No longer maintained or available at its original home. (Domain apparently abandomed. Taken over by a search spammer.) Archived at http://digilander.libero.it/chiediloapippo/Engineering/iarchitect/mshame.htm. (This link is dead. Is there a live one anywhere?)
Quoting from the front page:
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- The Interface Hall of Shame is an irreverent collection of common interface design mistakes. Our hope is that by highlighting these problems, we can help developers avoid making similar mistakes.
Some highlights:
- LotusNotes -- http://interfacehallofshame.eu/www.iarchitect.com/lotus.htm -- "We wish we found IBM's Lotus Notes a long time ago. This single application could have formed the basis for the entire site." As a GUI programmer and (forced) user of Lotus Notes, I am forced to agree. Lotus Notes has possibly the most frustrating GUI of any application I have ever used. It doesn't work like any other application. In every other application, F5 means "refresh". In Lotus Notes, it means "lock the user out until they enter their password again". I'm serious! Even trivial things like selecting items from a list works differently in Notes! You have to click to the left of the item, and a check mark appears instead of highlighting the item. The menus are as badly arranged as any I have ever seen. And it constantly presents security/confirmation dialogs asking if its OK to perform some internal action with an obscure name that only a DBA would understand the meaning of. Every company's mail template is different, of course... because of the centralization based on templates, it's easy for IT administrators to remotely move the columns around within YOUR inbox view. It's enough to make any user despair.
Add to this that with Release 5 LN reverted to a "task-switcher" interface. You can never open two windows. You cannot see an e-mail and the in-box or see two e-mails on the same screen.
- Pirates, Quest for the Seas -- http://interfacehallofshame.eu/www.iarchitect.com/pirates.htm -- "Pirates: What happens when a GUI is designed by someone who has never used a GUI" Choice quote: Instead of alphabetizing the items in the lists to make it easy to locate an item of interest, the developer chose to randomly order the lists.
- It's possible Notes evolved before GUI conventions became established. Thus, it's the age-old problem of handling the trade-offs of backward compatibility. As far as randomly sorting lists; back in the days it may have been done for efficiency purposes. You had to kiss up to the hardware back in those days. I remember how slow the computers were back then. However, they should at least offer the option to sort.
I show these gems to my students, some of whom go on to create applications just like them :-)
... If only there were some way of changing that.
Oh, I thought this page was about Java API interfaces. What are your favourites?
(See CodeSmellsIllustratedWithJavaAwt)
For those who would rather concentrate on successful interfaces and examples of good ways to do things,
Also have a look at http://pixelcentric.net/x-shame/index.html - a site with some more UI considerations, but while more from the mac side of it, also useful for other GUI programmers. Features also some recent GUI reviews.
Examples
- Design Links
- Ineffective Error Messages
- Interface Stupidity
- Tabbed Dialogs
- Terminology
- User Submissions
- Visual Elements
- Wrong Colors
- Wrong Controls
CategoryUserInterface
Interface Hall Of Shame