Bad UX World Cup 2025 | Hacker News Reader

Bad UX World Cup 2025

badux.lol

153 pointsCharlesW46 comments

Since it's bad UX, they should deliver the trophy as an NFT.

Also in the spirit of bad UX, clicking the winning link (Dalia) just reloads the current page, lol.

The "choose your date by selecting a substring of pi" is absolutely incredible.

I couldn't find my birthday in the first 10 or so pages, so I clicked "Give up" and searched the page for it. Said my pi index was in the 100,000s. Went back to the ui to select it manually and gave up after clicking fast for minutes and I hadn't even hit index 50,000.

How do they prove that it is indeed possible to select any date? :)

By search, since it's trivial to find any 8 digit string in the already-known digits of pi - in fact all 100 million combinations appear within the first ~2 billion digits.

But the site only supports up to ~10 million digits! This seems like serious defect. How am I supposed to select dates before 01/01/1970 or after 31/12/2069?

If you were born after 31/12/2069, I dare say you're the time traveler, so you can just go back in time and fix the UX yourself.

What if it's the date I plan to marry my AI love companion?

In the world champion date picker, I had to swipe exactly twice to get to my birthday. Once for the month and once for the year. The default day was right.

I had to do it several times again to confirm this was just absolutely absurd luck.

You must have an absurd birthday.

1970-01-01

If you were born at midnight, it would be “epoch.”

I appreciate that the image https://badux.lol/cdn-cgi/imagedelivery/ZIty0Vhmkm0nD-fBKJrT... is being animated with CSS. In fact, the page doesn't appear to require JavaScript for anything. Thumbs up.

It uses SVG filters! You can read about the effect here: https://henry.codes/writing/how-to-distort-text-with-svg/

Related: The worst volume control UI in the world https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27819384

If I'm reading correctly this "world cup" is just a rip off of that thread. Pretty lame of them not to cite it.

Too lazy to build it: Physically accurate bird view of the solar system at year zero of <INSTERT CALENDAR>. Grab whatever object with your mouse and move until reaching the desired point in time. Like grab Pluto to get somewhat near today, finetune with our Moon.

One of the date pickers has an overhead shot of Earth's orbit and you have to wind the planet back to get to the date.

Can I nominate every single award flight finder from every airline? It's almost as if they want you to get frustrated and give up on trying to book your free flight

Something extra hilarious about the UX of the website causing me to mis-click.

I tried to watch the YouTube video but the UX popped in and caused me to click on some other random link.

I think as long as it is a fun project (and not for real world applications) such experimental design is just fine. But yeah misclicking due to popups or other stuff is always annoying.

> "Good question! It is a brilliant and culturally resonant concept!" - ChatGPT

This testimonial killed me because it's something ChatGPT will totally actually say

The chatGPT endorsement is /chefs kiss/

Reminds me of a video on The Onion where macbooks were using a single giant click-wheel as the sole input device.

Anything built with Microsoft Power Apps.

It boggles the mind that they built a "low code" interface to designing websites, with the express purpose of making it easy to use...

..and then used Excel formulas of all things as the basis for its scripting language.

It's as if they wanted these things to be as clunky and spaghettified as possible.

At some point, doing things the "low code/no code" way turns out to be more painful than just . . . writing code.

for those that can write code. if you can't write code, the more painful way is just the way

A lot of those people end up writing code without realizing they’re writing code.

I don't know the MS offering, but places like Wix/Square or using WordPress definitely do not end up with the user writing code.

Instead, you end up installing an endless list of plugins that are sometimes so poorly written that I've decided to call WordPress "RCE-as-a-Service".

that just sounds more like a case of square peg and a round hole. Yes, WP is a nightmare just like NPM and its ilk are to me as well. Adding WP in my list was fraught for this level of response, and I realize now I should have left it off the list. It really doesn't do much for moving the conversation in the right direction

That's my point. At some point, people's fear of learning code is causing them to do things in ways that are unnecessary and overcomplicated, which is quite a bit ironic.

You say fear. I say unnecessary for task at hand. My mom doesn't need to learn how to code to make a website for her florist. She just needs a site that can host some basic information like contact info, gallery of example images, and maybe some cheesy "about" page that people feel like is oh so important.

We're obviously reading a developer centric forum where people seem to have a hard time seeing things from anything other than a developer's point of view. Have hammer, everything is a nail situation. People just not wanting to become a coder isn't because they are scared of it. They just don't want to do it. I don't want to be a florist. I don't go bitching to florists that there's not an easy way to make floral arrangements without learning basics nor does it make me scared of it. Whatever "fear" you want to imply really makes you sound out of touch with non-developers.

I realize that for the simple use cases like that it's fine. I'm talking about people at work using complicated workflows in "low code" tools or spreadsheets full of macros. At some point it's equally or more complex, just in a different way.

Having been involved in a “no code” product, I’ll just say that it’s a really crappy way to write programs. You’re better off creating a DSL of some sort and asking people to type. Demanding that people click the mouse three times to open an input box where they can type something and then doing that a few hundred times is not “better.” It’s infuriating.

That has nothing to do with actual bad UX, those are made up UX… jokes? pranks? I don’t know how to call it.

But it shows a bigger problem: the generation of designers grew up on abhorrent design that Figma normalised. They don’t know what bad is, they won’t recognise bad. Only outrageous made-up UX “pranks” are bad to them. How about showing an actual bad UX of Figma on their podcast?

Lowering the plank towards a fantasy bad UX makes any UX above it good.

The federal “eJuror” website is by far one of the worst websites in existence.

I haven't used the eJuror site personally, but having served 20 years active and reserve Navy, that is but the tip of the iceberg of shittily-implemented Federal government websites.

The "new and improved" cloud portal for doing Navy performance evaluations turned into such an unadulterated shitshow that everyone went back to the old system. A Visual Basic application bolted on top of an MS Access database . . . that originally was someone's side project in 1998.

There is an easter egg in the date picker on April 25th.

First date I chose by chance!

No mention of Spotify's terrible UX in mobile devices?

It's a competition, not a teardown of in-the-wild bad UX.

From the website:

> Build a date picker with bad UX (the worse, the better)

Is there a place where one can post examples of in-the-wild bad UX? Such as a choice of „yes“ and „later“ without the option of „No, never“

I used to frequent interface Hall Of Shame a long time ago, unfortunately no longer active.

http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/

Wow, I spent entirely too much time looking at that.

What does it mean if many of these entries are above-average in today's UI landscape? x)

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