What's the most unacceptable UI/coding you've ever seen?

[KerbonautInTraining]

Other than any issues with KSP, what's the worst "feature" of a website, game, app etc. you've had the misfortune of experiencing?

I'll start by saying the comment system on the YouTube Android app is an absolute mess (at least, once you consider the development resources available!) When making a comment, the page behind the keyboard gets almost entirely blacked out and you can't interact with it at all. You can't minimize the keyboard without deleting what you're writing, so if you want to quote somebody, good luck. Want to copy/paste to get around it? Can't even select the text within comments. 

Another example is in Team Fortress 2 (an FPS). The player has a backpack containing items that do hold money value, so they're protected quite well. If the item servers go down, the game somehow knows the contents of your backpack (you can see the items) but won't let you access it. That just doesn't make any sense IMO.

Also, G+ doesn't have any sort of list of your comments/activities unless you share them, publicly. There is absolutely no way something like that goes unnoticed in a multi-billion dollar company.

Edited February 17, 2016 by KerbonautInTraining

[Guest]

In TF2 that only happens if you were already connected to the servers before they went down. And the backpack doesn't let you access it to prevent players from glitching items.

[KerbonautInTraining]

8 minutes ago, Aperture Science said:

In TF2 that only happens if you were already connected to the servers before they went down. And the backpack doesn't let you access it to prevent players from glitching items.

Still, it would make much more sense to simply disable the "items" tab or something. I would understand if it did that, but it's pretty infuriating to have them all there and not touchable. 

[hugix]

I guess that has to be E.T. the video game.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/30/a-golden-shining-moment-the-true-story-behind-et-the-worst-video-game-ever

[Hysterrics]

How about the bug on the forums that sometimes doesn't allow you to post anything?

Details: Sometimes you go down to reply to a post. Guess what? You click on it and the text editor doesn't expand. Have fun reading the forums!

Surely someone else experiences this, right?

[Branjoman]

The game From The Depths, while it is an amazing sandbox game, has a somewhat...clunky and unintuitive UI. The keyboard based building system also is a little hard to get your head around, but you can change to mouse-based if you want.

Edited February 17, 2016 by Branjoman

[Shpaget]

The 53 step to exit the Assassin's Creed.

[Hobbes Novakoff]

26 minutes ago, Branjoman said:

The game From The Depths, while it is an amazing sandbox game, has a somewhat...clunky and unintuitive UI.

The UI is okay, but it's... a work in progress.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Sequinox said:

How about the bug on the forums that sometimes doesn't allow you to post anything?

Details: Sometimes you go down to reply to a post. Guess what? You click on it and the text editor doesn't expand. Have fun reading the forums!

Surely someone else experiences this, right?

Happened to me in mobile.

[Cydonian Monk]

iTunes.

[KerbonautInTraining]

2 minutes ago, Cydonian Monk said:

iTunes.

That's cheating and you know it 

[lukethecoder64]

The First Tech Challenge SDK.

For starters, there are variables named TOAST.

Edited February 17, 2016 by lukethecoder64
added link

[cantab]

Probably something I wrote. Like those scripts that downloaded pages from a website and scraped and munged the html in order to turn the data into .csv format. Stuff took over 24 hours to chug through it all, and I still had to manually clean up column-misalignment issues because I forgot the data itself could contain commas.

As far as released software goes, the 3DS web browser. It's just godawful, the worst browser released this decade that I ever had the misfortune to try and use. The problem is it runs as a "multitasking application", you open it without closing the game, and the 3DS just does not have the hardware performance to do that acceptably.

[Nuke]

gui code is notoriously convoluted no matter where you look. its probibly also the reason why linux is so terminal-centric. nobody wanted to write guis for all that stuff.

[Guest]

15 minutes ago, Nuke said:

gui code is notoriously convoluted no matter where you look. its probibly also the reason why linux is so terminal-centric. nobody wanted to write guis for all that stuff.

And when they do, you get Debian 8...

[Stargate525]

One of the proprietary programs I have to use in my work looks like it was last touched in 1998, and takes about five clicks to do anything of use.

[Camacha]

10 hours ago, Cydonian Monk said:

iTunes.

Yes.

[Nuke]

i tunes is terrible, i assume its mainly the pc version that is terrible (the mac version is probibly solid). as for me i took my ipod, installed rockbox, and its been running for 10 years. i just copy the files over and the database updates on device. and there is doom.

also anything running in a virtual machine and intended for multiple platforms, because they seldom conform to the gui conventions of the platform you actually run it on. like what side of a dialog box the save button is on. most people dont actually read dialogs, they just respond with muscle memory and click the correct button automatically without thinking about it. so when the buttons are switched from what is typical on your system, work gets lost and there is much swearing.

[StrandedonEarth]

How about bugginess in console games?

My boys bought the Lego Movie video game for the XBox 360, since they love all those Lego games so much. But this one must have been rushed out, because there were many places where a character could become trapped. No problem, you think, just kill the character (no real penalty for death in a Lego game) but it respawns in the same spot! The only way out would be to restart the level. Very frustrating, they obviously didn't spend much time on QA. Had to rush it out to make the movie release, I guess.

[cantab]

A Lego game was one of the worse games I played too. Lego Racers on the Gameboy Color. It was killed by too severe popup, meaning by the time you saw the powerups it was too late to steer and get them.

[KerbonautInTraining]

I just remembered what inspired me to make this thread.

A few weeks ago my phone did a software update. Apparently it also updated the "peel" smart remote app, something I've never used. The morning after the update I saw an icon on my lock screen of a remote. 

In my half awake zombie daze, I decided to press it, thinking the app might now be more useful.

I was wrong. The screen dimmed (as if there was a pop-up, but there was none) and the touch screen became completely unresponsive. I could get the restart/shutdown menu up but couldn't press anything on it. 

I had to take the battery out to use my phone again. GG Peel.

Edited February 22, 2016 by KerbonautInTraining

[Endersmens]

On 2/19/2016 at 7:28 PM, cantab said:

A Lego game was one of the worse games I played too. Lego Racers on the Gameboy Color. It was killed by too severe popup, meaning by the time you saw the powerups it was too late to steer and get them.

Lego Racers 2 was amazing though!  I played that on PC for a long time. Almost want to try it again!

[Streetwind]

The user interface of the original Final Fantasy 14 Online at launch was utterly atrocious.

To give you an idea: to craft an item, you had to bring up the half-screen-filling menu, which was best navigated with the number block keys, choose a submenu, make a choice in that to bring up a new window, in which you made a choice (with the mouse now), which brought up a new window with several ingredient slots. Each one of those you had to click, which brought up your inventory, which you then browsed for the ingredient you wanted to use. After finding your ingredient, you right-clicked it and chose to select it in the submenu that appeared. This closed the entire inventory and brought you back to the previous step, where you now had to click the next ingredient slot, which opened up the inventory all over again... and so on. After all of that, you were ready to craft one item in a little minigame. Completing this left you with all menus closed, so to craft another item (to perhaps, you know, level your skill up), you had to go through the entire process again.

Are you sufficiently disgusted yet? Good. Now further enrich your imagination with the fact that it was a server-side UI, meaning every single click and buttonpress you made was subject to your connection's latency and the server's load level. 1-2 seconds delay per action were common.

 

It was a crime against user experience with every fiber of its being. The game bombed so hard that Square Enix was forced to waive subscription fees completely while announcing that after going through its initial story arc, the game would shut down and relaunch in a completely rebuilt form.

(That game, FF 14: A Realm Reborn, turned out amazing and if you love MMOs you should strongly consider trying it.)

[TheKosanianMethod]

On 2/17/2016 at 6:28 PM, cantab said:

Probably something I wrote. Like those scripts that downloaded pages from a website and scraped and munged the html in order to turn the data into .csv format. Stuff took over 24 hours to chug through it all, and I still had to manually clean up column-misalignment issues because I forgot the data itself could contain commas.

As far as released software goes, the 3DS web browser. It's just godawful, the worst browser released this decade that I ever had the misfortune to try and use. The problem is it runs as a "multitasking application", you open it without closing the game, and the 3DS just does not have the hardware performance to do that acceptably.

I wish there was a browser for the 3ds that was decent. It has the hardware to,  because the Youtube app is a browser that doesn't let you out, but there is a backdoor  (a link to the Google search engine). It's just unstable.

[magnemoe]

Anything who don't have UI or at least an very minimal one. 
Its an reason why programming the first video recorders are infamous hard. 
I won an clock radio I had to trow in the garbage as I had managed to set an alarm at the middle of the night and could not find how to turn it off.  
This at least is an field who has improved