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.
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146 comments
| 55 points
| on HN
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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.
It only works in MSIE. You have to install a panoply of ActiveX controls. You have to install a "keyboard security" device driver (ha!).
Then, for an actual transaction involving funds transfer, it's a long-winded, 15-20 step process requiring so many layers of authentication that the typical person keeps an unsecured document around detailing what to enter on each step.
I'd kill for plain old HTTPS.
Yes, the controls for added security only work with lower security settings. We keep around an dusty old Windows XP machine in the house just for using these websites.
Which means that every time I log in I either end up scribbling down my password on a bit of paper or typing it into an editor window.
I refuse to believe this actually improves the level of security.
Another thing that gets to me is trying to check my credit card balance on the Bank of America "Mobile Site". The only number it will show me is the sum of the transactions that have cleared - it's impossible to see my "available credit" (or the information necessary to figure it out) which is probably the only thing I would ever care about on the mobile site.
Of course my completely unscientific tests seem to indicate that the standard, non-mobile site is significantly faster than the mobile one on my N1 in any case... So I'm stuck using that atrocity instead.
Oh, and don't forget Bank of America's Android/iPhone apps, which, last I checked, were just WebViews around their website.
For security reasons you’re unable to use the Back, Forward and Refresh buttons in your browser.
Uh, ok...
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.
Have you ever asked someone who's not a regular to upvote something? That's obviously not something that should be done (but I guess we all sin sometimes... call it a wild unruly youth), but if you do, you'll find that most people don't even see the voting arrows, let alone figure out what they mean.
If advanced users still make fairly critical usage errors because of small, opposite buttons right next to each other, and newbies can't learn the fundamentals of the interface, i'd say that makes it fairly bad.
On the other hand, as I said, it keeps the barbarians out.
Or those who don't experience layout problems. Often there is a significant part of the down arrow that results in an upvote or vice versa. Generally happens in FF for me. I feel like I need to check the URL before clicking.
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.
I'm not talking about ugly or beautiful, I'm talking about very specific usability problems. For example, it's very hard to tell when someone replies to you, which means I would just drop out of conversations if they didn't appear on my "threads" page. (Although there is a solution nowadays, notifo). HN also has problem with the voting, like being unable to change votes, etc.
That said, HN still rocks. Does the incredibly limited UI have anything to do with it? I don't know. But I wouldn't mess around with HN too much: why mess with something that works?
While I appreciate minimalism I think the comments page is lacking. Let me preface my complaint with the fact that HN is probably the only site I visit frequently, due to the quality of posts and commenters.
My biggest complaint is this: I enjoy reading the comments of submissions, oftentimes more than the submissions themselves. It's really frustrating to read a post with many comments in the morning (lets say, 40), then come back at lunch and browse the same comments when there are more (say, 45 - I often leave interesting posts open in tabs to look at later). Obviously these numbers are arbitrary - think of 10 new comments on a page with 100 or more! Without a clear indication of what is new after a page refresh, I have to re-read every comment and compare post times (or effectively recall reading that comment previously) in order to see what's new. Compounding that is that the post order can change.
Unfortunately, I'm not aware of anything that can be done to fix this. To me, that is a usability defect. Enough for me to stop visiting? No!
For logged-in users, Scoop (Kuro5hin's software) keeps track of when you last visited a comments thread, and displays a [new] next to all comments posted since that timestamp.
What's more, comments are really difficult to read on a mobile phone, which is surprising, given that they are basically just plain text which should have the virtue of being easily reworkable.
That said, HN rocks, so I can't complain too much.
About possible enhancements: ajaxifying the "reply" link, as billswift suggested, would help. Ajaxifying the "edit" and "delete" links would definitely help. LW does both and it's much more convenient. Making the vote buttons light up on hover would make the interface feel more consistent, because links already react to hover.
One thing HN does very right (compared to Reddit and LW) is that users' "comments" pages are threaded, not flat.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
The entire string theory community publishes all their papers on hep-th before sending sending them to journals (which nobody reads as everything is on ArXiv). Of course, maybe you will argue that string theory is crackpot physics...
Now I have to log into about 5 different systems to get anything done.
http://sakaiproject.org/
https://bspace.berkeley.edu/
https://coursework.stanford.edu/
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!)
It has been like this for years though, so at this point I doubt they'll make any significant changes to the user interface.
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.
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.
Not to mention, anything with this sort of clipart now automatically looks like spam/domain landing page to my eyes.
> 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".
Everything sucks about it. Everything.
On the plus side, I've now gotten my first bad business decision out of the way.
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.
You can't use the back button and you can't open links in a new tab/window
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.
However, the info aggregation at Spires is amazing and it's more or less an essential tool in High Energy Physics.
Based on the name ipac, I think they both use this software - http://www.l4u.com/iPAC.php
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.
I am currently working on a video site, and looking for suggestions.
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.
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).
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.
edit: I'm complaining about their multiple bundles that make no sense at all , at least for me.
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.
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.
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.
everything is forum style with a shitty forum implementation :/
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.
see a pattern