The Interface Hall of Shame

And the saddest part is that, since this list was compiled in the early days of the Web, the vast majority of the examples are from desktop applications -- which means they had access to a standard toolkit of GUI elements. (They may not have understood how to use it, as the examples show, but at least they had it.)

The rise of the Web, which has no such toolkit, as an application platform has therefore opened the doors to UI atrocities the likes of which the perpetrators of these could only dream.

> the folks at ryka, a manufacturer of women's shoes, wanted to be certain that no potential customers could be excluded. thus, rather than providing option (or radio) buttons to indicate one's gender, they decided to use checkboxes, to allow the potential customer to indicate male, female, or, well, both, and for that matter, none.

Er, yes? That is in fact somewhat more inclusive than choosing male or female with radio buttons? Not ideal, but still better? Why is this in a hall of shame?

I'd like to add 'hover the mouse in the magic spot' to the list, where UI elements are hidden until the mouse is above them. Facebook and Google are primary offenders. It's so goddamn hipster and entirely useless, even harmful.

What's hilarious is the website itself is really the winner for the "Hall of Shame"

I always liked their critique of the common file dialogs introduced with Windows 95: http://web.archive.org/web/20021017105308/http://www.iarchit...

The design seems normal to us now, but it's still problematic. (Although the rest of the UI seems to be getting worse at an even greater rate, so people might not expect the dialogs to make sense anymore.)

In particular, the horizontally scrollable non-detailed view (faithfully copied by KDE) might have made sense when filenames were restricted to 8.3 characters[1] but is absurd with long file names.

[1] As in the Windows 3.1 file manager: http://images.pcworld.com/images/article/2012/04/windows31_1...

Is it an attempt at irony that they greatly hamper the readability of their UI by lowercase-ing all of the main text on the site?

God, I had repressed what old windows UI's looked like

can someone add the microwave at my work to this list?