
Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money? - nicksalt
Hey all,
Gathering data for a potential blog post.
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alexandernst
WordPress. The buggiest, ugliest (in terms of code) piece of shit on Earth.
And somehow it managed to get almost 50% all website traffic... (with all the
revenue that this means)

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JBlue42
For those that don't have to customize it, it 'just works' right? Also, their
only major competitor was blogger at the time which, IIRC, was far less
customizable and monetizable.

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alexandernst
It “just works” as long as you don’t install any themes or plugins. The moment
you start adding stuff to it... oh boy...

That and the fact that most themes/plugins are coded by juniors, in the best
case...

So, yeah, it “just works” as long as you don’t actually pretend to use it for
something useful.

~~~
JBlue42
Yep.

It's dominant in its space and definitely belongs on this list.

As someone that has created and destroyed so many blogs, it was easy to get
going, choose a theme, and post. At one point, they may have gotten $10-20
from me so I could use my own domain. Not sure how they make their other
money.

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throwaway2016a
Netsuite comes to mind. Enterprise software. Charges hundreds of thousands of
dollars a year. It tries to be everything to everyone which makes it really
slow. And the menu has 500 options so it's hard to navigate.

For what it's worth, it has made me say "Wow, that is really cool and useful!"
more than a few times but also very often "WTF! Why does this take so long!
This is a common operation!" and "Why is this so unnecessarily complex!"

The API is SOAP and routinely takes 5+ seconds to do a common operation like
"Create order" \- and ad hoc searches can take minutes.

Business people like it because it gets them every critical piece of business
operations data they need at their finger tips but also hate it because of the
hundreds of thousands they ultimately pay consultants to deal with the
complexity.

Runner up: Jira

A lot of people say Wordpress but I think a lot of the Wordpress UI is good
design. Which is part of why it's popular. It is just really slow (unless you
spend a LOT of time optimizing). So Netsuite wins for being both slow AND
poorly designed.

Edit: That said I can't say that I wouldn't recommend Netsuite. If you are a
multi-national corporation (or even a large domestic one) and sell or
manufacture a physical product, and have the time and money to pay the
licensing fees and the consultants it does everything you could possibly want
and more. If someone asked me for a recommendation I'd say: "It's great but
don't expect it to be perfect day one. It will take a year with possibly
multiple full time consultants to get everything where you want it to be."

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lima
JIRA and Confluence...

~~~
humanrebar
A good design is as simple as possible but no simpler. The problem with
ticketing and document authoring platforms are that they are arbitrarily
complex. I have some sympathy for Atlassian on managing the complexity of
these things. We could say that they should limit their features better, but
predicting the cost of adding another use case to a pile of them is not a
solved problem.

~~~
nailer
> The problem with ticketing and document authoring platforms are that they
> are arbitrarily complex. I have some sympathy for Atlassian on managing the
> complexity of these things.

Many things are arbitrarily complex. But Atlassian constantly gives items of
differing importance the same level of attention, in a shotgun blast of UI.

~~~
tdewitt
And just when you think you've got it sorted out, they do a major redesign and
screw up your workflow (not the ticket flow, your personal one).

+1000 to JIRA as a response to this. I'd probably support confluence here too
but every company y I've worked with killed it one the WYSWYG editor became
mandatory and all of engineering refused to use it.

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ab071c41
There's a plain text option in the Jira I use, that will show formatting in
the usual forms, like *, _, etc. I also refuse to use the WYSIWYG editor since
it's a pain.

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lima
Confluence has no plain text editor, and the WYSIWYG one is horribly broken.

It's a pain to use.

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phren0logy
Any electronic medical record software

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roywiggins
This is probably the right answer. Between oldness, amount of money made, and
general bad design, I think EHR systems take the cake.

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rostigerpudel
Not to forget the myriad of different standards for storing and ex-/importing
data...it's job security for the programmers, I guess

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JBlue42
This was interesting:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_health_record#Barri...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_health_record#Barriers_to_adoption)

I forget, but I think there was some criticism that came out in a major paper
about Epic Systems a couple years back. They all seem to be a mess (and
salesperson's dream).

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yousuckatlinux
I can believe no one's said Oracle database. I keep thinking it's dead in
favor of FOSS alternatives, but every large business I consult at has racks
and racks dedicated to that tire fire, and a bunch of aging ODBAs itching to
retire. And, Larry's still making an absolute fuckton of cash from it.

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rostigerpudel
You might want to take a look at
[http://dreckstool.de/hitlist.do](http://dreckstool.de/hitlist.do) There is a
nice ranking there...

("Dreckstool" = sh*tty tool)

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DoreenMichele
Dreck does not mean _shitty._ It means _garbage._

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hiyer
Clearcase. I used to think Perforce was a bad VCS until I had the misfortune
of having to use Clearcase. Perforce is no spring chicken, but it's a breath
of fresh air compared to CC. And of course open source VCS'es like git and svn
are light years ahead of both of these.

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davidgould
Jesus yes! Clearcase is the only software that ever made me cry actual tears
of rage and frustration. I haven't used it in years, but in a prior
incarnation at Informix had to use Clearcase multi-site. I think we lost about
10 plus company wide workdays that year due to Clearcase outages. Every
developer ended up writing their own 300 line spec file so no builds were ever
reproducible. Oh yeah, the "VOBS" got corrupted so they had to move all the
sources to an entirely new Clearcase installation, but could not move the
history. They kept the old installation online read-only to serve history. But
mainly, it was incredibly slow and since it provided the repos as a filesystem
that meant builds were slow too. To build the product from the top on a
workstation took about 40 minutes. To build from Clearcase was over 8 hours.
Basically, touch a header file and your workday is over.

Ima stop now, cause it still makes me mad.

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egwynn
Almost anything designed by (or at the behest of) a TV network. From set-top
box software to web platforms to mobile apps. They always want to shoehorn
their long antiquated paradigms into everything they make.

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caleblloyd
Skype

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caleblloyd
To add to that, most business conferencing solutions in general are pretty
bad: Skype for Business, WebEx, and Google Meet. Have seen a big pickup in
Zoom which is decent.

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JBlue42
Zoom isn't bad. I've seen companies using BlueJeans lately. HighFive
([https://highfive.com/](https://highfive.com/)) was really great the one time
I had a chance to set it up.

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atticusberg
Salesforce?

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atticusberg
Ah, and let’s not forget JIRA. JIRA is a real dumpster fire.

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pjc50
Pokemon Go (Android, can't say about the iPhone version)

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dacracot
It's a buggy mess also.

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makbol
Facebook

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mabbo
Really? How so?

The page loads fairly quickly for me, and the design is highly optimized. Not
optimized for users, mind you, but optimized for profitability.

If you don't like Facebook, that's one thing but it's hardly fair to say
they're slow or poorly designed.

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cryptoz
> Not optimized for users

It's slow and buggy and awful to use on most Android phones for most of
history. It sucks the CPU and battery while you're not using it and slows your
whole phone down.

> hardly fair to say they're slow or poorly designed.

No it's completely fair and totally true. The Facebook apps are really badly
designed and so are the websites.

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mabbo
Ah maybe that's what I'm missing- I don't use their app. The mobile website
mostly works well for me. They removed messaging from it because they're
jerks, but you can switch the desktop mode and it works.

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cryptoz
> They removed messaging from it because they're jerks

That's another case of bad design. Intentionally making the webapp worse for
you by removing perfectly good features so they can extract more $/user on
average.

They make lots of money and the make very poorly designed and user hostile
software.

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valb
Windows

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ksvarma
Some of the Banking websites ( __easily say most of them) - Bank of america,
ICICIBank (India), State Bank of India etc.

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Artemis2
Everything Qualys. A simple task that I need to accomplish regularly which
should take 30 minutes tops requires a full day almost everytime (despite
building an internal wiki for the process with all edge cases).

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igammarays
Outlook.com/OneDrive web

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roddds
Pretty much any financial or HR app: QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, ADP...

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saketmehta
Why is it like that? Are people not interested to design better products or
it’s the “don’t fix what’s not broken” attitude?

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ac29
Decades of legacy code to maintain continuity of business (dont assume for a
minute you can export or import data from many of these apps in any sort of
sane way). I think a lot of businesses would be open to better designed
products, but the aforementioned legacy compatibility and the need to train
people on the new software make this a nonstarter. Pretty much the same
reasons Microsoft Office is still so dominant, although I actually like the
recent versions of office.

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jenscow
Any URL ending with .aspx

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SamSkjord
SAP

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thethunderbox
HipChat

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andechs
CA Agile Central (Rally) - Enjoy the mystery of why you can only view 5
defects in a very small iframed area plopped on the page.

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zerostar07
HSBCnet global banking.

man you have got to experience that one

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evnn
State-run websites. Tax forms.

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mf2hd
Except gov.uk, that site is amazing.

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sparrish
Braintree - simple subscription edits take tens of seconds.

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bsenftner
iTunes

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timrichard
It's a nice OS, but could do with a simple lightweight music player.

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ksvarma
Internet Explorer Plus their bookmarks manager

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_icarus
1.Solarwinds 2.ServiceNow

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comfortablynerd
indian railways website

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satyanash
While that was true for quite some time, it has dramatically improved to it's
current state such that it is only noticeable during peak 'tatkal' booking
time.

The UI/UX is still horrible though.

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hiyer
The UI is horrible, but the UX is quite functional. And given the millions of
people with various degrees of tech-savviness who use it, it's probably a good
thing they haven't done a major revamp in years.

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satyanash
That still shouldn't prevent them from iteratively, slowly fixing the UI such
that people have to only get used to small bits at a time.

It is one of the most unintuitive design I have seen. It only works because
we're trained to it's quirkiness.

I also feel the UX is horrible because it will often log you out and demand
that you log in again if you have performed a set number of actions
repeatedly.

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lozzo
skype for business

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zanybear
iTunes Podcast

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jachee
As an Overcast user, I don't disagree about the design aspect here, but for
whom does this make money?

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projectramo
I second this but its not just the design: the podcast app is so buggy and
freezes up all the time (iphone 7 plus). I tried overcast and I realized what
I had been missing. I actually think design wise they are about the same.

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molteanu
Lotus Notes

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throw7
IBM Notes?

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dade_
Visio

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matte_black
Slack

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zerostar07
ebay

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olavgg
I shop a lot on Ebay, I think it really works well.

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zerostar07
it's slow as hell, clunky interface , hidden options, bouncing from one page
to another in apparently different designs and versions. The seller interface
is quite terrible, but even the shopping experience is pretty outdated.

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madmulita
Altamira

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mamcx
Android. Certainly contender for #1

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zerostar07
reddit self-serve ads

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marak830
Wouldn't anyone on this site, if they had the knowledge of that, make a
competing product?

Or perhaps some of us are?

That's a fairly lazy question, and I cannot see how it would really start a
good conversation.

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dacracot
Not necessarily... If I said MS-Word, would you decide to go out and create a
word processor, probably not since the market is pretty much a done deal.

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supernes
I get what you mean, but why not? Having a well-established, dominant player
doesn't mean there's no opportunity to make a living solving similar problems.
"Word" is a huge target, it covers so many use cases that it's possible to
focus on a few of them and provide a tailored solution that enough people find
valuable. This was the status quo when Google Docs was being developed as
well, and OpenOffice for that matter.

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cryptoz
Coinbase.

Their webapp and mobile app are full of lies and bugs. Sometimes they won't
take your money but they say they did, sometimes they take 5x extra money from
your account, etc. Making billions though.

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arthurcolle
Yeah coinbase is total shit, its insane that they are dominant

