
The Interface Hall of Shame - normloman
http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/
======
smacktoward
And the saddest part is that, since this list was compiled in the early days
of the Web, the vast majority of the examples are from desktop applications --
which means they had access to a standard toolkit of GUI elements. (They may
not have understood how to _use_ it, as the examples show, but at least they
_had_ it.)

The rise of the Web, which has no such toolkit, as an application platform has
therefore opened the doors to UI atrocities the likes of which the
perpetrators of these could only dream.

~~~
cotillion
HTML has luckily until recently been too limited to allow many of the UI
atrocities well paid developers at huge software companies have managed to
produce.

Take a look at the in depth critique of Lotus Notes. Half of it is still valid
for the current version 18 years later. I thought I'd gone crazy the first
time i tried to use the somewhat special IBM password prompt in Notes 9.

------
MBlume
> the folks at ryka, a manufacturer of women's shoes, wanted to be certain
> that no potential customers could be excluded. thus, rather than providing
> option (or radio) buttons to indicate one's gender, they decided to use
> checkboxes, to allow the potential customer to indicate male, female, or,
> well, both, and for that matter, none.

Er, yes? That is in fact somewhat more inclusive than choosing male or female
with radio buttons? Not ideal, but still better? Why is this in a hall of
shame?

~~~
Retr0spectrum
I agree, but if the user left both boxes unchecked you would have no way of
validating whether they had simply forgotten to answer the question. A drop-
down list would probably best, with "Male", "Female" and "Other"

------
snarfy
I'd like to add 'hover the mouse in the magic spot' to the list, where UI
elements are hidden until the mouse is above them. Facebook and Google are
primary offenders. It's so goddamn hipster and entirely useless, even harmful.

~~~
bradbeattie
Coined as
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation)
by
[http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/mysterymeatnavigation.html](http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/mysterymeatnavigation.html)

------
urda
What's hilarious is the website itself is really the winner for the "Hall of
Shame"

~~~
chippy
it's original layout is better:
[http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.php?file=shame.htm&mode=or...](http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.php?file=shame.htm&mode=original)

------
ptx
I always liked their critique of the common file dialogs introduced with
Windows 95:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20021017105308/http://www.iarchit...](http://web.archive.org/web/20021017105308/http://www.iarchitect.com/file95.htm)

The design seems normal to us now, but it's still problematic. (Although the
rest of the UI seems to be getting worse at an even greater rate, so people
might not expect the dialogs to make sense anymore.)

In particular, the horizontally scrollable non-detailed view (faithfully
copied by KDE) might have made sense when filenames were restricted to 8.3
characters[1] but is absurd with long file names.

[1] As in the Windows 3.1 file manager:
[http://images.pcworld.com/images/article/2012/04/windows31_1...](http://images.pcworld.com/images/article/2012/04/windows31_11-11344016.jpg)

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runin2k1
Is it an attempt at irony that they greatly hamper the readability of their UI
by lowercase-ing all of the main text on the site?

~~~
josephpmay
The UI on that site is pretty horrid, however it is a decade and a half old.

~~~
ptx
The horrid UI is all from "GP designpartners" who took the content from the
original (sensibly designed but no longer online) Isys Information Architects
site.

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mhomde
God, I had repressed what old windows UI's looked like

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pascal1us
can someone add the microwave at my work to this list?

