8 ms·
Ask HN: What are the websites that you rely on but have horrible UI?
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!).
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.
Thank you.
- danilocampos 16y agoTripAdvisor. 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 16y agoI 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 16y agoYeah, 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.
- smackfu 16y agoTrip Advisor also has this weird thing where the reviews are in pages of three.
- brianwillis 16y agoSlightly 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 16y agoUgly? maybe. Hard to navigate? I don't know how you could make it any easier. Maybe making everything bigger?
- bemmu 16y agoMy 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 16y agoSeconded, at least for my Chase accounts. Credit unions' websites are often much better than your average BigCo bank (ex: https://www.becu.org/ https://www.becu.org/).
- swombat 16y agoHN? :-) 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 16y agoWhat 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!
- Zev 16y agoHave you ever tried using HN on a mobile device? I've been tempted to hack up yet another iOS app for HN, but A. I don't have the time to do it in what i would call the Right Way(tm) -- or a Hacked-Up Way(tm) either and B. it would really be better off as a separate style than a separate app.
- smiler 16y agoYes. I have a Nokia E51, it's just a standard T9 phone with wifi / 3g, as I don't need anything fancy. I've loaded HN on it and can skim the articles for anything interesting when I'm out and about. True I wouldn't write a comment, but it works fine for me for what I need.
- J3L2404 16y agoI use http://ihackernews.com http://ihackernews.com for mobile and it is very readable. The same developer wrote ViewText, which is a nice readability bookmarklet.
- AdamGibbins 16y agoI often browse HN on my android phone (as I am now) with no problems. Page automatically resizes to fit the screen, works nicely.
- mahmud 16y agoCiteSeer. 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 16y agoarXiv 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 16y agoOh, 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 16y agoIt's got no data quality checks, so you need to use it with caution, but something like http://arxiv.org/list/hep-ex/recent 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.
- vitobcn 16y agoCraigslist. 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 16y agoThey 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 16y agoit takes too much of my time to do simple tasks
- mthoms 16y agoGoDaddy. 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 16y agoI 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 16y agoIt 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."
- d_r 16y agoJust finished transferring all my domain names to NameCheap for that very reason -- I got tired of sifting through tens of pages with links in various font sizes to find that ever-elusive DNS setting ... among other things.
- megamark16 16y agoAlthough NameCheap's website is also horrible. I mean now that I know my way around I can get stuff done, but to say that it's busy/cluttered is an understatement. I've never had any problems with them though, so I'm stickin' with 'em.
- holde 16y agowww.teamliquid.net everything is forum style with a shitty forum implementation :/
- niyazpk 16y agoAll 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.
- jsankey 16y agoLucky you don't use my bank: it might just tip you over the edge :). Not only does the back button not work (most of the time), but they've also specifically added back-button detection so they can tell you why: For security reasons you’re unable to use the Back, Forward and Refresh buttons in your browser. Uh, ok...
- dangrossman 16y agoBlackboard, at every university.
- wh-uws 16y agoI really believe this market is ripe for disruption. Like right now.
- pieter 16y agoThe 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.
- tremendo 16y ago:) Recently acquired by Bb (from Elluminate). Not a user of the software so I can't really comment on that, I'm a Web guy. My Wife uses it and does occasionally complain to me now that I work for Bb, as if I could do something about it. I like the team that I work with though, good people.
- pipeline_tux 16y agoOur University recently switched to Moodle, which is an open source competitor.
- retree 16y agoMy 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.
- GVRV 16y agoSo 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.
- zackattack 16y agoebay craigslist odesk see a pattern
- shib71 16y agoSeveral 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 16y agoWhich 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.
- fjabre 16y agoSalesforce
- msy 16y agoPaypal. Trying to find anything is a 10 minute exercise in spelunking through at least 10 different pages.
- jonah 16y agoIt's also way too slow.
- jonah 16y agoEvery single credit card gateway's web interface I've used.
- d_r 16y agoPerhaps unrelated, but I've always wondered why http://www.authorize.net/ 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 16y agoI 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".
- jonah 16y agoSad thing is, Auth.net is one of the better interfaces I've seen lately...
- meric 16y agoMalaysian 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 16y agoOff-topic but: what is your recourse here? Can you cancel the charge at your CC company? What's the impact of doing that?
- meric 16y agoIt'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.
- smileysi 16y agoSlashdot! 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 16y agoI agree on the Slashdot iPad issue. Expanding a hidden comment is useless.
- Skyline 16y agoDNS Made Easy You can't use the back button and you can't open links in a new tab/window
- didip 16y agoYup. 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.
- nagrom 16y agoSpires (http://www.slac.stanford.edu/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.
- sz 16y agoCAESAR. http://www.northwestern.edu/caesar/ http://www.northwestern.edu/caesar/ Everything sucks about it. Everything.
- ritonlajoie 16y agoThe 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 16y agoDon'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 16y agoWhat are some specific problems you have with GDocs? I see a small bug once in a while, but nothing major.
- ivank 16y agoI 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.
- moe 16y agoPivotal Tracker.
- tomh- 16y agoWindows live mail
- kingofspain 16y agoI'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.
- tim_iles 16y agoHotmail, 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.
- ajaypopat 16y agoPretty 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)
- desigooner 16y agohow about rediff .. the entire screenspace for 5-6 links per tab.
- blntechie 16y agoicicibank.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 16y agoMSDN. 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 16y agoI 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 16y ago"NASCAR navigation"... good term. It express exactly how I felt today while reading on TFS (Team Foundation Server)
- chopsueyar 16y agorevision3.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.
- agentultra 16y agoboardgamegeek.com
- moconnor 16y agoGmail. 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 16y agoI'm sure the keyboard shortcuts would be awesome if I'd ever had a browser / OS combination that they worked on.
- AdamTReineke 16y agoWhat doesn't work? FF + Windows has always worked for me.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- Tycho 16y agoI was going to say GMail but I can't say it's BAD overall (in fact it's way better than Hotmail). However recently they made a few changes which were all just terrible. The Compose Mail link was a bit too anonymous before, but that big ugly button they've got now?? They also did something to the menus on the left which just made them weird.
- dmlorenzetti 16y agoNot to mention the fact that the button to delete an entire "conversation" is relatively big, and right at the top of the working area, while the control for deleting one message in a conversation-- a far more common operation-- is buried in a pull-down menu.
- ANH 16y agoThe Virginia Business One Stop (https://apps.cao.virginia.gov/IDC/index.html 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.
- zeemonkee 16y agoLiquidPlanner. I find the UI noisy and counterintuitive.
- jeffclark 16y agoCraigslist. 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.
- jcromartie 16y agorallydev.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.
- bengl3rt 16y agoUnited.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.
- shareme 16y agoVirgin Mobile, NEt10, Oracle, IBM, IRS, and any bank
- golgo13 16y agoI 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!
- 4chan4ever 16y agoEvery restaurant website ever created. It's like they hired Ron Jeremy to do the usability on these things (and that's being unfair to Ron Jeremy).
- meastham 16y agoEverything by my university.
- isb 16y agoBilling websites for public utilities (gas/electricity).
- idleworx 16y agoI 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.
- carnevalem 16y agoAmazon
- natgordon 16y agoPublic 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 http://www.l4u.com/iPAC.php
- kingsidharth 16y agoIndian Government Websites. Suck big time. Try anyone of them
- pt 16y agoevite.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.
- liquimoon 16y agoJobmine. http://www.jobmine.uwaterloo.ca/ http://www.jobmine.uwaterloo.ca/ Everything sucks about it. Everything.