Hey I’m Dave, welcome to my shop! I’m Dave Plummer, retired operating system engineer
from Microsoft going back to the MS-DOS and Windows 95 days. Most of my career at Microsoft
was spent on the Windows Shell team, which means I was one of the folks behind the pieces that you
interact with each and every day: the start menu, desktop, explorer, task manager, all of that.
I was a shell developer, but I was not a shell designer. I got to play the role of one on TV a
few times when no one else was available to fill the part, with infamous results like the Windows
Format dialog. The only one I’m a little proud of is Task Manager, which I designed the UI for
because I started the project independently. In other words, it was an unofficial one-man effort
for long enough that by the time it actually mattered, the design was sort of baked in. So,
if you want to know what my design sensibilities are, take a look at the Windows XP Task Manager.
Let’s be kind and call it an eminently practical and efficient user interface.
It does a lot of stuff and I think it does it in a discoverable way yet without overwhelming the
user on the front page. There were two great sins in the original, though, and both were my fault.
The first was that I followed the lead set by other Windows NT utilities like the clock
that allowed you to remove the window frame by double-clicking the non-client area.
In the days of 800x600, screen real estate was valuable, and this allowed you to use less of
it. But if you accidentally double-clicked without knowing how this worked, your Task
Manager would suddenly look very different and there’d be no menus or help to get you back. So,
it was a precedent that I absolutely should have abandoned instead of following.
The other problem was the large 7-segment LED display I cooked up for memory and CPU. I’ve
long held a soft spot for 7-segment LEDs, probably since I first saw them on a pinball machine or my
grandfather’s calculator in the 1970s. And thus, I emulated their look and style, which I thought
was kind of cool, but it doesn’t localize well into Japanese or Arabic, for example.
In those days localization of Windows used to be done separately, like there was an entire
team called NT-J working on Japanese Windows. It’s not like that anymore,
it’s now a unified codebase, and they’ve long since abandoned my disco-era display digits.
But I am most assuredly not a shell designer, let alone an artist of any sort. Fortunately,
that doesn’t cause my any angst because I don’t have any pretentions to being one, really. Oh,
that’s not to say that I didn’t have opinions on how a user interface should look and work.
In the meetings of the 90s I held them strongly and expressed them vocally,
sometimes whether asked or not.
I remember one time having an argument with a program manager about some UI issue.
They wanted to dumb down a piece of system user interface at the cost of actually removing what
I felt was important functionality. As a nerd, I always want all the features and all the options.
I want them well organized and so on, but never taken away for the sake of simplification.
I think removing functionality is almost always bad, at least to people like me.
So, I fought what I thought was the good fight. And when he ultimately dropped the mic on me by
pointing out that the design was his job, after all, I responded with a considerable flex: “Yeah,
but I know the where the code lives.” The clear implication, of course, was that I would just
change it back if he prevailed. So yeah… it could be a pretty tough place to work back in the 90s.
And let’s just say I’m a lot more self-aware these days. If you want to know why,
check out my book in the video description! It’s full of stories like that. Sadly, I don’t
remember who it was now, but I think my favorite PM Joseph was in the room and I bet he does. So,
if you’re watching, Joe, let me know where I should send the flowers!
In any event, I’ve long since abandoned any pretension to user interface design
when it involves artistic and aesthetic decisions of pretty much any significance.
But I’m still consider my opinion to be an expert one, just from hanging around with good designers
and watching them work for decades. Now that doesn’t mean I could do what they do, just that
I can appreciate it when they’ve done their job very well. So, a good user interface to me is like
pornography is to the supreme court: they can’t define it, they just know it when they see it!
That’s why today I’m going to take you through a parade of some of the worst user interface designs
and, in many cases, real implementations. In the old days you had to at least write an application
to even have a user interface, but the web has now democratized access to bad decisions for everyone.
But it wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t pick on myself a little too, which is why I’m going
to show you the worst dialog I ever put in a Microsoft operating system.
I almost guarantee that you’ve never seen it before, and trust me, it’s one you never,
ever, want to see for real, because if you do its Game over. Data loss. Shut it down and power off,
cats and dogs living together, the works. But more on that later!
Now, before we dive into all the examples of bad user interface, though, a quick word about
subscribing. I was watching Tech Moan, a wonderful YouTube channel that I also support on Patreon,
and he pointed out that many of his own viewers, and even Patrons like myself,
never actually subscribe. After all, YouTube is usually pretty good about suggesting his other
videos one you’re in the habit of watching them, so it seems that there’s little need.
If you find yourself in a similar situation, where you wind up watching my content but aren’t
actually subscribed to the channel, please, please do take a second right now to find that Subscribe
button and click on it to sub to Dave’s Garage. It really helps my YouTube metrics and the little
dopamine burst I get when you do it is very much appreciated! And that way you won’t miss it when
I go off on some technical tangent that YouTube doesn’t immediately recognize as being related!
back in bad ui land most of the others come from submissions collected and organized by a
person uh over at board panda i'd love to say her name but i can't so i'm gonna
put her here that's right i even pm'd her on facebook to ask is her name pronounced
anywhere that i could go and learn it because i don't want to massacre it so
yeah text will have to do for today anyway they showcase a combination of truly horrible real
designs from actual websites as well as what ifs composed by sadistic would-be designers they're
sort of intermingled though so if you want to know the source for a particular example check the
video description for a link to the compilation we'll start down at the bottom and work our way
up to the best of the worst pausing only to stop at noteworthy ones along the way and stay
tuned after the compilation for the worst of the worst my own dialogue that i promised you earlier
here's a hint it has only one button and a staff valley not okay or cancel all right let's
drop into the browser now so i can skim through the top contenders in the bad dialogue contest
all right here we are and these are not all winners so i'm going to just kind of skim through
them i've done a little quick pass so most of them are actually new to me as we get higher up but
i went through to kind of eliminate some
of these so bear with me as i skim through to show you the better ones
there we go um this one's kind of cute it's a fidget spinner to adjust your system
volume spin it one way to increase spend it the other way to decrease
so we took the time to actually write the thing too which is kind of funny a slider for entering
your phone number now if you can imagine this is probably one of the top five painful ones in here
kind of like what ui would be like if you were in hell so it wouldn't work because there's probably
what 400 pixels tops here on the slider and you've got 10 digits of phone numbers to deal with so
yeah not going to actually practically work but it will be enough to drive you crazy if you try
nope nope this one is kind of cute because it looks like it's real or at least somebody
coded the whole thing because if you click through and it's a twitter post and it goes to an actual
website so the the vanity here is that there are three dropdowns each with a thousand and then a
thousand and then ten thousand entries in each of these drop-downs that you have to sort through in
order to find your phone number and compose it it's something that a real novice web designer
might do with a tool but you would not type in all 10 000 entries i can assure you that
now this one i will show you only because i'm obligated as a plumber to show you any
plumbing related ui and this is of course a flushing system where the
volume builds up and then you flush to drain it and you can double flush in order to mute
it's something all right enter your phone number and ascii values now i actually know my phone
number and ascii values so to you probably because all you have to do is add 48 to each one of your
digits because 48 is the offset of zero in the ascii character set so if your phone number like
mine starts with a three then you would have 51 as your first digit of ascii for your phone number
still be a painful way to enter it though this one is uh i don't know why it's art let's let's
call it art so you use pac-man in order to eat all the dots that are not your phone number so
it's kind of like drawing a picture or carving an elephant by removing everything that doesn't
look like an elephant you remove all the dots to leave the digits of your phone number and
then it adds it to your number and then you click submit i don't know again this is a reference to
age of empires minecraft i have no idea
yeah i don't gain much i mean if it's not geometry wars or tempest i don't get it
now this actually strikes me as something that you could almost imagine making it in in like nt31
from maybe a third party isv or something on a control panel applet page
but i feel like i've seen horrible stuff like this i've never seen 100 radio buttons together but uh
i can imagine it i don't think i'd ever do it but i can imagine it
tetris anyone i like that click here to generate a phone number click here to dial the generated
number to check if it's your phone number this one's kind of interesting in that it
seems real you can click through and it's live on the web it's not at a united airlines
property right now but it claims to be united airlines whether it ever was and was kind of a
tongue-in-cheek thing i have no idea it could have been but i like the little animations
so just lock your phone number it starts at zero zero zero zero zero and then it
war dials every number possible and asks you if your phone is ringing
uh so the volume slowly drifts down and then you have to pump up the jam in order to keep it going
uh here we go the digits rapidly cycle and then you have to click on it and get it quickly enough
in order to get your number right then if you get any digits wrong you have to restart
game a snake that you would get more challenging as you add digits right so it crashes here but as
you go through and you add this to your phone number the snake gets longer each time and
gets more and more challenging yahtzee yahtzee's actually more entertaining than that it's actually
pretty cool for a game that comes with like five or six dice and a cup and some rules a good way
to spend some time on a rainy time at the cottage or something i guess but uh here we go how many
digits of pie three point one four one five nine two six five three two six three gone two six five
i may not know pi as far as i thought because it looks like i'm wrong but one four one five nine
two six three five i don't know i'll look it up later now this is like the horrible data entry
thing you can do in the mercedes s class i believe where you can spell numbers and letters out
on the console mouse pad thing pretty weird solve the polynomial for your phone number
your phone number in binary so this is very similar to doing the ascii and then you convert
the ascii into binary this is only kind of entertaining to me especially at the moment
because my daughter for christmas gave me a card and the card was always binary and everybody
looked at me like come on computer boy read the card aloud so i was looking at the letters or the
you know groups of eighth digits and i realized that well the first and second and then two are
repeated and i realize oh that's like hello probably because i was looking through the
digits and i figured out that e was the second letter and so i was sure that was hello but
then when i went on i had a space and then c i was like hello c i'm like chris who is this
um merry christmas once i got a little further down but it took it took a few minutes so reading
and writing binary not trivial i mean it is but not if you haven't done it in a while
this impresses me because somebody either wrote an entire game or modified extensively to get
it as a mechanism for setting your phone number by setting the order in which you sync the balls
so this one picks a phone number for you calls that number asks you if your phone
is ringing and if not suggest that you call the phone company and change
your phone number to be the number it was trying to call it would in theory work after all
uh total eclipse would be a hundred percent and then partial eclipse would be or half of this
would be fifty percent but you would think it'd be hard to get close to a hundred exactly right
do they ever get close to a 100
no no actually they don't even
girling for the canadians in the various scandinavians and i don't know what accent this is
i wish they would have done the animation a little further
i mean you could actually have the numbers closest to the center reading outwards and
that would be the order in which your phone number was set huge opportunity wasted
i don't get this one you're gonna be mad if i don't stop on the rick astley one you're
gonna think i'm rick rollins or something but we have adjusted volume based on your latitude
i guess that's some insider castle joke that i don't get
it took me a second for this one too what's going on and it's a horizontal slider within the
super tall aspect ratio of the volume control so instead of going up and down it goes left to right
dragon dots around to spell your phone number not my thing now we're talking it's space invaders and
breakouts just think of this would always work is this guaranteed to always have the
number available like if you called or could you lock yourself out yeah you can
you can hide numbers and this may not
they would have to generate them accurately right you couldn't just randomize all nine
digits in there in each row because the number you need may not be above the one you
have to pick in the row below it so that's my first take anyway
please make a noise as loud as you would like the volume to be
that makes sense and everybody will know exactly what's coming because
you've just screamed in the office if you're going to play a lot of music
ah yes the window crank i've got a couple older vehicles myself
couple 69 pontiacs which are both power windows 70 gmc which is crank windows
so the first time my kids ever wrote in it they were always blown away by these crank windows
and i think ellen does a bit on this is probably 10 years old so i don't even know if it's true
anymore but at that time still the universal symbol for rolled on your window is to pull up and
do this but what the hell does that even mean but i mean you can't just pull up and go maybe
people do that now i have no idea but this is a window crank for raising and lowering your volume
all right this i appreciate tippy volume control
like the little games you got as a kid where you like get the ball into the right place
also known as a ball level probably now the beauty of this is this is a real user interface
right this is the rotary dial telephone this is what we had in my house for my entire life until
i moved out in my early 20s because my dad had cerebral palsy and he had become accustomed to
dialing with that mechanism and it was easier for him than dealing with the rather sensitive
by comparison touchpad on a touchdown phone so we kept that phone as the main house phone
and i had a friend whose dad worked at sastel the phone company and he had a vanity phone
number as part of the perk of working there i guess and it was like mostly zeros and you just
didn't want to call anybody like that because it took so long to dial these huge swaths of zeros
it sounds silly now but you didn't want to call twice in a row that's for sure
what's going on here let's see
angry birds launch the ball and where it lands is your new volume all right you ready for number one
here we go the number one most annoying user interface example which is incrementing your
phone number starting at zero with a single plus button and a submit button
is this the worst of the worst we'll compare it to my own in one moment
okay with those out of the way i can turn my attention to the worst of my own creations
remember i've been doing this for a while now but my worst dialogue comes about from my very first
microsoft product that i worked on ms-dos i was writing smartdrive 4.0 adding some features like
cd-rom caching and so on i was working on write back disk caching or some aspect of it when i had
to confront the operating system developers worst nightmare user data loss because there is a rare
case where data you think you've already saved cannot then actually be written out to the disk
back when most computers still had hard drive lights even under ms-dos it was common to
save your work and then wait a few seconds before rebooting or turning off the computer
this was done so that the disk could finish flushing or lazy writing any sectors that
were still in the cache waiting to be saved as it were if the power went out in those few seconds
you'd lose data just the same but somehow it's worse when it's computer's own fault
and that happens when there's a disk right here you save your work you get it to leave and then
this dialog pops up in your face serious disk air a serious disk here has occurred while writing to
the drive ms-dos was unable to finish writing data to the disk press retry to try again and
you got a retry button so what's so insidious about this dialogue well primarily the fact
that you only get that one option retry as far as i know it's the only dialogue in all of microsoft
systems that leaves you just hanging with a single option there truly is nothing else that can really
be done at this point but the odds that a retry will ever succeed are infinitesimal so basically
you're going to spend the rest of your days hitting retry or you're going to power cycle
the computer and start over data loss or not either way it's a good time to be looking at
a full pass of good old scan disk now i don't have any patreons and i'm not selling anything
i'm just in this for the subs and likes so if you enjoyed this episode i'd be very grateful
if you consider leaving me one of each before you go thanks for joining me out here in the
shop today in the meantime in between time i hope to see you next time right here in dave's garage
so
yachty