It’s more efficient their way. If someome orders one taco, it’s one tap to select one taco. If they order three tacos, one tap. If they order two, two taps.
Your way, it’s two taps every time. Once to open the dropdown, once to select the item. That’s the worst case scenario for their method, and it’s only one time out of three, assuming that people order one, two or three equally.
If they just put three buttons on there instead of two, each button might have to be smaller, slowing down operators. Why not have one big button and tap it as many times as tacos are ordered? Maybe the common order is 3, so it’s more efficient to have 1 and 3. Then you can make any combination with a minimum number of taps.
Plus, dropdowns are generally bad UI. They hide information, and the targets for tapping are small and therefore take more effort and time to hit.
I ran across one yesterday that is stupid, but very minor.
A web page had a field to enter a code number which had been emailed to me. Standard stuff to verify an email address, 2fa, reset a password, etc.
This field had little up/down arrows to increment/decrement the number. Fortunately it could also be entered manually, so I didn’t have to click 727644 times to enter my code.
I’m pretty sure that’s it – IIRC three tacos is one of standard meals at Chipotle, so it makes sense to have a button for that (It may be cheaper to order the three taco meal than three individual tacos, too, but I haven’t checked). The single taco button is probably for people who want an extra taco a la carte, like they’re extra hungry and want a burrito and a taco, or something like that.
There is a Windows program called Super(c) made by a company called eRightSoft which can (or could) convert any image/video/gif/swf into any other image/video/gif/swf using open-source libraries.
It was great… if you are, like me, a software developer.
The thing that was severely lacking - and judging from their website, still lacking, was useabilty.
It opened in the centre of the screen, but weird menus might pop out to the left or right and shift the entire Super(c) window so that it was now centered in the screen including the menu.
It is the ultimate in bad UX design, design by developer rather than by designer. I can’t express how utterly poor the user experience was. It is as if the developer who created it actually consulted a designer and did precisely the opposite of their advice, plus adding in a bunch of their own bad ideas.
I use a Mac now, so I have to use different software, but this was both the most amazing and most irritating program I have ever used.
(Not linking to their website, I am pretty sure it was the source of some virus I got back quite a few years)
But… it was pretty incredible at what it did/does.
This isn’t “stupid” from the perspective of the developer; I’m sure it’s entirely intentional and they do it for a good (from their perspective) reason, but it is hella annoying. I’m talking about “nag” messages that don’t have a “Don’t ask me again” option.
You’re using some app on your phone, and you get interrupted by a message that pops up:
“Will you take a minute to rate this app?”
[Yes] [Ask me again later]
They don’t even give you the option to say “No / Don’t ask again / Leave me alone / Stop bugging me”. If you don’t want to rate it, you’ll keep getting those messages forever. I’m tempted to say “yes” and leave a one star review, with the feedback “Keeps asking me to rate it.”
For some reason even if I tell my phone DON’T AUTO-ROTATE it will still auto rotate if you turn it fast enough, I have no idea but it’s super annoying since I can’t then just automatically auto-rotate it back I have to turn back on auto-rotate and rotate it back then turm it off again.
Reminds me of a similar program that used to be on Macs, called GraphicConverter. Their business model was that they’d give the program away for free, with oodles of features, but you had to pay for the manual. Worked just fine for me, because I didn’t mind playing around and experimenting to see what all of the features did, but someone less adventurous or tech-savvy than I might easily have found it very frustrating.
The document handling suite that came with the multi-function machine (printer/scanner/copier/fax) I bought five years or so ago does have a “don’t ask me again” option on its upgrade-to-the-paid-version nag. Which it remembers for no more than two months.
This is what Chipotle needs. “How many tacos do you want?” Enter a number or inc/dec between 1 and 9.
Yeah, it’s extra clicks. I don’t care! I want to be able to order two tacos! (And it’s far fewer clicks than selecting one taco, selecting your toppings, giving your order a name, then having to do it all over again.)
For some stupid reason my VoIP provider is blocking this browser. First on occasion and now all the time. (They had a very bad DDoS attack a few years ago and have taken steps to handle that.)
So I searched how to remove the blocking for my provider. Google showed the first couple of sentences of the provider’s how-to on getting rid of the blocking. And of course a link to the full page. … Which I can’t see since I’m blocked.
& I got my first notice about that in March. (Hint, March comes after February). I had literally a few days to clean out a ton of old attachments. “Shakedown” is absolutely a correct word for it.
Ran into this one yesterday and find it remarkably ubiquitous.
You search a site’s help to find out how to do “X”. You get a page that says click on A, then click on B, etc. to get a specific page.
Nowhere on that help page is an actual link to the page they are telling you to go to. None at all. So you have to have two windows open, one to read the directions, the other to do the actual navigation.
I see this over and over and over. I have no idea what’s going thru these people’s minds.
BTW, the steps that page told me to take to do “X”, didn’t reflect the function on the actual page. There wasn’t the button I was told to click on.
I’m traveling overseas next week, so I was just setting up a travel notification with my credit union on their web site, so I can use my ATM/debit card while traveling. I will be in the Republic of Ireland for most of the trip, but for the last couple of days I’ll by across the border in Northern Ireland, aka the UK, so I figured I’d better list the UK as one of my destinations as well. Except their website makes makes you select one, and only one, destination for your trip. Fine, I’ll create two travel notifications, one for Ireland July 1-7, and one for the UK July 7-9. Except they don’t allow any overlap between the two, even though I will be in both countries for part of the day on July 7. So instead I had to make the first notification for Ireland July 1-6, even though I will still be in the Republic of Ireland in the morning of the 7th. I hope they won’t freeze my account if I forget and use my debit card there that morning. I mean, I’ll probably want to get some Pounds from an ATM after I cross over into Northern Ireland.
We are in the realm of stupid software design, but one can hope that the alert software has a day or two of slop in it, to deal with travel difficulties.
Just curious - does it have a “Europe” option? My understanding is that you could easily be in two or three different countries on the continent in a single day.
Well, the last time I traveled overseas I set up a travel alert with them, with the destination set to Greece. And then I used the card at DFW airport during a layover on the way there, and they immediately froze my account because I wasn’t where I said I was traveling to. So this time I’m being extra specific and setting up three notifications for Texas, Ireland, and the UK.
I checked after I saw your post, and no. You can select a country, a US state, or a city (which seems way too specific to me). But the broadest category you can set for your destination is a country. No option for Europe or the EU (although with Brexit I won’t even be in the EU the whole trip, either).
My credit card, issued by a different bank, makes it so much easier. You just enter the dates you’re traveling, and that’s it. They don’t even ask for a destination.
But I actually came here to post a new one – the software Live Nation uses to generate their emails announcing new events in “your area”, which I assume are probably generated automatically. I purposely stayed subscribed to them because sometimes they do inform me about concerts I am actually interested in seeing. But sometimes I get am email from them about a show I might like to see, and then I look at the details and it’s actually in Los Angeles. I’m in the Sacramento area. Los Angeles is in no way near me. Maybe I’ll make the trip to San Francisco for a show I really want to see, but that’s it. It’s like their software was written by a guy from Delaware with no clue how big California is.
I seem to encounter a lot of web forms and apps recently, where some of the UI goes off the bottom of the screen, and without a vertical scroll bar appearing. The only way to see those controls is to temporarily make the text smaller.
Luckily Ctrl + scroll wheel comes quite naturally to me, but it’s still curious to see this issue so frequently.
My guess is that you use a larger than average default font size, and the page developers did not design it to handle that. A lot of web developers suck at responsive design.
I’m playing a multi-user online idle game (Firestone, if anyone cares).
There’s one component where you start a task and then have to wait on it to complete before you start another. If you open the screen to see progress it shows you the time to completion:
01:25:36 - HH:MM:SS
which becomes
36:24 when the remaining time drops below an hour
and then
24.8 when it drops below a minute.
The tenths value doesn’t change - the countdown is for the seconds only (so 24.8, 23.8, 22.8, etc). I don’t need that level a psuedo-accuracy, but if you are going to show it, update it.