And the saddest part is that, since this list was compiled in the early days of the Web, the vast majority of the examples are from desktop applications -- which means they had access to a standard toolkit of GUI elements. (They may not have understood how to use it, as the examples show, but at least they had it.)

The rise of the Web, which has no such toolkit, as an application platform has therefore opened the doors to UI atrocities the likes of which the perpetrators of these could only dream.

HTML has luckily until recently been too limited to allow many of the UI atrocities well paid developers at huge software companies have managed to produce.

Take a look at the in depth critique of Lotus Notes. Half of it is still valid for the current version 18 years later. I thought I'd gone crazy the first time i tried to use the somewhat special IBM password prompt in Notes 9.

> the folks at ryka, a manufacturer of women's shoes, wanted to be certain that no potential customers could be excluded. thus, rather than providing option (or radio) buttons to indicate one's gender, they decided to use checkboxes, to allow the potential customer to indicate male, female, or, well, both, and for that matter, none.

Er, yes? That is in fact somewhat more inclusive than choosing male or female with radio buttons? Not ideal, but still better? Why is this in a hall of shame?

I agree, but if the user left both boxes unchecked you would have no way of validating whether they had simply forgotten to answer the question. A drop-down list would probably best, with "Male", "Female" and "Other"

I'd like to add 'hover the mouse in the magic spot' to the list, where UI elements are hidden until the mouse is above them. Facebook and Google are primary offenders. It's so goddamn hipster and entirely useless, even harmful.

Coined as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation by http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/mysterymeatnavigation.html

I like using keyboard-only interfaces for browsing (currently through Firefox's Pentadactyl plugin). Jira has some things that are hidden until hovered over, and it completely breaks the keyboard-only interface.

What's hilarious is the website itself is really the winner for the "Hall of Shame"

it's original layout is better: http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.php?file=shame.htm&mode=or...

I came here to write this same comment.

I always liked their critique of the common file dialogs introduced with Windows 95: http://web.archive.org/web/20021017105308/http://www.iarchit...

The design seems normal to us now, but it's still problematic. (Although the rest of the UI seems to be getting worse at an even greater rate, so people might not expect the dialogs to make sense anymore.)

In particular, the horizontally scrollable non-detailed view (faithfully copied by KDE) might have made sense when filenames were restricted to 8.3 characters[1] but is absurd with long file names.

[1] As in the Windows 3.1 file manager: http://images.pcworld.com/images/article/2012/04/windows31_1...

Is it an attempt at irony that they greatly hamper the readability of their UI by lowercase-ing all of the main text on the site?

The original didn't have this: http://web.archive.org/web/20021105045514/www.iarchitect.com...

If you look at the source, the cases are correct. I assume it's a CSS thing whoever made the mirror did, possibly as a joke.

The UI on that site is pretty horrid, however it is a decade and a half old.

The horrid UI is all from "GP designpartners" who took the content from the original (sensibly designed but no longer online) Isys Information Architects site.

Fair, though the particular complaint is that making everything lowercase makes it unpleasant to read, which isn't obviously linked (to me anyway) to the outdated design of the page.

God, I had repressed what old windows UI's looked like

can someone add the microwave at my work to this list?