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

[Waxing_Kibbous]

On 2/18/2016 at 1:23 AM, Stargate525 said:

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.

Same here- sometimes I randomly get not one, but two confirmation pop-ups! For stuff I do ALL DAY. I would guess I probably blow through 40-50 "are you really sure you want to do that" type of pop ups a day. At a previous job, again using crappy proprietary work software, the input method was a touch screen, and there was practically a hole worn into the screen where the "yes" button popped up.

[cantab]

11 hours ago, magnemoe said:

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 

Oh yes, this too. Case in point:

A DECT repeater, basically a range extender for cordless phones, we had at the office. The sole output was a single LED. The sole input, the only way you have of configuring or resetting the device: Well have a think about the one "input method" common to all electronic devices, before you open the answer. Because that was the only input method this thing had.

Spoiler

Powering the device off and on. You had to plug it in, count seconds, unplug it, plug it back in, in order to pair it with the base station or reset it.

Yes, it took several goes and some time spent fiddling around to make it work.

[StrandedonEarth]

On 8/12/2016 at 3:51 AM, magnemoe said:

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.  

Ye gads, my sons both got the same alarm clock for xmas, with a set of really confusing multi-function buttons. It took me forever to figure out how to stop the alarms from going off at 12:00am, and I have to figure it out again every time the boys mess something up. I miss the old clocks (like in my room) with clearly labelled "time / alarm / hour / minute / sleep / snooze" buttons, that only do one thing

[insert_name]

I would say my immune system has an atrocious UI. I have to take a pill or two every day to tell it not to freak out about random stuff in the air, have to get a shot to tell it not to close my airway, and couldn't get it to stop asking for excessive amount of thyroid hormone without ingesting what was essentially refined nuclear fallout.

Edited August 14, 2016 by insert_name

[LordFerret]

The one which stands out in my mind was the Therac-25.

[Randox]

Runescape. RuneScape updated a few years back to a whole new combat and user interface system, and it's the worst combination of not being able to find the options you want, and not even knowing that certain options exist. There is a method to the madness I suppose once you are used to it, but I still find that options tend to be poorly organized. Most of them are scattered through poorly organized menu windows, while others exist entirely as little buttons in the game UI that don't have obvious connections to the UI elements that host them. It's also cluttered with a lot of the promotional stuff that currently helps fund the game with falling user count, which includes fewer paying members, and those elements aren't neatly sorted into their own thing, but infringe upon the main game UI as well.

I also worked retail for a bit for a company that was primarily a warehouse distributor, and so their system was built on warehouse management software. It made sense, since that accounted for almost the entire company, and it was great for it's intended purpose (stuff like ordering things from our other warehouses, or dealing with purchase orders was super easy), but it was something of a nightmare for point of purchase retail use, since the system just wasn't designed to rapidly process small orders, nor did it have any native ability to integrate with things like bar code readers or swipe card readers directly. Instead, we were just using those tools to input text strings into appropriate boxes directly. It was compounded by an esoteric product database full of items we hadn't carried in more than a decade and various naming schemes, so every time we had to deal with items that lacked barcodes it was an adventure. Gift cards were the worst though, since they couldn't be integrated with the system at all (I doubt the software designers ever anticipated that need), so we had to run that through a whole different program at the same time.

Edited August 19, 2016 by Randox