead me
to the info I want, but more than once I found myself clicking in circles. The
other big issue is the number of broken links.

~~~
alexitosrv
"NASCAR navigation"... good term. It express exactly how I felt today while
reading on TFS (Team Foundation Server)

------
jonah
Every single credit card gateway's web interface I've used.

~~~
d_r
Perhaps unrelated, but I've always wondered why <http://www.authorize.net/>
insists on generously using 1990s-style stock clipart all over their site.
Does the picture of the lady with the headset really make their operation
_that much more_ trustworthy?

Not to mention, anything with this sort of clipart now automatically looks
like spam/domain landing page to my eyes.

~~~
cdr
I think "stock photography" is the phrase you're looking for.

> Does the picture of the lady with the headset really make their operation
> that much more trustworthy?

Actually, yes. I would definitely bet that that style of corporate stock
photography is what their target audience associates with "trustworthy".

------
sz
CAESAR. <http://www.northwestern.edu/caesar/>

Everything sucks about it. Everything.

------
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.

------
tim_iles
Hotmail, even after its recent Gmaily redesign.

I find all the View options distract my eye from the Actions that I am more
often looking for, and I still find it clunky and too time consuming to use
easily. I'm only still on there for old contacts who don't have my gmail
address.

------
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.

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

------
Skyline
DNS Made Easy

You can't use the back button and you can't open links in a new tab/window

~~~
didip
Yup. Their website is totally DNS Made Hard. Furthermore, delete removes all
records by domain name. So if you have aliases, you have to type them in all
over again.

------
moconnor
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.

~~~
moconnor
I'm sure the keyboard shortcuts would be awesome if I'd ever had a browser /
OS combination that they worked on.

~~~
AdamTReineke
What doesn't work? FF + Windows has always worked for me.

------
kingofspain
I'll second all the bank comments. My own bank is horrible and has no way of
escaping from statement view without logging back in (same with print friendly
pages).

Of all the others, the one that got me most recently was Skype. Trying to
upgrade my account, I spent a good half hour trying to figure out which links
did what (some go to help, others to order pages). It's never entirely clear
that you are buying what you think you are until you get to final payment
page.

------
nagrom
Spires (<http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/>) is a difficult search box to
use. Everyone I know uses the "Easy Search" option on that page. It's just my
hunch, but if you need to have a non-default "easy" option for searching,
you're probably doing it wrong.

However, the info aggregation at Spires is amazing and it's more or less an
essential tool in High Energy Physics.

------
meric
Malaysian Airlines website. I was trying to buy a return ticket to Hong Kong.
I entered my credit card details, clicked next and received an email saying
I've bought the ticket..... to Kuala Lumpur. It's probably that I entered the
wrong destination but, for a plane ticket, why is there no confirmation page!?
I called them up and they said it'll cost $150 to fix it.

~~~
bruceboughton
Off-topic but: what is your recourse here? Can you cancel the charge at your
CC company? What's the impact of doing that?

~~~
meric
It's my dad's credit card; He says he hasn't been robbed so how can he cancel
the charge? Also, the wrong ticket I bought very clearly stated "This is a
discount ticket, it cannot be changed or refunded." I feel lucky they even let
me to change it for $150.

------
natgordon
Public library search interfaces are awful. The Vancouver library and Seattle
library both use the same standard catalog software. They're slow and clunky.

Based on the name ipac, I think they both use this software -
<http://www.l4u.com/iPAC.php>

------
jeffclark
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.

------
shib71
Several of the TV shows I watch put the episodes online (which is great), but
the websites invariably fall short in the way they organise those videos and
the rest of the site. They are definitely popular _in spite_ of their UI, not
because users "unconciously" prefer it.

~~~
chopsueyar
Which TV sites do you not like and which do you consider good UI?

I am currently working on a video site, and looking for suggestions.

------
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.

~~~
acharkin
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).

~~~
danilocampos
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.

------
ritonlajoie
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.

------
lionhearted
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.

~~~
AdamTReineke
What are some specific problems you have with GDocs? I see a small bug once in
a while, but nothing major.

~~~
ivank
I was using Chrome and imported a .doc into GDocs a week ago. A ton of words
were marked misspelled; it was internally seeing "wor d" instead of "word".
Deleting and retyping the words didn't help.

------
idleworx
I know of a calling card website that asks the user to enter the last 8 digits
of their pin to validate their account, then it asks the user to enter the
last 4 digits of their pin to continue.

------
bengl3rt
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.

------
chopsueyar
revision3.com - I watch the show Filmriot. Each tv series has its own section,
but you must navigate through several clicks to watch the current episode.

Also, if you don't interact at the end of the episode, it will start
automatically playing older episodes in reverse chronological order.

...and there is no cohesive source of information. It is spread between
revision3, facebook, and twitter.

------
liquimoon
Jobmine. <http://www.jobmine.uwaterloo.ca/> Everything sucks about it.
Everything.

------
moe
Pivotal Tracker.

------
jcromartie
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.

------
holde
www.teamliquid.net

everything is forum style with a shitty forum implementation :/

------
pt
evite.com

Horrible UI, both the old and the new one. Plus they don't expose any
functionality in their emails, you are forced to come to the website for
simple tasks like a 'yes' response.

------
kingsidharth
Indian Government Websites. Suck big time. Try anyone of them

------
isb
Billing websites for public utilities (gas/electricity).

------
zeemonkee
LiquidPlanner. I find the UI noisy and counterintuitive.

------
agentultra
boardgamegeek.com

------
tomh-
Windows live mail

------
meastham
Everything by my university.

------
fjabre
Salesforce

------
carnevalem
Amazon

------
shareme
Virgin Mobile, NEt10, Oracle, IBM, IRS, and any bank

~~~
golgo13
I use Virgin Mobile Broadband 2 go. That website would have been bad in the
90s! Plus the flow for topping up is pretty poor. After adding money, I should
be given the choice to purchase MBs, instead of going back to the main screen!

------
zackattack
ebay craigslist odesk

see a pattern

