Samples for good/bad usability



  • Hi everyone,

    I am searching for the worst GUI I have ever seen in my life. As far as I rememeber, it was on worsethanfailure.com. But I just don't find it anymore. I hope that some could point me to the link. It was a window with thousands of icons, that's the only thing I can remember.

     I will have to prepare a short presentation about "usability engeneering". Maybe you have some other curious user interfaces in mind, which should not miss in such a presentation.

    And maybe you know some positive examples, too. They are even harder to find.

     Philip



  • @stophi said:

    Hi everyone,

    I am searching for the worst GUI I have ever seen in my life. As far as I rememeber, it was on worsethanfailure.com. But I just don't find it anymore. I hope that some could point me to the link. It was a window with thousands of icons, that's the only thing I can remember.

     

    Duh, you're posting on it.



  • Try searching for "GUI", "usability" or "interface" on the site.



  • Try the interface hall of shame and hall of fame at: http://homepage.mac.com/bradster/iarchitect/. I think i got the link to it out of one of the posts here originally.



  • I assume you're talking about FileMatrix.



  • It might be one of these:

    The Customer Friendly System  or Back To Hotel Hell 

    ~ben


  • There was some classic image where a guy installed every available firefox extension.  Can't find the link to it though.



  • @vt_mruhlin said:

    There was some classic image where a guy installed every available firefox extension.  Can't find the link to it though.

    Well, there's this one with IE7.



  • Usually anything done in Flash is a good example of worst practices in useability.



  • You want bad? Check out Rainbow Painter: http://www.rainbowpainter.com/


    It's supposedly a Mac app (that only works in Classic, thankfully), but it appears that the author made their own windowing system. So it doesn't actually allow overlapping windows, and doesn't look anything like a Mac application. It's got a bunch of different modes that you have to work in, and the UI is always literally showing thousands of colors at a time. It's a designers worst nightmare. But hey, the paid TuCows to give it 5 stars, or whatever, so it's gotta be good, right?



  • No, I remember there was a screenshot of a ubercomplex file manager-type app with about 500 toolbars and 10 task panes on the front page about a year ago.



  • yep: it's filematrix. bstorer posted the link above



  • This one definately takes the price as the worst GUI ever. Although in german I guess everybody can agree the design is horrible.

    I get seasick just looking at it.

    http://www.karl-fritsch.de/homepage/no-index.htm



  • @stophi said:

    Hi everyone,

    I am searching for the worst GUI I have ever seen in my life. As far as I rememeber, it was on worsethanfailure.com. But I just don't find it anymore. I hope that some could point me to the link. It was a window with thousands of icons, that's the only thing I can remember.

     I will have to prepare a short presentation about "usability engeneering". Maybe you have some other curious user interfaces in mind, which should not miss in such a presentation.

    And maybe you know some positive examples, too. They are even harder to find.

     Philip

    I remember the EAGLE interface being really bad. I was running the freeware "lite" version in X11 under Mac OS X. Can't find any representative screenshots though.



  • @savar said:

    I remember the EAGLE interface being really bad. I was running the freeware "lite" version in X11 under Mac OS X. Can't find any representative screenshots though.

    Can't say that I can share the experience. I've worked with in on Windows and seen it on Linux, and it's quite usable. It's not trivial, I'll give you that, but what circuit design program really is..

     My most recent GUI nightmare was with Open Office (latest version.) I had a document and wanted to spell check it. Unfortunately, the default language was not the same as the language of the document. You'd think it's a trivial operation to change it, but that's not the case. The helpful combo box in the spell check dialog had a list of all available languages, but for some reason could only be applied to the current word.

     Looking through the menus, and the document properties, there isn't an option anywhere to change it. It was only after consulting the help file that I found out it's somewhere in Tools, Options (wtf?), Languages, default language -- with a check box that makes it the default only for the current document. UGHGHGH.


     



  • Thanks a lot for your feedback. I think I have enough material now. ;)


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