[HN Gopher] User Inyerface - A worst-practice UI experiment
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User Inyerface - A worst-practice UI experiment
Author : andyjih_
Score : 369 points
Date : 2021-06-25 19:37 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (userinyerface.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (userinyerface.com)
| hpen wrote:
| I got the fuck out after i clicked "no"
| drosan wrote:
| I gave up on "password" field - can't figure out how to make it
| "unsafe" for the life of me OTL
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I remember when <blink></blink> was the most annoying tag in
| HTML. Ooof.
| [deleted]
| sgt wrote:
| That country dropdown selector had me cracking up. And all the
| flags are not only unordered, but in black and white!
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| That's some Douglas Adams[1] grade work, there. Bravo.
|
| 1: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Bureaucracy_1987
| narush wrote:
| This was actually hilarious, and honestly better than half the
| screens I've designed :-)
| suyash wrote:
| LOL what a nice joke on UI!
| soperj wrote:
| I laughed at various points. well done.
| xophishox wrote:
| I cant stop laughing trying to fill out forms.
| wtetzner wrote:
| How do I get past this?
|
| > Your password is not unsafe
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| need to be Password1234
| grawprog wrote:
| You may need to add a cyrillic character...
| zild3d wrote:
| that means its fine (not unsafe is safe)
| float4 wrote:
| I wasn't getting through because my domain was "domain". When I
| changed it to "gmail" it was fine.
| iab wrote:
| I can't remember the last time I was this angry
| dang wrote:
| One past thread:
|
| _User Inyerface - A worst-practice UI experiment_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20344565 - July 2019 (255
| comments)
| Jipazgqmnm wrote:
| And here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20353724 on July
| 4, 2019
|
| and here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20345826 on July
| 3, 2019
|
| and here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20351023 on July
| 4, 2019
| dang wrote:
| True! it's just that the convention is not to link to past
| submissions that didn't get interesting threads. Otherwise
| users get cranky when they click on the links and find
| nothing interesting there.
| qwertox wrote:
| Oh my nerves... what a stresstest.
| grawprog wrote:
| Well...I did it...somehow...I did...
|
| 00:06:57
|
| That seems too fast...apparently i've experienced these things
| far too much. It actually was filling me with rage. I came close
| to saying fuck it...I really did...
|
| Well done to the creators...you managed to, with 100% accuracy,
| capture every single thing that's horrible about signing up to
| websites.
|
| That bow thing though...gotta admit, was worth it just for the
| chuckle I got as I realized...
| LeftHandPath wrote:
| I got it in 5:58 and I'm proud.
| pageandrew wrote:
| I got it in 3:49!
| danudey wrote:
| I got 6 minutes and 7 seconds, half of which I think I spent
| trying to figure out the capcha.
|
| Also, if you got to the capcha and got it on the first try, go
| back and fail it a few times. They have some really clever
| ones.
| romwell wrote:
| I got nearly the same time, 06:58. Spent the most time on the
| bow.
|
| If you liked this, you will enjoy the Phone Number UI from
| hell[1]. Surprisingly, I did see stuff like that in the wild -
| and from Google, of all places![2]
|
| [1]https://qz.com/679782/
|
| [2]https://i.redd.it/gns5ci5hp2yz.png
| fernandotakai wrote:
| i did in 4:33 -- it was fun!
|
| https://i.imgur.com/RiHmKZM.png
| squiggleblaz wrote:
| You and I have very different definitions of fun! I got
| annoyed when it asked me for a profile picture and I just
| closed it.
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| I nearly quit when it said "your age and birthdate don't
| match". Glad I got through because the bow and check also gave
| me a laugh.
| romwell wrote:
| I absolutely expected that. Having both birthdate and age was
| the Chekhov's gun on that form.
|
| The only thing better would be to have them on different form
| pages.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| (2018)
|
| _2 years ago Discussion_ :
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20344565
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| I laughed out loud at the expansion control in place of the
| "close" X in the corner of the T&C modal.
| sodafountan wrote:
| "Send to Bottom" of the help box is hilarious
| Pxtl wrote:
| It took me way longer than I wanted to admit to figure out
| how to get rid of that, and then it starts slowly....
| crawling.... downwards....
| enjoyyourlife wrote:
| Reminds me of job applications
| loa_in_ wrote:
| Not enough repetitive questions. The birth date one was
| appropriately frustrating though!
| infogulch wrote:
| Love all the little details. Some favorites:
|
| * Clicking 'expand' button on any dialog (T&C) expanded the
| dialog to cover the page but doesn't expand the contents to match
|
| * Tiny flag icons to select country
|
| * The age slider that went from 0-180 years and didn't update as
| you slid it (fun on a trackpad)
|
| * number input for house number that required clicking on the
| arrows to change it one at a time
|
| * utterly ambiguous human verification instructions
| romwell wrote:
| >number input for house number that required clicking on the
| arrows to change it one at a time
|
| You might enjoy the Phone Number UI from Hell[1], and Google's
| implementation of it[2]
|
| [1]https://qz.com/679782/
|
| [2]https://i.redd.it/gns5ci5hp2yz.png
| wongarsu wrote:
| Flag icons in grayscale. My country's flag is three equally
| large horizontal bars, just like 12 other nations (and a lot
| more if you count variations like little insignia etc). [1]
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triband_(flag)
| kvirani wrote:
| My current real world frustration: a date picker for birthdate
| which starts in current year and I believe the native selector
| in Android/Chrome doesn't let you select a year. You hit left
| arrow to go down month by month. Am I crazy and did I miss
| this? Ive seen it a few times now!
| httpsterio wrote:
| Usually you can hit the year number and it'll let you skip
| whole years. But yeah.
| Pxtl wrote:
| iirc the Android 4 date picker had a microscopic hit-area
| on the date where, if clicked, would display a year-key-in
| dialog. I don't know if newer ones have this.
|
| I hate date pickers so much that I use the Google Assistant
| in all its hellish, buggy glory to create appointments for
| my calendar on my phone.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| There usually is a way, but it's often non obvious. I.e. the
| picker might have a header like July without any visual
| offset, but clicking could still switch the view to the year
| picker.
|
| I usually just try various stuff and I can't remember a
| single time where I didn't find an option _eventually_ , but
| they're sometimes well hidden
| TranquilMarmot wrote:
| I wonder if there's a way to get the datepicker to open on a
| specific date... find the median age of all users and open
| the datepicker in that year haha
| karrotwaltz wrote:
| Also if you select the first choice for birth date you get
| April 1st
| kgantchev wrote:
| Took 8 mins to complete...
| fredley wrote:
| This could be so much worse. Why does the form retain my
| information when I get something wrong? It should reset, or go
| back to the start.
| fullwaza wrote:
| New Windows 11 UI preview?
| toxik wrote:
| 5:59 on an iPhone, why did I do this I don't know
| throwaway4pooxi wrote:
| love the help chat bottom right only has a increase height
| button.
| ParanoidShroom wrote:
| Lovely to see a small company I worked with seeing end up here!!
| If someone is looking for an agency, super fun and great people
| over there!!!!
| simlan wrote:
| That was hilarious i gave up at the slow scrolling cookie consent
| template. Thanks for the laugh !!!
| beprogrammed wrote:
| Thanks for the ideas, I will be sure to implement them in my next
| project.
| moistly wrote:
| Doesn't appear to work on my tablet... so goal 110% achieved!
|
| Edit: oh, heck, it does work--I completely missed the obvious
| misdirection!
| easterncalculus wrote:
| I was expecting the benny hill theme to eventually start playing,
| this is hilarious.
| luke2m wrote:
| 00:03:53
|
| Much easier on mobile than desktop
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| I rage-quitted on the third captcha
| jumelles wrote:
| I ended up getting through by selecting them all.
| qwertox wrote:
| The worst was the initial scroll offset. I was wondering why
| the last row had no checkboxes below the images, and was
| unable select those images. After three or four times
| submitting that damn dialog I noticed that I can scroll up.
|
| I also had to scroll down the terms and conditions dialog
| _twice_ because I thought I could just click the text in
| order to toggle the checkbox.
|
| 8 minutes and something. Very painful.
| vlunkr wrote:
| My favorite thing is the painfully slow animation when you send
| the chat box to the bottom.
| Pxtl wrote:
| 03:51
|
| I laughed out loud when I got to the bottom of the last page and
| didn't see checkboxes and realized the checkboxes were _above_
| the pictures and not below and had to scroll to the top.
| paulddraper wrote:
| I noticed that after a few seconds, but I had to go though like
| 8 screens and it took 3+ minutes....
|
| Did I just keep getting the Captcha choices wrong?
| beforeolives wrote:
| I genuinely gave up after two unsuccessful clicks. It probably
| says something about my personality or current state of mind.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| It's so bad I didn't want to go past the 2nd page.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| A complement actually
| arthurcolle wrote:
| God this is painful
| easton_s wrote:
| I hated it. Good Job!
| canada_dry wrote:
| For Canadians... I love this one: ENTER YOUR
| POSTAL CODE: A1A1A1 <- ERR! A1A 1A1 <- ERR!
| A1A-1A1 YOU MAY PASS.
|
| Lazy %@$# front-end devs that can't reformat the input!
| shric wrote:
| I'd say it's the backend's job to accept any of those and
| reformat accordingly. If you rely on the frontend the backend
| would still have to validate it anyway.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Yup. If you're going to do validation on the frontend, it
| should be for the _sole_ purpose of improving user
| experience, not for making life worse!
| ceejayoz wrote:
| My email address has a dash in the domain and it's remarkable
| how many sites (and big ones, too!) reject it as an invalid
| domain.
|
| Discover.com, for example, rejected it when I did a card
| application, but disabling JavaScript let it go through on the
| server-side validation. Bloody weird.
| xoa wrote:
| Really the entire idea of client/server-side email
| "validation" kind of seems like an ancient, cockroach-like
| anti-pattern that is impossible to stamp out. Like, what is
| the problem they're even solving? One validates email
| addresses by sending an email with a token the user then acts
| on. There are useful things to do with emails, like checking
| against already registered ones (including any blacklists),
| but I can't think of any that would result in any in-page
| user feedback since that would generally be a dumb
| information leak. Like if someone tries to register an
| already registered email, send an email about it don't leak
| that it's registered.
|
| And as well as being useless most such scripts seem to date
| back a long ways and have very lazy and fixed assumptions
| about what constitutes a valid address. I mean, I've never
| been a fan of the explosion of TLDs, but it's also a reality
| and they're all valid. Even on the left side of the @ a
| surprising number of scripts seem to fail on things that are
| perfectly acceptable characters.
|
| Strikes me as one of the many little minor GUI traps where
| new designers get carried away with the power of scripts and
| do without asking if they should, then further get too clever
| by half.
| handrous wrote:
| Lots of these kinds of things--at least for companies that
| aren't just copying others' patterns blindly--are the
| result of multiple support calls/emails/tickets. The
| tickets, in this case, would be users complaining about
| your service being broken when in fact they messed up their
| email address and don't realize it. There are also some
| cases in which you want to use the address immediately to
| reduce friction (as with sending receipts or shipping data
| for an order by a "guest" user without an account) without
| first sending a verify-address email.
|
| My personal preference is to let the user know why you
| think the email address looks wrong and give them some way
| to override your judgement and submit anyway. It's more
| work, but it gives you all the benefits of rejecting "bad"
| addresses while minimizing the harm of false-positives from
| your bad-address-spotting code (it's very slightly annoying
| to people with odd-looking addresses, but not that big a
| deal). This also lets you go beyond validating the form of
| the email address, to alert on common typos that _might_ be
| legitimate (and which can sneak in even if you make the
| user type the address twice). "gmial.com looks like it
| might be a mistake; are you sure you got that right?" Or
| "yaho.com". Or even just Levenshtein-distance check a bunch
| of common email domains and alert any that are close, but
| not exact. You annoy whoever has an actual address at those
| domains, but save a bunch more people who screwed up.
| Shacklz wrote:
| > like an ancient, cockroach-like anti-pattern that is
| impossible to stamp out.
|
| I feel like you just described email (or rather, "the"
| email spec, as if there was a single one) in general.
|
| Yes it obviously still serves its purpose but what consists
| a valid email-address (let alone email) is specified in
| such a godawful way that every application that I've seen
| in the wild trying to address this problem somehow fails at
| it (sometimes in negligible, often in very gross ways).
|
| If devs all over the world manage to screw it up over and
| over again, maybe it's just time to call it quits and
| acknowledge that the spec is broken?
| xoa wrote:
| > _I feel like you just described email (or rather, "the"
| email spec, as if there was a single one) in general._
|
| But the concept of email is extremely useful, valuable,
| understandable, and it's standardized and out of the
| centralized control so common for anything developed
| these days. I'd be happy to see some sort of email 2.0,
| cleaned up, with modern encryption by default and so on
| that served as a replacement. But I don't know of anybody
| even proposing such a thing. Instead the rage is to
| create yet another fucking instant messenger or slack
| thing or whatever.
|
| Everyone knows the spec is ancient and has had a lot
| grafted onto it. But it's not going anywhere without a
| good replacement and even with that the transition would
| take a very, very long time. So as is so very, very often
| the case in computing we just have to deal with that.
| Nadya wrote:
| > Even on the left side of the @ a surprising number of
| scripts seem to fail on things that are perfectly
| acceptable characters.
|
| I've had an input require a minimum of 3 characters on the
| left side of the @ to register. My email was just
| "me@example.com" using my own domain name. A perfectly
| valid email address. I am also unable to sign up for Id.me
| for the IRS because it rejects both of my personal email
| addresses. I cannot register to create NPM packages for the
| same reason. I also cannot sign up for Vercel either. I
| cannot sign up to Vercel via Github and when I try to sign
| up by email it says the account already exists. When I
| attempt to do a password recovery for the email it says
| "Sorry, we are unable to validate that email." So the
| original error of "account already exists" is actually
| wrong - the account doesn't exist and can't exist because
| they aren't able to validate the email for it.
|
| My personal emails aren't even "weird" ones like ones with
| an emoji or punycode domain or non-Latin character sets.
|
| I hate with a fiery, burning passion every site that
| attempts to do any kind of email validation beyond simply
| sending me an email and letting me click a link to verify
| my email exists.
| lmm wrote:
| > what is the problem they're even solving?
|
| The problem they're solving is that a lot of people just
| enter their email wrong and then wonder why they didn't get
| the signup email.
|
| > Like if someone tries to register an already registered
| email, send an email about it don't leak that it's
| registered.
|
| This is something that's cargo-culted far too often. Maybe
| for some services it's worth keeping secret which emails
| are signed up, but for most it isn't.
| sneak wrote:
| Lots of websites reject email addresses at entirely valid
| domain names as invalid, too, such as any at some of the new
| TLDs like .email.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I'm a little more inclined to forgive that, but dashes in
| the domain have been valid for decades.
| whatatita wrote:
| So many websites provide some TLD validation but don't keep
| it up to date. Using .xyz is an exercise in frustration.
| mcbishop wrote:
| My email address is "_@" followed by a domain name with a
| dash followed by the "shop" domain ending. It gets rejected a
| lot, but I won't give it up. It's a good indicator of whether
| I should spend more time at the website.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| The U.K. government does this a ton with random reference
| numbers, even on their new (mostly good) sites and it drives me
| up the wall. Oftentimes they will give you these numbers with
| spaces but the form will not let you enter it with spaces (so
| it will fail if you copy-paste), or even worse the form will
| have a size limit so if you paste your 10 digit number with two
| spaces, the last two digits will be chopped off so it will fail
| again when you remove the spaces.
|
| Another problem is phone numbers: if you want to use some
| autofill functionality, your phone number will often include
| the country code part but the field won't allow a + (maybe in
| this case the autofill feature should drop the country code
| (and add a 0) or replace the + with 00).
|
| I'm not actually sure about the significance of the space in
| U.K. postcodes. I feel like it shouldn't be significant as one
| can imagine a regex for the two parts,
| /([A-Z]+[0-9]+)\s*([0-9][A-Z]+)/, but I then there are
| exceptions like EC1R.
| Weryj wrote:
| I absolutely hated that, guess that's a success.
| java-man wrote:
| I feel like I've been in this experiment for the last 20 years...
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I have a personal punishment policy for any obvious violation
| of UX/UI - they will permanently and irrevokably lose me as a
| customer. Even if they fix it, I won't budge. Leadership needs
| to use their own products and if they allow this to go to
| production, I wonder what they're doing behind the scenes.
| Small battles that I pick, but by god it is so satisfying.
| doomroot wrote:
| So a small shop that can only pay 1 fresh bootcamp dev who is
| trying their hardest doesn't get your business because they
| can't keep up with several hundred Frontend google devs.
| Seems a little silly and absolutist.
| analog31 wrote:
| It's a win-win. The small shop also can't afford to deal
| with this customer. Not to disparage either, but a first
| lesson for small businesses is that you can't chase every
| customer.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Most horrible UX comes from too much software, not to
| little. If it was a single dev, they'd probably not have
| time to implement all the popups, dickbars, newsletter
| reminders, full screen interruptions, and dark patterns.
| Horrible UX takes large engineering effort.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| It is usually the opposite - large enterprises have
| horrible UX than a mom & pop small shop. Furthermore, just
| because you're small doesn't mean you cannot fix UX of the
| user. I don't throw my money at them in charity or pity for
| being small. There are some great small businesses, and
| many not so great. Absolutist argument is perhaps in the
| point you're making.
|
| I run a small side business with $2k/month in revenue and I
| damn well make sure that there are no annoyances to the
| user. This is _standard_ expectation and has nothing to do
| with how big or small you are. We should all strive for
| excellence and not perpetuate mediocrity.
|
| Regarding silliness - it would be silly to keep going to a
| restaurant that has rude service. That's what you're saying
| essentially.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Wow. That is painful.
|
| I recognized a number of those issues from a number of sites I've
| visited.
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| Every time you click the "help" button its just says "Please
| wait, there are X people in line." and just keeps going up every
| time.
| mabedan wrote:
| I know I'm supposed to hate it, but at first glance the color
| scheme reminded me of NC and I ... I ... liked it
| leff_f wrote:
| cannot stop laughing!
| leff_f wrote:
| Expand in the place of the close button is the best part.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| And the best part is that I clicked it twice thinking the
| second time would do what I wanted.
| mike_d wrote:
| Oh, I wondered what our UI designers had been working on for the
| past month...
| jliptzin wrote:
| Only thing missing is deleting everything you entered into the
| entire form any time there is an error message
| inoffensivename wrote:
| 5:08 of my life that I'm not getting back.
|
| Congratulations, that was infuriating :)
| jtvjan wrote:
| I love the double indirection on the cookie dialog. You're used
| to the small, unhighlighted option being the one to click to
| reject cookies, but here the question is asked the other way
| around, making the big button the one you want to click instead.
| dshanahan wrote:
| 4:11
|
| OMFG this is brilliant and somehow made me happy and angry at the
| same time. Well done.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| I can appreciate Nihilism-derived Humor.
| c0nsumer wrote:
| I think I found a bug. When I put 4-Aug-1978 for birthdate, and
| 41 for age, it said age and birthday don't match.
|
| It validated successfully on 42.
|
| Although maybe that's part of the game?
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| Not sure, I didn't want to do math so I just put in todays date
| and an age of 0. Worked!
| nneonneo wrote:
| Side effect: you've now created a child account and will have
| to wait 18 years for all of the website features to unlock!
| And don't dare make a second account, or you will get banned
| for sockpuppeting!
|
| At least one popular mobile game has a policy that the
| account's birthdate will not be changed under basically any
| circumstance, and child accounts are severely restricted
| compared to adult accounts. Parents wanting to take over
| their kid's account (happens more often than you'd think) end
| up seriously frustrated with the restrictions.
| kbelder wrote:
| Yeah, my daughter has been eighteen since she was five.
| jammaloo wrote:
| If you were born in August 1978, you would currently be 42
| years old.
| Causality1 wrote:
| I appreciate this. I'm so sick of seeing links hit the top of HN
| that are utterly broken in landscape orientation because some
| stupid pop-up renders with the close button off-screen.
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