HACKER Q&A
📣 RachealMichelle

What's the most frustrating user interface you use regularly?


I'm a university student working on a user interface design project. We're tasked with identifying and redesigning a problematic UI.

I'm curious about the pain points of a technical audience. What are the most frustrating websites, apps, or software interfaces you encounter in your daily work or life? What specific aspects make them bad? (e.g., poor layout, confusing navigation, lack of accessibility, etc.)

  👤 gooodvibes Accepted Answer ✓
ServiceNow and JIRA feel actively hostile towards the user.
👤 bediger4000
Gnu Image Manipulation Program. Lots of twiddly things wrong, like:

Doing a crop, the cursor almost disappears. Same with freestyling the outline of some complicated shape to cut.

Picking a color doesn't work consistently.

Choosing a pencil or brush - WTF, it's all wrong.

The layers menu is incomprehensible.

There's a lot more.

👤 smt88
iOS, hands down. Why can I still not reply to messages from my notification drawer? Why doesn't the keyboard suggest contractions? Why don't I have a dedicated back button, like I did on Android? Why is Siri so astonishingly bad? Why are there 3-4 different settings (including the hardware mute switch!) that control volume? Why are hidden, undiscoverable gestures the only way to do important things?

I was forced to switch from Android 3 years ago, and I am shocked every day that the UX is so much worse.

👤 incomingpain
Ive used alot of bad UI and I dont currently use any UI that I would call bad.

LM Studio though... boy I kind of wish I could fork it and fix the ui lol.

👤 pirates
Illustrator for iPad. Especially coming from CS6. It seems like most of the functionality exists, but some things are incredibly tedious to change or are buried too many menus deep. It’s almost an uncanny valley thing, it’s too close to what I’m used to that it throws me off. I tend to only reach for it when I specifically want use a stylus/pencil and then go back to desktop as soon as I can.
👤 btschaegg
Jira, Confluence, MS Teams.

Slow, disorganized, delaying every navigation, screwing up things as simple as copy+paste and other basic functions (Teams: muting/unmuting with a headset in voice calls, Jira: apparently, simple text templates in tickets are impossible (wtf?)), are impossible to search through successfully,… the list seems endless.