The QuickTime 4.0 Player earned its eternal spot in the User Interface Hall of Shame for its gratuitous skeuomorphism and breathtaking disregard for usability,

The QuickTime 4.0 Player earned its eternal spot in the User Interface Hall of Shame for its gratuitous skeuomorphism and breathtaking disregard for usability, forcing users to wade through the hollow hubris and masturbatory design indulgences of Apple's avant-garde, artisanal cocaine-snorting 'geniuses' who clearly prioritized looking "cool" in a mirror over making a product anyone could actually use. http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm >[...] The QuickTime 4.0 Player sports a consumer interface, designed so that it "looks like" a physical consumer product. Apologists for this design philosophy maintain that users will more readily be able to transfer their knowledge of real-world objects to the software. Unfortunately, the apologists fail to recognize that there are two likely consequences of this approach: (1) the user is unable to transfer his or her existing knowledge of computer interaction, and (2) the software becomes needlessly subject to the limitations of the physical device. >[...] The QuickTime 4.0 player contains many examples of how the software must adopt the limitations of the physical device it is based on, but the first example the user is likely to discover is the volume control. Since a real-world hand-held electronic device typically employs a thumbwheel to control the volume, the designers concluded that it would work just as well in a software application. What the designers failed to realize is that a thumbwheel is designed to be operated by a thumb, not a mouse. Watching new users try to adjust the volume can be a painful experience. The user invariably tries to carefully place the cursor at the bottom of the exposed portion of the control, then drags it to the top of the control and releases, then carefully positions the cursor again at the bottom of the control, drags upward, and well, you get the picture. http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/images/qtime/player.jpg http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/images/qtime/player.jpg