221 comments

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Doesn’t appear to work on my tablet… so goal 110% achieved!

Edit: oh, heck, it does work—I completely missed the obvious misdirection!

i had to view source - for a second i thought this was a notpron-ish sort of game. Then i had to look again. There's no indication that you're hovering over something.
I absolutely hated that, guess that's a success.
I feel like I've been in this experiment for the last 20 years...
I have a personal punishment policy for any obvious violation of UX/UI - they will permanently and irrevokably lose me as a customer. Even if they fix it, I won't budge. Leadership needs to use their own products and if they allow this to go to production, I wonder what they're doing behind the scenes. Small battles that I pick, but by god it is so satisfying.
So a small shop that can only pay 1 fresh bootcamp dev who is trying their hardest doesn’t get your business because they can’t keep up with several hundred Frontend google devs. Seems a little silly and absolutist.
Most horrible UX comes from too much software, not to little. If it was a single dev, they’d probably not have time to implement all the popups, dickbars, newsletter reminders, full screen interruptions, and dark patterns. Horrible UX takes large engineering effort.
It is usually the opposite - large enterprises have horrible UX than a mom & pop small shop. Furthermore, just because you're small doesn't mean you cannot fix UX of the user. I don't throw my money at them in charity or pity for being small. There are some great small businesses, and many not so great. Absolutist argument is perhaps in the point you're making.

I run a small side business with $2k/month in revenue and I damn well make sure that there are no annoyances to the user. This is standard expectation and has nothing to do with how big or small you are. We should all strive for excellence and not perpetuate mediocrity.

Regarding silliness - it would be silly to keep going to a restaurant that has rude service. That's what you're saying essentially.

It's a win-win. The small shop also can't afford to deal with this customer. Not to disparage either, but a first lesson for small businesses is that you can't chase every customer.
To be honest google makes pretty awful frontends so I'd say the small shop has an advantage here.
Eh, a very basic form can offer a solid (if ugly) user experience if you do not need too much validation.
There are levels of badness that can only be achieved through sheer talent or diligence.

Both are red flags.

"several hundred google frontend devs" are the teams that cause these atrocities
A small shop should just get a service like Squarespace or similar, not pay a dev.
I know I’m supposed to hate it, but at first glance the color scheme reminded me of NC and I … I … liked it
cannot stop laughing!
Expand in the place of the close button is the best part.
And the best part is that I clicked it twice thinking the second time would do what I wanted.
I love the double indirection on the cookie dialog. You're used to the small, unhighlighted option being the one to click to reject cookies, but here the question is asked the other way around, making the big button the one you want to click instead.
I appreciate this. I'm so sick of seeing links hit the top of HN that are utterly broken in landscape orientation because some stupid pop-up renders with the close button off-screen.
This was actually hilarious, and honestly better than half the screens I've designed :-)
Reminds me of job applications
Not enough repetitive questions. The birth date one was appropriately frustrating though!
5:59 on an iPhone, why did I do this I don’t know
love the help chat bottom right only has a increase height button.
That was hilarious i gave up at the slow scrolling cookie consent template. Thanks for the laugh !!!
Thanks for the ideas, I will be sure to implement them in my next project.
We should make this a thing. Enough with catering to user’s wishes and making everything idiot-proof :)
I was expecting the benny hill theme to eventually start playing, this is hilarious.
I rage-quitted on the third captcha
I ended up getting through by selecting them all.
The worst was the initial scroll offset. I was wondering why the last row had no checkboxes below the images, and was unable select those images. After three or four times submitting that damn dialog I noticed that I can scroll up.

I also had to scroll down the terms and conditions dialog twice because I thought I could just click the text in order to toggle the checkbox.

8 minutes and something. Very painful.

I selected them all -- on every one it looked to me like they all were the thing -- I did not pass. At least not if getting another captcha means you didn't pass.
I gave up after the 6th captcha or so. If the answer is to check them all then that's a bit dishonest, because some pictures technically don't apply. For example, glass windows are not "glasses".
"glasses" also means things that are glass. Like Pyrex and phone screens are both examples of glasses.
That's true, hadn't thought of that.
It’s so bad I didn’t want to go past the 2nd page.
A complement actually
I got the fuck out after i clicked "no"
I laughed at various points. well done.
I cant stop laughing trying to fill out forms.
How do I get past this?

> Your password is not unsafe

You may need to add a cyrillic character...
that means its fine (not unsafe is safe)
I wasn't getting through because my domain was "domain". When I changed it to "gmail" it was fine.
There's nothing to get past. Your password is not unsafe, which is what you want, you're good. Just click next.
(comment deleted)
One past thread:

User Inyerface – A worst-practice UI experiment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20344565 - July 2019 (255 comments)

Oh my nerves... what a stresstest.
Well...I did it...somehow...I did...

00:06:57

That seems too fast...apparently i've experienced these things far too much. It actually was filling me with rage. I came close to saying fuck it...I really did...

Well done to the creators...you managed to, with 100% accuracy, capture every single thing that's horrible about signing up to websites.

That bow thing though...gotta admit, was worth it just for the chuckle I got as I realized...

I nearly quit when it said "your age and birthdate don't match". Glad I got through because the bow and check also gave me a laugh.
I absolutely expected that. Having both birthdate and age was the Chekhov's gun on that form.

The only thing better would be to have them on different form pages.

And the form clears every time you go back/forward
I expected that one, but somehow got the gender wrong. I hate those radio selects!
i did in 4:33 -- it was fun!

https://i.imgur.com/RiHmKZM.png

You and I have very different definitions of fun! I got annoyed when it asked me for a profile picture and I just closed it.
(comment deleted)
Same! Closed it on profile picture. Then saw people mentioning "bow" in the comments, so I had to find out what it is. Worst possible way start a day.
I saw the bow thing in the comments too, but I can't understand what it is even though I completed the form!
It was one of the captcha forms at the end. It used a clever play on words.
I got 6 minutes and 7 seconds, half of which I think I spent trying to figure out the capcha.

Also, if you got to the capcha and got it on the first try, go back and fail it a few times. They have some really clever ones.

I bailed on the captcha after 3 tries. It was infuriating, which is my experience with real captchas more often than I'd like to admit.
I sometimes save the good ones to disk just to laugh a bit more later.
My favorite CAPTCHAs are when they don't state whether they're case-sensitive or not and it's hard to tell whether some characters are uppercase or lowercase.
6 minutes? Seriously? You guys must be pretty motivated.

I gave up after about 30s. I'd probably have given up after 60s, even if there was a prize at the end (e.g. being registered). I rebel violently when confronted by a UI crime-scene like that. I'm feeling ill after just two pages of that form.

Wait you can advance beyond page 1?
Same question. My password wasn't unsafe. Abcdefghij1 seemed unsafe to me.
You have to scroll down to see the other condition to make your password safe.
Are you on mobile? I cannot see arrival requirements
The "password isn't unsafe" isn't actually a problem. All the other conditions are.
Is that time including reading the terms or without?
00:33:39—Jury is out on whether that’s a good or bad thing...
That deserves a medal just for the incredible amount of inhuman patience that must have taken.

That's just an insane level of perseverance.

> Well done to the creators...you managed to, with 100% accuracy, capture every single thing that's horrible about signing up to websites.

Oh no no no. For an authentic experience it needs to reload the page and wipe out all forms when you click 'next' and one of the fields is not valid. (And of course reloading the page should take at least five seconds.)