When buying a product from an American based website and their country drop-down selection has United States at the very bottom instead of having it be first selection. Are there REALLY that many people from Afghanistan buying PS5 controllers to make them the #1 choice? I know it’s alphabetical but I’ve seen a lot of places make the default go to United States of America or eschew alphabetical and give a Top 5 of most bought from countries.
It doesn’t always work, but on some sites with a dropdown you can type the first letter to jump to those matching entries.
There is also coding magic that allows you to type the entire response in the dropdown box which is a joy to encounter when, for instance, you have to enter your birth year and the dropdown starts with the current year. This, obviously, is more appreciated the older you are.
I’ve not seen anything that gives away that this kind of thing has been implemented in the code so when faced with an onerous scrolling I always try typing first. Then, when necessary, I will call for a pox on the designer.
All users must be 18 or older, but we’ve started our dropdown at the current year…
The worst birthday thing I’ve used was the mobile version of some major pharmacy chain’s vaccine appointment site. Tapping the birthday field opened one of those little calendar displays to the current month, and it could only be moved backwards one month at a time. 600 taps later… No actually, one tap to close the site.
On almost all sites, on the “State” field I can hit “C” twice to get to Colorado.
Been there. Had to do that. Hated it and its designer.
Sometimes you can tap the month/year on the phone’s calendar to bring up a faster way to enter that information but not on the last one I had to use.
‘N’ for Nebraska, one up to Missouri.
I’ll have to try that double letter trick on other drop downs - I like drop downs that let me start typing the name to get me where I’m going, but too many only jump you to the first name in the list matching the letter - so ‘CO’ gets you to Ohio.
I’m not sure this is stupid - it may be brilliant from the developers POV. But it gets on my tits so I thought I’d share it. SW in question is Quicken, which I’ve been using for decades. I like the reconcile and transfer funds between accounts functions and I used to like the Credit Card transaction download, especially for my Discover Card.
1st off, Quicken bugs you to upgrade every year. The upgrade fee is almost what the new s/w costs, but this isn’t what bugs me.
2ndly, if you don’t upgrade within 3 years they start disabling features - most notably the financial institution transaction download function. This actually didn’t bother me too much…I figure the upgrades include staying current with the financial institutes DBs so I’d upgrade every 3 years.
Now Quicken has gone to a ‘subscription’ service “…so you always have the latest version of Quicken!” (their words, not mine). The yearly subscription is the same as the old upgrade fee. Surprisingly this only mildly bugs me.
So unsurprisingly I opted out, but I’m still using Quicken with the DL function disabled. It’s like a glorified Checkbook register now. I had always hand entered my bank transactions (small credit union) anyway, but now I have to download my Discover Card transactions into a spreadsheet and hand enter them into Quicken. This doesn’t bug me either.
One day I got the brilliant idea to just import the spreadsheet into Quicken! I’ll do all the formatting, column/row aligning, heavy lifting, etc that Quicken expects…except you can’t import a spreadsheet into Quicken. What the hell kind of financial s/w program doesn’t allow spreadsheet import? Or at the very least CSV? This is the idiotic part that bugs me the most.
The kind that is based on a subscription business model!
This is why I stopped using Quicken myself years ago, and weaned my 93-year-old mother off of it just recently. And I’m canceling her Discover card, too, because alone among all my credit cards, Discover doesn’t let you download transactions in QFX format, only CSV, PDF, or Excel (I think).
If I’m not using Quicken, why do I need to download in QFX? Because my replacement for Quicken, AceMoney, from MechCAD Software, uses QFX. You pay for AceMoney once; no subscription, no disabling features, etc. It’s not quite as sophisticated as Quicken, but it works fine for me.
My Sony music players have all been reliable and convenient, but they have one weird pointless quirk. In one pop-up menu you can choose from various play modes: Shuffle, Repeat 1 Song, Shuffle & Repeat–and just Repeat.
Now.
You’d think that it would just repeat whatever is in the folder (artist, album, playlist) that you are currently in.
Nope, that would be too cool and useful.
Turns out it will attempt to repeat the ENTIRE contents of the player, from A to Z, which could number in the thousands to tens of thousands of cuts depending on your memory. Who da fyuck is going to use that feature? You finally get to the end, you just need to grab the thing (once) and send it back to the start. First time I tried it I couldn’t grasp why it went on to the Police folder and didn’t remain in the Pink Floyd folder, replaying Animals.
Thing is, someone somewhere made a deliberate choice to do it that one (virtually useless) way, not the other (very helpful) way. Boggles my mind.
Didn’t stop me from getting a new one today. [For those curious, I don’t use my smart phone for music because the main one I have has tactile buttons and fits easily on the ledge beneath my stick shift, making it easy to pause it when in traffic, where on a smart phone I’d have to visually search for the button if not grab it first, plus one inadvertent swipe could mean getting off of the album list or cut I am currently listening to. It also subjects the phone to endless drain and recharge cycles, an issue with a player yes but I don’t want my phone dying when an important call is coming in.]
My runner-up vote is fast food apps like the McDonald’s and Taco Bell apps.
The latest trend is to do away with passwords and go “password-free.” This means they send me an email link every time I need to login. And every time they update their app, which seems to occur weekly, they log me out. And their stupid emails always seem to go into my spam folder, which means I then have to log in to my ISP website to release it from my spam folder. And did I mention that the email expires in 10 minutes? What’s even more aggravating is that I have a password manager, so it was far easier to simply use my very secure password that I took the trouble to set up and save—and for which there is now no option to use. 
But the winner for stupid software design is the Amtrak website.
I recently tried to create an account to book a last-minute one-way ticket in which a train actually made sense and was economical too*. The problem was they insisted on verifying my email before they would let me proceed. The infuriating thing was their stupid verification email took 15-20 minutes to arrive in my inbox, but expired 10 minutes after it was sent! I went round and round for over 45 minutes trying and failing to proceed. I must have requested 8 verification codes. None of them arrived in my inbox in time to be of any use. I wanted to scream. What is so important on this stupid website that an email only works for 10 minutes? And why can’t they use my cell phone instead?
Finally in frustration I created a whole new account using a Gmail account instead of my normal email. This one worked. I then went all the way to the last screen to purchase the ticket, entering passenger information, my credit card, and my credit card security verification only to get an error that the ticket was no longer available. It had sold out.
I think hell will probably freeze over before I try to buy an Amtrak ticket again.
*Well, not really but close enough…and it would have saved 8 hours of driving, because I picking up a car that was 4 hours away.
In other words, the stupid software wasn’t Amtrak; it was your email provider, that was for some unknown reason delaying delivering your mail for 15-20 minutes.
A Google search indicated that there was some incompatibility between Comcast/Xfinity email addresses and the Amtrak website. So granted, maybe Comcast had some blame here as well.
But again, why did Amtrak set up the system such that the emailed code expires in 10 minutes? I can see setting a time limit on email security codes, but it should be more like 24 hours, not 10 minutes. And in this case, all they were doing was verifying my email address.
I’ve run into a similar problem with requesting a manual password reset on websites (because the automated system was not working, for whatever reason). Some support tech would take a day or two to respond, then send a password reset link that is only good for a very short period of time. Unless I’m checking my email every 10 minutes for two days, by the time I see the password reset email, it has expired.
The above reminds me that recently I had a land line telephone problem that took 8 days to resolve, but the link to the survey page expired after 48 hours.
And I’m sure they go ahead and stick an ad or two in that email. I know TEMU and Aliexpress were doing that to me.
My job requires me to use a completely new password every six months, and the password can not be the same or similar as any of your previous five passwords.
Not only is this annoying, they don’t allow you to “reveal” your password at all so if you mistype you’ll have no way of knowing.
And the fact that it’s even possible for them to enforce this requirement is proof that they have no password security.
They aren’t storing the password itself, surely, rather some kind of transformation with a one-to-many (very, very many) correspondence to the alphanumeric password.
That’s what they should be doing. But if that’s what they were doing, they wouldn’t be able to check whether it’s “similar” to any of your previous passwords.
True, I missed that.