Mine has to be inability to type. No, no, no, don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to play World of Warcraft via command line or anything*, but there are things that would be much quicker if I could just type them (including hotkeys) instead of navigating their convoluted menu structure. The most egregious is when the installer won’t let you type the absolute file path, look, the default is C:\Program Files(x86), I have this nice, identically named directory on my D:\ drive I’d like to use, but can I just change C to D? No, I have to navigate the file browser to sloooowly select the folder I want in D, instead of changing one character. Particularly bad since, as a programmer who has handled file IO (like, oh, almost all of them have at some point), I already know that it’s probably EASIER to interpret text file paths than it is to force the user to use the file browser. I suppose it guards against mistyped paths… but “this directory does not exist” is fair warning.
Ironically, this is one thing you aaaaalmost CAN do. More or less everything in WoW except moving and buying things can be done with / commands, and those non-movement related things can usually be done with LUA addons and bound to a / command or hotkey. It won’t be efficient, but hey.
Nag windows that want you to register the product every time you reinstall it and won’t go way. This is especially maddening with some older games (Baldur’s Gate I’m looking at you) in which case the company no longer exists.
Speaking of which, it and its sister games force you after install to sit through trailers for games that came out over 10 years ago.
I just encountered another one – distributing binaries of a program that needs to update. Look, I already downloaded your 15-billion gigabyte file, and you want me to download 16-gazillion more after I think the application is installed, especially when half of them are most likely just alterations of core files, and even more when your “installer” is just a downloader in disguise (as is true for many, many games nowadays). Look, just put the full application along with the changed and added files in the main download directory.
I hate software that doesn’t let you type in the two letters of your state. Sometimes they will allow the first letter but never the second and you still have to use the scroll down window. I live in WI which is always hidden on the bottom of a scroll down select window. Typing WI takes two seconds to type and much much longer to scroll and click. You’ve already typed in the whole of your address. It started out so people didn’t type in invalided states, but if the programer can’t program a check for a valid state before submission they shouldn’t be programing.
Laggy response times! Some of the applications I use at work have what I assume are Javascript drop-down menus (sorry, I know nothing of programming but they’re clearly not native Windows-style menus). They have a maddening delay when you click them - not a huge time but maybe a second before anything happens. And you can’t use the mouse scroll wheel or cursor keys on them either - you have to click on the scroll bar, which also has a slight lag.
Multiply that up by however many hundreds of clicks I have to do in the course of a day and I want to kill someone.
Entering phone numbers into boxes on a form where the cursor does not automatically jump to the next box after the third and sixth number are entered.
Lazy programmer.
Rusty spoon? Well la-di-da, aren’t you a mollycoddler.
All text everywhere must be copy-and-pastable.
E.g., tax software says “mail the form here” and there’s the address. So I go to copy it so I can print the envelope and I can’t. Why?
Error messages. Oh, I better Google that. Can’t select it. I gotta type all that gibberish in?
And thousands of other examples.
It’s text on the screen. Let me copy it, okay? It’s, you know, something the customer wants to do and maybe, just maybe, making the customer happy might do some good.
(I’ve programmed. In Java, you have to set things up special to make text selectable. It should be the default with hoops to jump thru to turn it off.)
I hate it when you have a text box where basic right clicking doesn’t work. What really bugs me is that Microsoft pioneered this feature back in 1995, and yet it’s missing in the file dialog boxes of all Microsoft Office versions up to 2003. Heck, for all I know, it’s missing in 2007 and 2010 as well.
A more general pet peeve is the removal of features when the underlying code has not changed. Sure, sometimes you are making major changes, and you would have to recode the feature, and it’s so rarely used that it’s not worth it. But if that’s not the reason, don’t remove it. Hide it, if you are worried about choice fatigue. But don’t remove it.
A similar problem is adding a new feature to an automatically updating program that you cannot shut off–especially when it breaks things. This is why I no longer use NoScript. A security feature that breaks things should never be unremovable.
Finally, I hateforced removal of backwards compatibility. I’m talking things like Finale, which will convert your old Finale Files into a new format every year, so that you cannot use an old version. I’m talking Apple’s removal of Rosetta when the code would still work. And I’m talking Yahoo Mail’s telling you you can try out the new version, but not then not letting you go back to the old version if you didn’t like it.
Stop it. The stuff still works. Don’t break it unnecessarily.
Little known fact: Ctrl-C will work on almost all error messages on a Windows box. Highlighting is unnecessary.
Of course, just letting you highlight and copy would make it a lot more obvious, so I wonder if they did that to make it harder for you to fix your own computer.
When you push the caps button on my crappy phone, if goes from abc to ABC to Abc, so if you just want to capitalize one letter, you have to either remember to click it twice from the outset or click it, type one letter, then click it twice. If it cycled abc to Abc to ABC, you’d only have to click it once and then just go on.
As a fellow Wisconsinite I can tell you the trick isn’t to hit WI, but to hit WW. Each time you his W it’ll go to the next W state. Weather you have to hit WW or WWW depends on if it’s sorted alphabetically by state name or abbreviation. IME it’s almost always WWW.
WWW if it’s by state
Washington
West Virgina
Wisconsin
I can’t stand webforms that do that. I’ve tabbed though every other box on the form and all of a sudden this one does it for me. And since I wasn’t expecting it, I’m usually and extra spot ahead now since the form tabbed and I tabbed. Also, every site is a little bit different in what you have to do to ‘trick’ it if you make a mistake and need to go back and fix something. Sometimes you can click at the beginning of the text, sometimes you have to highlight and delete everything quickly, sometimes you can Shift-Tab back into the box, sometimes you can just click where ever you want. But if you pick the wrong thing the form will notice that the box is full and keep sending the cursor to the next box.
Programs should have to state, BEFORE a purchase decision is made, whether they will require an online connection at all times. There are lots of games that I want to buy, but these days it seems like every single game out there wants the player to be connected to the internet. Even if the game has a solo mode. Maybe my connection is DOWN, assholes, or it’s painfully slow. If I’m playing solo, most games really don’t need an internet connection.
Also, there is absolutely NO excuse for any website which will not allow the user to click X to close the screen. I don’t like the nag screens that ask if I’m really, really sure that I want to leave the site, either. Oh, and whoever thought up that little trick of a gazillion popup windows when you try to close the screen, so you have to turn off the computer or use a function key? One of these days, my cousin Vinnie WILL find you. And he’s going to hurt you.
I guess it depends on how you think of the phone number. If you think of the number as a group of three numbers, a group of three numbers, and a group of four numbers, then you will have no problem with a tab between boxes.
If on the other hand you think of the number as a single ten digit number the tab will drive you bat shit insane.
I don’t think of my phone number as 818 (tab) 555 (tab) 1212. My number is 8185551212. I will say it in groups of 3-3-4 to make it easier for the listener but it is a 10 digit number not a 3 digit number, a 3 digit number, and 4 digit number.
Why can’t a touch pad (on a lap top) just be a f’n touch pad?
I don’t want it to scroll, I don’t want it to copy and I don’t want it to click. I just want it to move the pointer from point A to point B.
What really sticks in my crawl is if I try to intentionally copy or scroll just using the touch pad, I can’t. It only happens when I don’t mean for it to.
It’s not that, it’s that some forms do it and most don’t so I’m usually not expecting it. That typically results in the second set of three digits ending up in the last section because of an inadvertent double tab. Also, if you make a mistake, it can be annoying to try to fix it.
My biggest annoyance these days is application developers that think it’s a good idea to keep changing the keystroke commands from version to version. It only affects people who already know the program well (for newbies it’s all new) so I guess it’s only an issue if you want loyal repeat customers :mad:
The attitude seems to be “we’ll give you a keyboard-driven workflow, but we know most of you won’t use it, so no one’s going to beta test new versions from the standpoint of a keyboard-centric user”.
One of the things that really gets to me on webforms is nonsensical tab orders (or whatever the correct term is.
On my banking website I couldn’t figure out why it kept asking me to change my password. Then one day I realized that I typed in my user ID, hit tab, password, tab and instead of going to ‘submit’ it went to the next link. The next link, directly under the password field is ‘forgot password’. From what I understand, that’s the default setting the web designer can over ride that so hitting tab will go in whatever order they want it to go in.