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...
> Well done to the creators...you managed to, with 100% accuracy, capture every single thing that's horrible about signing up to websites.
Oh no no no. For an authentic experience it needs to reload the page and wipe out all forms when you click 'next' and one of the fields is not valid. (And of course reloading the page should take at least five seconds.)
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]
6 minutes? Seriously? You guys must be pretty motivated.
I gave up after about 30s. I'd probably have given up after 60s, even if there was a prize at the end (e.g. being registered). I rebel violently when confronted by a UI crime-scene like that. I'm feeling ill after just two pages of that form.
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!
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
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
I was dying with laughter. Love the helpful chat box which takes forever to drop, the helpful popup telling you to hurry up with an option to lock it where you'd expect an ok, and the expand button where you would expect the close button.
But captchas were truly the icing on the cake.
The only thing missing would have been a 'subscribe to our newsletter' feature 2 seconds after each page loads.
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]
The way the final verification overlay window was just a little too small so you had to scroll one line to get the final set of check boxes was a very nice touch.
And an obnoxious GDPR message with intentionally confusing sliders (am i disabling all tracking or enabling all tracking? Why is the ‘accept all’ button in the placement of the ‘accept’ button, why can I not just hide this form and not complete it at all)
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.
My favorite is a video cutter software that has two four-sectioned inputs for start/end times, like hh:mm:ss.ttt. You enter e.g. 00:17:44.500 into “start”, deleting minutes section with DEL, because it’s full with zeroes. And then you can’t enter 17 into end-minutes field, because video length is 21:30 and 17:30 is less than 17:44.500, which is bad. You have to first del-fix end-seconds and then go back to minutes. But wait, you want to cut to 17:50, but 21:50 is more than the video length (21:30), so as you type 50 it makes it into obvious 05! You have to del-fix minutes to 20, del-fix seconds to 50 (now you’re half-good), go back to minutes and del-fix these to 17. Milliseconds are no-brainer from there, don’t worry (but do not forget to unfocus the input, because otherwise it doesn’t apply). Sadly it still cuts along nearest keyframes only, but hey, at least it works.
If you think that I’m just kidding, it’s Gihosoft Video Cutter, one of 10 best video cutters out there.
Dvla... They ask you to enter the number on your form, without a prefix that is printed on it, and then to enter the payment amount that you think you owe them. No confirmation, no validation...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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...
Oh no no no. For an authentic experience it needs to reload the page and wipe out all forms when you click 'next' and one of the fields is not valid. (And of course reloading the page should take at least five seconds.)
The only thing better would be to have them on different form pages.
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
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.
I gave up after about 30s. I'd probably have given up after 60s, even if there was a prize at the end (e.g. being registered). I rebel violently when confronted by a UI crime-scene like that. I'm feeling ill after just two pages of that form.
That's just an insane level of perseverance.
https://i.imgur.com/RiHmKZM.png
* 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
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
But captchas were truly the icing on the cake.
The only thing missing would have been a 'subscribe to our newsletter' feature 2 seconds after each page loads.
When I slid the marker to about half the maximum length and the slider showed me 95 years old I cracked
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triband_(flag)
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
You probably won't notice that way ;)
Had a real website for a real store do that to me a few days ago.
Deleted Comment
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.
If you think that I’m just kidding, it’s Gihosoft Video Cutter, one of 10 best video cutters out there.
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.
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.
User Inyerface – A worst-practice UI experiment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20344565 - July 2019 (255 comments)
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
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.
Did I just keep getting the Captcha choices wrong?