Google. The search engine, not the Chrome web browser or the Android phone or other stuff they’ve shifted their focus to while ruining their search engine. Which didn’t alway suck so badly (although I never stopped sighing and pining for Alta Vista’s Advanced Search pane with the true boolean search field). But it’s deteriorated severely.
To indicate that yes goddammit the exact thing I typed in is the exact thing I want the returned search results to all actually have on them, you have to enclose what you typed in quotation marks and then perform the search and then click “Tools” and then specify “verbatim”, which you can’t do if you also want to limit the search to a specified timeframe (doing so turns off “verbatim” and vice versa). And it still even then only kind-of sort-of brings you only what you asked for. It will still bring you web pages that had what you searched for on some freaking “referring page” that linked to it, for instance.
I have something similar with ordering Jack in the Box online. At the restaurant when you order a Jumbo Jack they’ll ask if you want cheese on it for an extra cost. However on the website there’s two versions, the regular Jumbo Jack and a Jumbo Jack with Cheese. For some dumb reason you CAN’T just add cheese onto the normal Jumbo Jack despite the fact every other burger on their menu let’s you add cheese or extra cheese for an additional cost. Instead they expect you to choose either With Cheese or Without Cheese at the start.
This only becomes a problem when the coupons or free burger you get via reward points ONLY works with the regular Jumbo Jack sans cheese. For some dumb reason they refuse to let you use a Buy One Get One Free Coupons on a Jumbo Jack with Cheese you have to get it without cheese even if you’re completely willing to pay extra for cheese on both burgers.
If you pay for something at Target using the Target app and you want cash back, you have to select that option in the app before you scan the QR code to pay. It takes some getting used to, but I understand it has to be that way since you’re not using the credit card terminal. That’s not my complaint. My complaint is that the app remembers your selection, meaning if you forget to de-select the cash back option, the next time use the app to pay, you get cash back again even if you didn’t actually want it. And once you’ve initiated the transaction, there’s no apparent way to cancel, at least at the self-checkout. It just displays “cash back requested, tap to dispense”, with no other options.
I tried to use www.Kayak.com for some travel stuff. Holy cow, that site is the motherload of bad web design. I don’t even want to single out any one thing - it would be easier to list the things that are decent.
Does anyone else notice how on credit card machines after you insert your card, there’s a point where they’ll say YOU MAY REMOVE YOU CARD before you can actually remove your card? I wonder why they do that. It goes you insert your credit card, it says PROCESSING, then in between processing it will flash YOU MAY REMOVE YOUR CARD but then it was flash PROCESSING again then finally it will beep YOU MAY REMOVE YOUR CARD. I know this because occasionally I’ll remove my card at the first prompt and my card will be immediately rejected.
I don’t think I’ve noticed that, but for a long time the “dip” style credit card machines would use a buzzer to indicate successful completion. Maybe in some cultures that works, but not here in the US. Even when I knew what to expect, when I’d hear that noise I’d still think it failed.
Some machines have moved to a “ding” sound which is closer to what I think of as a successful completion, but most I use now have no sound at all.
Please don’t go that route, we’ve seen it all before. Soon somebody will chime in with “my C64 had no hard disk at all, and only 64kb of RAM, only 39kb of it free”, until finally someone will post “when I was deciphering the Enigma in 1943, we only had three bits of memory. To set a bit, we had to bite them out of a brick with our own teeth.” It’s like the four Yorkshire men sketch each time.
The company I was working for at the time had a deal w/ MicroSquash. We could buy Office (for personal/home use) for some ridiculously cheap price, maybe $15. For an extra $10 you got Project, too. This was for a download; for an extra $10 you got a CD. I am sooo glad I spent the extra $10 for the CD. I’ve installed it, for free, on a couple of PC upgrades since then. No Office 365 crap for me.
When using a browser, key doesn’t work. Read an email & want to get rid of it, you must mouse up to the top of the screen & click on the delete icon. Outlook is so much better in this regard.
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In the let’s change things just for the hell of it dept, Windows had the same shortcut keys from Win 3.1 up thru Win7. Why the everloving @#$%& did they decide to change all of the shortcuts in Win10??? I’m very much keyboard-centric & used all of those shortcuts regularly.
Creating a new folder used to be {Alt-F}, W, N. Now it’s {Alt-H}, N, __. To change views in a window, like from details to S/M/L/XL icons has changed also. Except now it almost takes two hands or really long fingers to do those things.
At the self-serve checkout at my local Sobeys, the screen says ‘start scanning’ when you walk up. So you scan your first item, then try to scan the next one and it won’t scan. Looking up at the screen, it is now blocked with a dialog, “Do you have your loyalty card? Scan it now.” So apparently you are supposed to scan one item, then get out your wallet and scan your loyalty card, then put it away and finish scanning items, then get out your wallet again at the end to pay.
And there’s no reason for it, because if you say ‘no’ to having your loyalty card, it asks you again before you pay, and it makes no difference. So why the extra dialog in the middle of grocery scanning? It’s really annoying, and serves no purpose whatsoever.
At my local gas station, you put in your card, and while it is processing someone decided to put up a helpful notice, “Remove Card Quickly!”. So you are standing there, it says, “Processing…” Then “Remove csrd quickly!” So you remove your card quickly, and the transaction fails. Huh. Must not have removed it quickly enough. Try again…
In fact, what they mean is, “When we DO tell you to remove your card in a while, remove it quickly. Don’t slide it out slowly, which will confuse the reader. But not yet!”
Actually it was a response to wulfpup. The pinheads are those whose memories harken back to the days when storage was expensive and so they have that mindset despite modern-day prices.
The online textbook system I use has been acting up lately. You go through one webpage to log in, and from there click another link to open a new window with the app for the online homework. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. Lately, though, usually when you click that link, it brings up a little page with a timeout message on it, that the server didn’t respond in a reasonable time.
This error message shows up in about the same amount of time that it takes to click the mouse. It’s so close to instant that I can’t tell the difference. No, the server didn’t fail to respond in a reasonable time, because you didn’t even give it a reasonable time.
Of course, after the fourth or fifth try when it finally works, it takes significantly longer than that to actually open the page (because it always takes longer than that to open a page).
hey I had the deluxe c64 I had 2 disk drives the fast loader cartridge and the tape deck for it
heh ei still forget my card has the chip in it and I stand there and try using the strip old style … in which the cashier will say politely"for the 100th and 2nd time put it in the front ." with a winsome sigh …in which I will do so and pull the card out too early and get another winsome sigh and have to try again luckily I’ve been going there since said cashier started the job at 15 and shes 35 now and co-owns it
At a guess, if you scan your loyalty card then the display will show you the loyalty card price for items on sale for only card holders. Also, you can possibly scan your card as the first thing and skip the prompt (not that it isn’t a crappy design, of course - why not have the first prompt be “do you have a loyalty card”?).
Not a software design mistake but what I suspect is a fully intentional shakedown:
Microsoft if you use Outlook/Live/Hotmail gives users 15G of free space for their mailboxes.
Microsoft gives any Office/Windows users up to 5G free space in OneDrive, their cloud storage.
As of this past February, guess where is it that MS stores the attachments for the O/L/H e-mails?
Yeah, making it the first option makes sense if you want to track discounts. Making it pop up after you start scanning groceries makes no sense at all.
Here’s a favorite software design error: Inappropriate use of infinite scrolling. This board does it, and I have seen operator consoles in fqctories where some idiot implemented it.
Infinite scrolling was designed for one purpose: to keep people on a web site after it was learned that a common jumping off point was when they have to select the next page. It was never about usability, but maximizing time spent on site. The only places where it’s not a usability disaster is when the list of things you are looking at is short-lived and continuous, and the decision to leave is basically when you get bored of reading. Twitter and Facebook, for example.
For other applications like message boards, infinite scrolling is awful. It breaks the browser’s page search, it pollutes your recents list, makes it hard to find your position in the middle of a long conversation, makes it impossible to link to a specific page in a lisst of comments, forces you to re-navigate by scrolling if you accidentally leave the page, etc.
My waterproof Bluetooth speaker for my shower showed off a really dumb flaw.
Turned it on in the shower, it automatically synced not to my phone but to someone else in my houses phone first via Bluetooth (they must have synched it last).
They were watching a movie on their phone apparently so I got the movie audio while in the shower. I decided to just turn it off but for some reason my Bluetooth headset REFUSED to turn off, presumably because it was too busy receiving the constant Bluetooth signal from other phone. Holding the button to turn off nor pressing the resync button did anything. I had to manually lower the volume, then outside the shower pry the back open and pull the battery to actually turn it off.
OTOH you have the clickbait sites
-click-
where in reading a story
-click-
after a sentence or two
-click-
you have to get to a
-click-
new page so they
-click-
can load another set
-click-
of goddam ads.
When you order online from Chipotle, you can order a single taco or you can order three tacos. If you want two tacos, you have to order one taco twice. (Or order three and save one for later.) Instead of a button for One Taco and a button for Three Tacos, why not just make it drop-down where you can choose how many you want?
(This may not be a design issue, it may be some upper level management decision and the software just implements that. It’s still annoying as hell.)
