Unforgivable Sins of UI Design

[KingRoyal]

This is more UX than UI and may also represent a glitch in their system

Friend sent me a gift subscription to Current Affair's newsletter on Substack. However, despite me having told him multiple times that I no longer use my gmail account and given him my personal email, he sent it to my gmail account. Go over to substack and find that I can transfer the subscription over to my current email, so that's what I do

At this, Substack then logs me out of the account it had created for me. So I attempt to login on my other email, which triggers a one-time use email to login. Except click it takes me to a sign up page where it asks for my name and a valid email address, despite getting to this page from the email address they sent the link to

When I fill out the information, it informs me that my email currently has an account and sends me a login link again (a security flaw) and when I click on that link it takes me back to the exact same signup page. Repeat until heat death of the universe

I did eventually get the system to send me a password reset link, so I reset the password and can use that to login but does not actually log me in, just kicks me back out to the login page without any kind of error message. Now I click on the Help link to go to their help desk and get stuck on a page from Substack making sure my "connection is secure" and I'm wondering "why are you checking this for your helpdesk that should be on https anyway" but it never does load and also it's really just a FAQ and will definitely not have the solution to my unique problem

Anyway, I bounced over to Chrome and it all worked so I'm guessing this is a Firefox unique problem and while I appreciate my friend's gift I really fucking hate Substack

[KingRoyal]

Okay the problem is that I had Bypass Paywalls on which, fair

[KingRoyal]

It's 2023 add a show/hide password button I'm tired of having to delete and re-enter my entire password because I might have double tapped a key

[Thad]

Manually typing a password?

I hope it's to open your password locker.

[KingRoyal]

That it is, and my password is like 25 characters long if I fudge something it is a pain in the ass. Though, I'm still using Lastpass because I'm too lazy to convert to something else, which is also a security problem inandofitself

Also have to enter a password into my work laptop where I have to change the password every 3 months and as a result have started appending more and more variations of "42069" to my already long password

[Thad]

Something went wrong in my calendar app so that everything in the homescreen widget is now showing one day early. (If I open the app to edit, everything is in the correct place; it's just the widget that's wrong.)

Funnily enough the fuzzy dates are correct too.

At the top of the widget it says "Tue Oct 17" and then right below that the first entry is "Tomorrow, Tue, Oct 17".

[Joxam]

Yeah I don't know date shit is weird sometimes. My car sets the clock and date every time you start the engine by updating over wireless but for some fucking reason the date is always a day off and there is no way to change it manually.

[Thad]

So it turns out the reason I was getting weird syntax errors when I tried to run curl from PowerShell is that MS, in its infinite wisdom, decided to alias "curl" (and also "wget") to a program called Invoke-Webrequest that has a similar function but completely different syntax.

Presumably they decided to do this before they started bundling curl as a built-in program included with Windows, but it's still stupid as fuck, and now that curl is bundled with Windows it has the delightful result that if you type "curl" into a cmd window it calls a different command than if you type it into a powershell window.

[Thad]

Baby monitor has a disclaimer so that every time you turn it on it warns you not to put it somewhere where the baby can strangle themselves with the cord and I just turned it on and it fucking woke my baby up and I am pretty fucking unhappy with this design decision!

[Thad]

If you're using a shared mailbox in Outlook, and you delete a message, it moves it to the Deleted Items folder in your personal mail account instead of the one on the shared account.

[Mongrel]

Wow... That's an impressive one.

Whyyyyyyyy MS, whyyyyyyyyy

[Büge]

sometimes people need blackmail

[Thad]

Oh good, the Thunderbird devs have decided search engines have the right idea and search should return shit that's not what I fucking asked for.

No, asshole, I searched for teams. I am looking for a fucking Microsoft Teams meeting. I do not want results for "team", singular; if I did, I would have fucking searched for that.

Oh, putting it in quotation marks doesn't change the results in any way? Awesome!

Okay, let me just look for hearing, so I can find e-mails related to my upcoming court hearing oh god dammit.

[Thad]

It is not helpful when a machine uses the same beep for multiple kinds of notifications.

The baby's bottle warmer uses the same beep to indicate "done warming the bottle" as "out of water, you need to refill it to finish". This occasionally results in our hearing the chime, waiting a few minutes to get the bottle, and then pulling it out only to realize it's cold and we're going to have to refill the tank and wait several more minutes before it's ready.

I realize this is simple electronics, but it should still be possible to vary the pitch or the length of the beep to indicate different states. Hell, it's got a digital clock across the front of it; "FILL" is a word you can spell out with just a 4-digit digital clock face.

And last week my car wouldn't start so I borrowed my grandparents' minivan to take my dog to the vet (she's okay but has a toe injury; my car is also okay, it just needed a new battery). And I found that it uses the same chime for "don't change lanes right now, you've got someone in your blind spot" and "your dog is not wearing a seatbelt."

I mean really it shouldn't be indiscriminately nagging me based on a weight sensor in the passenger seat in the first fucking place, but given that it does, it shouldn't use a sound that I can mistake for information about driving conditions.

[nosimpleway]

If I haven't bitched about my car having a "hey, it's kinda chilly" sensor tone that goes off whenever it's less than forty degrees, I'd like to bitch about it. I really have more important things to do when driving than have something demand my attention to acknowledge that there might, in another ten degrees, be ice on the road. But yes now that you mention it it does sound exactly the same as other indicators like low tire pressure or the check-engine light coming on.

[Grath]

And I found that it uses the same chime for "don't change lanes right now, you've got someone in your blind spot" and "your dog is not wearing a seatbelt."

I have a dog leash that clips into the seatbelt buckle, which I mainly use to keep it from nagging me when I have a dog riding shotgun.

[Büge]

Did Youtube get rid of the search filters function or is it just me

[Thad]

God dammit, more than 15 years on it still boggles my mind how much the fucking ribbon interface obfuscates functionality that I could easily find back when shit had menubars.

Why is it so hard to search for text in an e-mail in Outlook? Ctrl-F is fucking Forward. Right clicking the body of an e-mail and then clicking Search pulls up fucking Bing for some fucking reason. The magnifying glass in the toolbar adjusts the zoom level. If you want to search, you have to click the other, smaller magnifying glass icon on the same fucking menu.

Two magnifying glass icons. With completely different functions. On the same fucking menu.

What happens in a person's life that makes them do something like that?

[Mongrel]

I dunno, but I bet it involves several layers of multiple interleaved bosses.

[Thad]

I dunno, but I bet it involves several layers of multiple interleaved bosses.

"They look the same but they're pointed in opposite directions" does feel like a metaphor for something.