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Designer's Gallery - Bad Design: articles and examples of poor and unusable software interface designsGUI Bloopers
GUI-bloopers.com: This page presents both new bloopers and new examples of bloopers. It is organized into the same blooper-categories as the book. Examples of bloopers are marked to indicate whether they are new examples of bloopers discussed in GUI Bloopers or new bloopers not mentioned in the book. (2001-04-29)Macromedia Flash 5 Design a Site for Usability contest winners
This site lists the contest winners. I had a look at the some of the top entries, but only liked the first place entry in the advanced category. Most of the other entries used a lot of animation that I personally find very annoying because I can't start to read the text until it stops moving. I can't help but feel these heavily animated sites treat me like a moron that will be enticed and enamored by text and graphics that move around the screen. (2001-04-15)
Deconstruction Outpost.com
Internet World: "What is Outpost.com? a confusing concept. At first, it seems to be an e-commerce site with a catalog of stuff you can buy. But closer inspection of the home page reveals frequent use of other retailers’ names. So is this a portal, or a shopbot that leads to other sites? No. Outpost doesn’t follow any of the conventions that enable users to easily understand what’s going on. It’s doing things its own way, which leads to usability problems." (2000-11-05)The Curse of User-Hostile Design
According to this PCWorld article: "Microsoft just can't get its interfaces right. The behemoth's idea of user-friendliness amounts largely to treating novices with condescension by removing or submerging helpful tools (in the name of simplicity) and replacing them with a circus of witless cartoon characters. It's as though the company were bent upon redeeming the legacy of the hopeless botch known as Microsoft Bob." (2000-10-15)Critical Review of brint.com
In this WebBusiness article Lou Rosenfeld reports that: the brint.com "the Premier Business and Technology Portal and Global Community Network for E-Business, Information, Technology, and Knowledge Management," makes my head spin with too much of a good thing. (2000-09-04)The usability of on-line banking: how not to do it
In this paper, Systems Concepts, highlight some of the many usability problems with the three major online banking companies in Great Britain. The article provides lots of examples of what not to do. (2000-07-15)Poor Usability of Award Winning Web Sites
This paper by Prof Jacques Steyn explains the methods used to evaluate South African sites that have received Loerie Awards. According to his analysis of related research "...only a quarter of the population of Web users are prepared to wait for a 100K page, while a third are prepared waiting for a 50K page." (2000-05-29)Filing online: the good, the bad and the unusable
I'm going to tell a tale of usability... a tale of trying to file my taxes online at the last possible minute (nearly, anyhow). (2000-04-25)Walk-Through: A Usability Experiment
In this InformationWeek article Don Norman writes "Imagine that you want to buy an ink-jet printer for your home office. Naturally, you might check out the Web sites of several leading printer vendors: Hewlett-Packard, Canon, and Epson. I tried it as an experiment and one word quickly came to mind: frustration. Here's what I found." (2000-02-27)Microsoft Develops Mars...MSN Mars
Mars opens with a simple login screen asking the user to click their picture to sign on. Boasting the new "friendly" MSN butterfly, the screen looks like something you would see in WebTV, giving a feeling of clear readability and simplicity. Unfortunately, as Dvorak so boldy states, the feeling quickly disappears. (2000-02-27)YouDecide.com.
On a lazy rainy Sunday I decided to test out YouDecide.com. It seemed like it might be a site that supported decisions about personal financial services. I was hoping to find something interested and a good example of a performance centered web site, but I was quickly disappointed. (2000-02-20)Worst of the Web
A Web site with comments and criticisms of bad web site designs. (2000-02-13)Web Pages that Suck
An internet web site with examples and information about bad and unusable designs in web sites. "The purpose of WebPagesThatSuck.com (WPTS) and its related sites is to provide you with easy-to-read and understand information about how to make your Web sites successful" (2000-02-06)Computer.com
This site claims to "..make learning about, buying and using technology easier for everyone, especially the novice user, by bringing together the best resources in one easy to use web site." But the site contains a really annoying yellow background graphic, a load time that will put you to sleep, a very silly and useless mouse over graphic, and a very wide horizontal scrolling frame. It seems like the designers don't know the meaning of simplify and usability. (2000-02-06)Online job sites:Where unusability leads to unemployment
The aquent.com Web site makes it hard to figure out where to go. It's something of a common mistake: Online job sites are so keen to sound even-handed, and to "balance" the needs of job-seekers and employers, that they ignore the obvious reality that most visitors to the site will want to search for jobs. (2000-01-30)Notes client creates training hurdle for customers
According to this Network World Fusion the Lotus Notes 5.0 "...client, with its slick new Weblike interface, is becoming a cost issue because end users are requiring additional training to master the interface, according to some enterprise customers." (2000-01-22)Interface Hall of Shame
The Interface Hall of Shame is an irreverent collection of examples of common interface design mistakes. Our hope is that by highlighting these problems, we can help developers avoid making similar mistakes.What's the Next Step
Family Tree Maker leaves users wondering what is the next step and as usual help does not help.[mailto.htm]