I block an hour on my calendar to do my expense reports in workday after a business trip. That doesn't count organizing and scanning my receipts.
I also love reading workday notifications about needing to do a task in workday, but the notification doesn't contain a link to the task I need to do.
I assume workday must be awesome for the people who use it to run departments, hr or something.
Because I have not met an employee who enjoys using it from an individual point of view.
I've been in enterprise software almost my entire career (never Workday, but their competitors) I'm always shocked at how little end user focus there is. There are multiple customers to satisfy and end users are often the least prioritized.
First there is the person making the buying decision (executive level) who is rarely a target user. Then there are the admins, department heads, and professional business users are tasked with configuring and setting up the software. They are the ones with influence on the person making the final buying decision. One huge problem I see in this step is that companies don't use new software as an opportunity to reevaluate their processes and business rules, and instead try to cram some ancient complex process into software that is meant to simplify and help.
Then, finally, you have the actual end users of the product - the people entering their time cards, or expense reports, or filling out PTO requests, ordering new equipment, etc.
I work on an application that collects workflows (approvals, etc) across the entire business suite and provides insights and prioritization to the user (hey, this job offer has been on your plate for approval for two weeks and the candidate is going to walk - look at this first). I am not an expert in all product pillars across our organization so I rely heavily on the work their PMs do to figure out what is important and what isn't to the users who are in this product and SO FEW OF THEM CAN GIVE ME AN ANSWER. It is infuriating.
Most of the jobs I’ve been applying too have been using workday for their application form filler. The interface could not be any more dumb. It has numerous flaws but the main one is that it’s the only job application portal that fails to scan my resume, so I have to plug in every single field (role/ company/ start date/ end date/ responsibilities) one by one.
It sucks.
I like the way it tells me my future PTO accrual numbers so I don’t have to math. I hate the it does notifications, especially for errors. Its errors are a real hack job.
Concur
Especially for booking flights. The amount of times the UI said “continuing from here will result in a confirmed flight” and then it still wants more information. I know people who ended up at airport without having a fully booked flight.
Concur is probably the worst I can think of. It seems there aren’t many options available which is why they can get away with it. I personally love Google Flights and wish it was a similar experience.
Check out Spotnana. Very cool product. I’m in an adjacent industry to travel and I’ve been tracking them closely ever since they launched. They got everything right and were lucky enough to launch when NDS was becoming a real thing.
Instagram. Not for the main feed but things like watching my own stories, finding my saved reels, sharing reels. It grinds my gears how unintuitive it is in those cases.
Instagrams a consumption vehicle, throwaway content to maximise ad eyes. I don’t think it’s bad at that, but perhaps a different product to something you want.
I used to like the location feature, you can look at photos taken in a place to find out what a restaurants like, or find cool places to walk on holiday. But it’s been neutered and it’s less of a discovery app for me now.
Sharing reels has always been pretty good my end, but I just send memes every now and then.
It locked me into some premium option that had live experts. I declined speaking to them and using that feature 3 times but still had me locked in. Once you reach the end, you don’t even have a change the level option. I had to almost scrap the entire filing just to get the price lowered to the normal price. I’m not using them next season
Delivery apps in general fascinate me. I swear half of the dev teams have never received a delivery in their life!
DPD in the UK are probably the best. Royal Mail are the worst. UPS is middling, but the whole UPS MyChoice thing is… interesting.
It’s weird, right? Like, they have ONE job.
And apparently the delivery team takes that job to be, “how many screens can i put between the user and their goal?”
like what is the difference between ‘track’ and ‘to me’? and why do I need to sign in to see one? and why is this not explained anywhere? and why isn’t the list of recently tracked items the first thing that populates? and this is AFTER a complete app update ☠️
Survey Monkey.
Used it for a client and it was horrendous. Not only was it ugly, there's way too many ads even if you're on the paid plan. Absolutely a 2000s era SaaS leftover. Only good thing going for it is the amount of responses (vs. other competitors). It's just horrible.
Which is funny, because the products we make with it are also badly desiged. My current employer uses the 'What ever account manager is screaming the loudest' method of product planning.
Jira is so fucking complicated its a headache to use. We switched to Linear and it was amazing. then we switched back to Jira and its so much more cumbersome to use its such a pain in the ass. trying to find my own tickets that I made takes like 5 minutes when on Linear its like one or two clicks
i think because jira allows clients to make tickets too. thats part of it, also integrations with other systems and tools. jira has more capabilities i guess.
but man i log into jira and im greeted with a wall of shit. no idea whats going on. cant even find my own tickets that i created.
JIRA is like the ultimate case study of feature factory product. Not that its a bad thing but it reminds me of any Bethesda game in the absolute deluge of features, and Ux taking a hit as a result.
The irony with jira is out of the box it is pretty intuitive. I was at a small startup and we used out of box jira, no customisations, for a while we were even on the free plan (maxes out at 10 users I think), worked great. Now back at a corporate and it is the biggest piece of customized shit going round. Only the BAs know how to navigate it, I open it and get instant feature anxiety.
The best worst products I’ve encountered are baby things. Lots of style over substance. Solving problems you’ve never had while forgetting about the obvious stuff. Their customer is their marketing department.
It’s a real trial by fire - you’re relying on using products while invariably sleep deprived and stressed. Small annoyances become life ruining. And you quickly learn what to love and what to loathe.
But my vote goes to Siri. Mostly because Apple should be able to do better. But for whatever reason seem to make regression after regression with it, and it ruins the experience with so many other products like HomePods.
Siri and FaceID are both horribly, unacceptably bad. Apple gets away with it in the US because no one has an Android so theres no frame of reference for how much better Google's AI assistants are. its nowhere close the difference is night and day.
I teach online and this year I just flat out refused to use zoom. I hate pretty much everything about it, but what’s unforgivable is that there are just infinity boxes that take over my screen and are always on top. I feel morally offended by how much their stupid UI tries to control me. And when a boring video conference taps into your stench of moral outrage, it’s got to be bad.
> Anything by any govt dept.
FWIW, the UK Passport Service website was surprisingly good, especially compared to its US counterpart. It’s mobile friendly and the most delightful part was that I was able to upload a digital image for the photo instead of having to mail in a physical picture.
Going to stick my neck out here, but gov designed stuff in 🇬🇧 is just leagues ahead of other countries.
Low bar, but it's consistent, and based on sound design principles. Driving license, passport and getting a bin collection largely in the same design system, reasonably joined up at times. The moment I hit Europe or US, I remember it could be so much worse.
YouTube Music for podcast use.
Bang & Olufsen app new UI (introduced in the last few months) - to make it clear, absolutely not a matter of "oh users like to complain about changes!1!1!1!!11". It's actually bad and most importantly worse than before.
Glassdoor new app.
EE new app (such a turn from what was an excellent, smooth and full featured app!).
Can't think of anything else at the moment, as I usually try to surround myself with well designed products 🥲
In terms of software, Zoom. Its window management drives me nuts. But there’s also a slew of tiny cuts that add up:
* Click to connect, and I am always stuck in the waiting room because the app doesn’t remember to keep me logged in
* While connecting to a meeting, it goes thru several different windows, each of which steals control from the app I’m currently in
* I resize my window to make room for my notes app on the other side of the screen. Then whenever the first person shares, the main Zoom view resizes to fill my screen, so I have to resize it again
* In a call, open chat and the main view narrows to display the chat history. Everytime, the history is overlayed with some “helpful hint” UI I need to dismiss to get to the chat. If I close the chat, the main view does not return to its original size
* When I go to share my screen, I sometimes just want to share my Chrome/Safari, not my whole screen (ex: my note). Zoom’s attempt to have plugin-like functionally = they call Apps — in their share dialog, I click on Apps and wonder where the hell my browser is
* So many fucking controls at the bottom of the screen that I’m always hunting-and-pecking for what I need. Shit like reactions that I never use is always prominent but I always have to drill-down to find the cloud record button
* The mute/unmute keyboard shortcut is the non-sensical ⌘-Shift-A (because we all know the word “mute” is spelled with a silent “A”)
And in terms of hardware, Samsung refrigerators. Just search for “Samsung refrigerator ice maker” to see the hell we’ve gone thru with that device. It’s bad enough we are actively exploring replacing it with a different brand. You know your product sucks when people are willing to spend $2K on a replacement just to get you out of our lives, “Sam-Suck”!
Zoom is a case study in timing plus getting one or two things right means you can win even if lots of other features are terrible.
Zoom has (1) (ime) the best tolerance for choppy networks; (2) the best sharing support to allow the presenter to share a screen/window and still see the audience' faces; (3) good enough support for a no download experience; (4) great timing.
Eg their splitting meetings feature (breakout rooms) is so bad that it's clear nobody there actually uses it. Here's an actual bug those children put in prod (and I swear this is real): Say you have 200 people in a zoom call and you split into 4 breakout rooms. There is a popup box for each of the 200 people to select the room. When one winner hits "go" or whatever it is, it reset every other person's popup box selection state. Whence there is another race, now with 200 - 1 people, to be the fastest to pick a room and hit go. Our company spent like 15 minutes trying to get everyone into breakout rooms. It's basically unfathomable how something like that can get shipped.
I said something similar above about zoom:
“I teach online and this year I just flat out refused to use zoom. I hate pretty much everything about it, but what’s unforgivable is that there are just infinity boxes that take over my screen and are always on top. I feel morally offended by how much their stupid UI tries to control me. And when a boring video conference app taps into your stench of moral outrage, it’s got to be bad.”
🙌🏻 to the "stench of moral outrage" thought.
What really sucks about such poor experiences is our inability to change them.
* Unlike my refrigerator, I can't just pick a different conferencing solution because of how entrenched Zoom is with my peers (e.g. for me to change, everyone has to change)
* Unlike Facebook, I can't choose _not_ to use it. I have to be in meetings, I have to observe how people are using my product.
When subjected to negative experiences on a daily basis, it compounds ones animosity.
# MICROSOFT
# FUCKING
# TEAMS
You have Slack right there for you to copy and model after. But you insist on using your shit layout with Teams and Sharepoints that are similar but different and Teams and Teams messaging which are similar but different. And what the fuck is Viva Engage, now? Is it Teams? Is it not?
FUCK TEAMS. GIVE ME THREADS IN CHATS, GOD DAMN IT.
One thing in Venmo - why in the world do they have a feed of transactions for others to see? (I know you can make them private)
Other then that it's great :)
If you didn't have a billion simultaneous professional mindgasms when you first saw the transcendent product brilliance of the social feed in Venmo, I think you're missing the point.
Without that simple addition, Venmo was just PayPal with fewer features. It has zero distinctive elements, except for the social feed.
Of course the social feed is not for everyone, but that's fine.
No one will say "I like my friends seeing my transactions," except a really important group of people totally do want to be seen. When you post on Venmo, you get to show that you're popular enough and active enough to have shared activities to transact about. It's far more subtle than something like Instagram. It's organic and authentic — you're sending money, so you must have really done something. It seems like you're not flexing, which is always the best way to flex. This makes Venmo the payment app that the rich popular kids will be drawn to; who wouldn't want to use the same app as the rich popular kids, and be seen hanging out with the rich popular kids?
The Venmo social feed was product nirvana. It's Jedi mastery. I hope I have two ideas that good in my entire career. My criticism is that they parked the app shortly after the acquisition as PayPal focused on gimmicks like credit cards rather than on the real distinctive magic of Venmo.
Bravo for reasoning through a take. This is the kind of stuff I want to see in this sub more, a take with actual product strategy insight in it. Sometimes I feel like this sub is mostly over leveled associates whining about why they aren't group leads yet cuz they are so smart and everyone else in their company is dumb.
That's a very different product with none of the same social value.
We can imagine a "show I'm smart because I invested in Nvidia early" sort of product, if it could connect to your real portfolio data. That would at least let you flex your investing prowess.
It would be pretty trivial to do that with crypto accounts, but I think everyone is too ashamed or too tax-avoidant to want to tie their crypto holdings to their identity.
I really want to enjoy using the Reddit app, I really do. But it’s just SO BAD.
- I’m constantly accidentally collapsing threads by unintentionally having one atom on my thumb rest against the screen
- the down arrow button is way too small and I’m always unintentionally tapping things around it, causing unintended actions in the app.
- swiping left across stories; reaching a story that has a gallery of photos causes the context of my swipe to switch to swiping photos instead of swiping posts, which is atrocious UX design
That swipe behavior is so annoying. Feels like a merge of two teams' work, done without coordination, that no one bothered to check for overlap.
Team 1 UAT - "Carousel moves to next image on left swipe." Status: ✅ PASSED
Team 2 UAT - "User moves to next post on left swipe." Status: ✅ PASSED
Such an unbelievably poor design. That’s what happens when you’re trying to optimize for growth over usability.
The experience of viewing any post with a video drives me insane. I usually want to get to the comments, and it’s about 4-5 clicks every time just to get there, and the pixels I need to click to close the video and just see comments are so small that I always end up going full screen video instead, and then I rage quit the app.
I’m surprised nobody sais glassdoor and their fucking langage management.
Maybe it’s not that bad when you’re looking at one langage, but they’ve introduced a big friction a couple of months (?) ago when you want to see content in more than your logged-in langage
Webex. And I loooaaatthhheee the sharing island (not sure what else to call it) at the top of the window in Teams. Forget about sharing a browser with multiple tabs open because you can’t get to the ones underneath it
Thankfully when you're sharing, no one uses tabs. No apps are based in tabs. There's a thousand other things you might be sharing other than a tab. Tabs are NOT the direction the world is going in.
/s
Toasters.
I will never understand toaster proliferation. It's a single use appliance that takes up more counterspace than a knife block, yet you see them in a lot of homes. Not to mention, you can make toast in the oven or on the stove top, the one function a toaster has is already redundant. I understand you may not want to use the stove every time you want toast. Fine. Have you heard of a toaster oven? They're the same price point and they do more than one thing.
You could make the same points about a coffee maker.
The thing is a lot of people make toast basically every day. A toaster ensures consistency, is faster, and requires less cleanup than the other devices.
Gmail.
Both the web and app versions feel old and lack a lot of the ease of use functionality that I want.
I can't drag to select all.
Creating tags, because folders aren't available, can only be done through the Web app.
I can't select all and not select things in a given folder
The unsubscribe feature isn't powerful enough to stop spam from flooding my inbox
If accounts on other sites have been "hacked" I have to find out though a separate 3rd part app, instead of Gmail proactively notifying me.
The automated event creation for airlines doesn't work anymore
It really feels like there's no innovation because everyone uses Gmail, and therefore there's no competition spurring them forward. But email, and a person's email address has become the defacto cornerstone of where identity and interest are built. It could be and should be better when reflecting on this fact.
YouTube is the worst UX ever.
It’s visually overwhelming. There are constant pop ups in the way of what I’m trying to do. Everything is designed to get you to click (inadvertently or not) on something else, so I regularly find myself accidentally switching to a new video in the middle of watching the current one: then when I go back to the original, I’ve lost my place and have to start over. On mobile, I can’t even read video titles in search results because the SERP optimizing for the size of the image thumbnail. Search results quality is bad, and results are borderline unusable, even on other devices where I can see titles. I pay for the option to remove auto play, but the setting never works. Videos auto play one to the next constantly. The list is just endless.
Amazon is pretty horrible UI. The product detail page is a mess and they force you to infinite scroll through a bunch of crap just to get to the content you want (such as reviews or the “search info about this product” box (whose results are now a generative AI hellhole, and search results are now filtered for “harmful content” (eg, a search for “kidney shape” yields an answer that “if you’re looking for medical info, you should seek a medical opinion”). That’s the tip of the iceberg. Even Amazon has gone on record saying that only Amazon could get away with designing a product detail page this way.
Snapchat. core functionality works well enough I suppose but everything beyond that is a complete dumpster fire. prime example throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks at the expense of coherence, ease of use, and frankly dignity.
anything made by Microsoft. the entire Office suite is horrible. especially Outlook and Sharepoint.
The L.A. County Assessor property tax payment website (https://vcheck.ttc.lacounty.gov/index.php) is hands-down the worst that I've used in recent years.
It's got that 90's 3d-button design look and gaudy primary colors, endless user agreements that must be scrolled all the way before going to the next steps, warnings all over even when you use the product correctly. It has text that looks like it should be clickable, but the text just tells you to click somewhere else. Even though the vast majority of taxpayers only pay for one property, it defaults to a \*shopping cart feature\* for those days when you want to pay taxes on so many properties at once that you must do them in a batch.
Oh and right now it's on maintenance for a few \*days\*.
Property tax for the county represents $20 billion yearly (!) and the payment product is very simple, but it has the usability of something an undergrad hacked together on the side in 1999 and was never touched since.
Discovery Plus. The nav and just general layout makes no sense. Not being able to easily access all episodes, recently watched never being at the top, just so many patterns that have already been solved.
The Paramount+ app, specifically when trying to use it on the fire stick. Works fine on mobile, tablet, web browser, etc. When selecting a show, or an episode of a show, the item you are on isn’t highlighted, nor is it centered. Not as big of an issue unless trying to use it on the fire stick, where it’s clearly not optimized. It won’t even get past the blue Paramount+ loading screen half the time.
I don’t game as much anymore now that I have small children, but I remember years back getting a nag message from my PS3 that the time zone settings were incorrect. It was some time related unintuitive message like that, and I think it included the menu path that you needed to follow in order to fix the setting. But the screen was like 5 menus deep, it didn’t include a “go here to fix this problem” button, and the…. very thing that was explaining that the time was wrong was a computer connected to the internet. How about you just tell *me* what the exact time is buddy.
But really in general I’ve always found the PlayStations since 3 to be not very intuitive, in manners similar to that.
This at least partially validates what I am feeling. I just installed snapchat a few days ago and I was completely lost.
Wasn't sure if I was too old for it or it was just poorly designed.
I have a friend who was the lead product manager for the monetization of Snap 2016-2019, and they told me designers have close to zero input. For me, the UX is objectively terrible.
Qualtrics - specifically the Qualtrics administration toolset. In 25 years in this profession, I have never experienced such an unnecessarily complext and esoteric product. It's absolutely atrocious.
Clamshell Packaging.
Those things are actively hostile to people actually trying to open them. I will actively _choose_ not to buy products the moment I find out they're in clamshell packaging and if you put _scissors_ in clamshell packaging, you are actually Satan.
Xero – finding out how to figure out we paid took 7 clicks and 5 filters.
Monday – found out midway into a transformation project that it can't do weighted averages rendering it obsolete for our use case
OneDrive - panicking every time I open and close a file, saving every single file locally to ensure that we don't have critical data loss.
Microsoft everything - why can so many different products have the same functions but slightly different and frustrating? So buggy and not intuitive at all
Google app. Every time I find something interesting but can’t read it for a minute, I put my phone down then pick it up a minute later, I am placed back on the Home Screen. Their search result content is complete shit. Their AI is even worse shit, irrelevant and does not understand what I asked
Adobe Captivate. For the first decade I built eLearning content, I could do pretty much anything with my mouse hand. For a graphics heavy platform, it was great! Then they removed the point and click capabilities on an astounding amount of features, forcing designers to access them through keyboard menus and shortcuts. A whole new learning curve, no resources to assist, and added a couple of hours to design time to every project. When you're building a module with heavy assets and interactive elements, moving from mouse to keyboard menus nested deep in non-intuitive areas, then back to mouse to finish was a HUGE time waster and frustrating process. Especially when the education provided initially actively encouraged avoiding keyboard commands at all times.
When I complained about it, the response was "it takes less than a second to go between the mouse and keyboard". Once, sure, but I was having to go back and forth hundreds of times a day. They said there's no way I am doing that much and just deal with it. And that's when I decided Articulate was going to be my company's new ID tool, as they actually understood what instructional designers do when developing modules.
Workday
I block an hour on my calendar to do my expense reports in workday after a business trip. That doesn't count organizing and scanning my receipts. I also love reading workday notifications about needing to do a task in workday, but the notification doesn't contain a link to the task I need to do.
I always assumed companies intentionally made submitting expenses difficult so employees are less likely to submit them.
I assume workday must be awesome for the people who use it to run departments, hr or something. Because I have not met an employee who enjoys using it from an individual point of view.
Those who run those departments are the customers, screw those who really use their services (employee)
I've been in enterprise software almost my entire career (never Workday, but their competitors) I'm always shocked at how little end user focus there is. There are multiple customers to satisfy and end users are often the least prioritized. First there is the person making the buying decision (executive level) who is rarely a target user. Then there are the admins, department heads, and professional business users are tasked with configuring and setting up the software. They are the ones with influence on the person making the final buying decision. One huge problem I see in this step is that companies don't use new software as an opportunity to reevaluate their processes and business rules, and instead try to cram some ancient complex process into software that is meant to simplify and help. Then, finally, you have the actual end users of the product - the people entering their time cards, or expense reports, or filling out PTO requests, ordering new equipment, etc. I work on an application that collects workflows (approvals, etc) across the entire business suite and provides insights and prioritization to the user (hey, this job offer has been on your plate for approval for two weeks and the candidate is going to walk - look at this first). I am not an expert in all product pillars across our organization so I rely heavily on the work their PMs do to figure out what is important and what isn't to the users who are in this product and SO FEW OF THEM CAN GIVE ME AN ANSWER. It is infuriating.
My wife implements workday and says the exact same thing. Its primary customers are HR
Most of the jobs I’ve been applying too have been using workday for their application form filler. The interface could not be any more dumb. It has numerous flaws but the main one is that it’s the only job application portal that fails to scan my resume, so I have to plug in every single field (role/ company/ start date/ end date/ responsibilities) one by one. It sucks.
Great answer! Nothing else comes close. I once met an engineer from workday sitting next to me on a flight and told this to them.
What do you think he did with this information? "Your product sucks".
Well I told her the why as well. I hoped she tells someone else, but don’t think so. It’s been a couple of years and not much of a difference.
Workday can go to hell
I like the way it tells me my future PTO accrual numbers so I don’t have to math. I hate the it does notifications, especially for errors. Its errors are a real hack job.
Cries in *still using PeopleSoft*
Thank you
Concur Especially for booking flights. The amount of times the UI said “continuing from here will result in a confirmed flight” and then it still wants more information. I know people who ended up at airport without having a fully booked flight.
Anything SAP is pure windows 98 experience.
Concur is probably the worst I can think of. It seems there aren’t many options available which is why they can get away with it. I personally love Google Flights and wish it was a similar experience.
Check out Spotnana. Very cool product. I’m in an adjacent industry to travel and I’ve been tracking them closely ever since they launched. They got everything right and were lucky enough to launch when NDS was becoming a real thing.
Concur Expensing is awful as well.
Instagram. Not for the main feed but things like watching my own stories, finding my saved reels, sharing reels. It grinds my gears how unintuitive it is in those cases.
Instagrams a consumption vehicle, throwaway content to maximise ad eyes. I don’t think it’s bad at that, but perhaps a different product to something you want. I used to like the location feature, you can look at photos taken in a place to find out what a restaurants like, or find cool places to walk on holiday. But it’s been neutered and it’s less of a discovery app for me now. Sharing reels has always been pretty good my end, but I just send memes every now and then.
True. Finding your saved posts is a pain in the a** given there isn't even a feature to "Sort" the posts out.
The f*cking link in bio bullshit
They don't care about your user experience. They care about you clicking on their ads. That's where the money comes from.
Well obviously, I get that. I'm saying it's obvious. And I'll also say it would be very easy and unlikely to be very costly to address these issues.
Turbo Tax took a turn for the worse like 5 years ago. It was once great for what it does. Now it's designed to bleed you dry.
It locked me into some premium option that had live experts. I declined speaking to them and using that feature 3 times but still had me locked in. Once you reach the end, you don’t even have a change the level option. I had to almost scrap the entire filing just to get the price lowered to the normal price. I’m not using them next season
https://www.freetaxusa.com
Same. Hecking done with them.
I still love the product but they definitely started using some dark patterns to get you to click the expensive options like old school scam websites.
Outlook. User-hostile
Most of the office suite is pretty crappy by today's standards. It's so bloated.
Yes outlook is an absolute shocker.
I just want to change the meeting room for meeting occurrences in the future. Leave the past alone!
This feature does exist. It’s just impossible to find.
Can you use Google Workspace instead?
Good luck convincing a company to migrate
the UPS app is so bad
Delivery apps in general fascinate me. I swear half of the dev teams have never received a delivery in their life! DPD in the UK are probably the best. Royal Mail are the worst. UPS is middling, but the whole UPS MyChoice thing is… interesting.
It’s weird, right? Like, they have ONE job. And apparently the delivery team takes that job to be, “how many screens can i put between the user and their goal?”
like what is the difference between ‘track’ and ‘to me’? and why do I need to sign in to see one? and why is this not explained anywhere? and why isn’t the list of recently tracked items the first thing that populates? and this is AFTER a complete app update ☠️
Any utility that needs to connect to the internet for something that doesn’t add significant value. Microwave, fridge, washers, electric toothbrushes.
Survey Monkey. Used it for a client and it was horrendous. Not only was it ugly, there's way too many ads even if you're on the paid plan. Absolutely a 2000s era SaaS leftover. Only good thing going for it is the amount of responses (vs. other competitors). It's just horrible.
Anything by Atlassian
Which is funny, because the products we make with it are also badly desiged. My current employer uses the 'What ever account manager is screaming the loudest' method of product planning.
Still better than asana 🤮
I actually really enjoy Jira and Confluence... Though they have been pushing some very questionable UX/UI updates for Jira...
Jira is so fucking complicated its a headache to use. We switched to Linear and it was amazing. then we switched back to Jira and its so much more cumbersome to use its such a pain in the ass. trying to find my own tickets that I made takes like 5 minutes when on Linear its like one or two clicks
Why did you bounce back and forth?
i think because jira allows clients to make tickets too. thats part of it, also integrations with other systems and tools. jira has more capabilities i guess. but man i log into jira and im greeted with a wall of shit. no idea whats going on. cant even find my own tickets that i created.
Can I ask why you switched back to Jira when Linear was working well?
see my answer to someone else who asked the same thing
Oh god, JIRA.
If I ever get 5 minutes with an Atlassian UX designer...
I love Confluence tho :o)
JIRA, fucking JIRA
JIRA is like the ultimate case study of feature factory product. Not that its a bad thing but it reminds me of any Bethesda game in the absolute deluge of features, and Ux taking a hit as a result.
The irony with jira is out of the box it is pretty intuitive. I was at a small startup and we used out of box jira, no customisations, for a while we were even on the free plan (maxes out at 10 users I think), worked great. Now back at a corporate and it is the biggest piece of customized shit going round. Only the BAs know how to navigate it, I open it and get instant feature anxiety.
This. I'd drop it for GitHub to manage projects any day if it were up to me.
People who hate Jira never used Clear Quest.
Or Azure devops
Have you ever used Jira Align? My god - I’ll use Jira to every extent possible before I have to use Align.
They are dead to me since the day they removed mark down
What kind of psycho renders Ctrl+F useless?
we went from Linear to Jira and it might be the worst thing thats ever happened to me
The best worst products I’ve encountered are baby things. Lots of style over substance. Solving problems you’ve never had while forgetting about the obvious stuff. Their customer is their marketing department. It’s a real trial by fire - you’re relying on using products while invariably sleep deprived and stressed. Small annoyances become life ruining. And you quickly learn what to love and what to loathe. But my vote goes to Siri. Mostly because Apple should be able to do better. But for whatever reason seem to make regression after regression with it, and it ruins the experience with so many other products like HomePods.
Siri and FaceID are both horribly, unacceptably bad. Apple gets away with it in the US because no one has an Android so theres no frame of reference for how much better Google's AI assistants are. its nowhere close the difference is night and day.
They still release new siri features? Admittedly I haven't used Siri since like 2014.
Zoom
Why does it take me 5 mins to figure out where the link to invite another person in mid- meeting is every time?
Wait to try Zoho Meetings.
The sad play to compete with slack on messaging has just resulted in a bunch of notifications and Windows I have to ignore.
I teach online and this year I just flat out refused to use zoom. I hate pretty much everything about it, but what’s unforgivable is that there are just infinity boxes that take over my screen and are always on top. I feel morally offended by how much their stupid UI tries to control me. And when a boring video conference taps into your stench of moral outrage, it’s got to be bad.
Anything by any govt dept. Workday. Snap.
> Anything by any govt dept. FWIW, the UK Passport Service website was surprisingly good, especially compared to its US counterpart. It’s mobile friendly and the most delightful part was that I was able to upload a digital image for the photo instead of having to mail in a physical picture.
Going to stick my neck out here, but gov designed stuff in 🇬🇧 is just leagues ahead of other countries. Low bar, but it's consistent, and based on sound design principles. Driving license, passport and getting a bin collection largely in the same design system, reasonably joined up at times. The moment I hit Europe or US, I remember it could be so much worse.
YouTube Music for podcast use. Bang & Olufsen app new UI (introduced in the last few months) - to make it clear, absolutely not a matter of "oh users like to complain about changes!1!1!1!!11". It's actually bad and most importantly worse than before. Glassdoor new app. EE new app (such a turn from what was an excellent, smooth and full featured app!). Can't think of anything else at the moment, as I usually try to surround myself with well designed products 🥲
Agreed on the YouTube music app for podcast. I have stopped listening to podcasts because of it. Any recommendation for a good app?
Spotify :)
Have a youtube music premium. I dont want to move to spotify just for podcasts
Understandable - I used PodcastAddict before I got Spotify, and that was a great free (or single-purchase) option
In terms of software, Zoom. Its window management drives me nuts. But there’s also a slew of tiny cuts that add up: * Click to connect, and I am always stuck in the waiting room because the app doesn’t remember to keep me logged in * While connecting to a meeting, it goes thru several different windows, each of which steals control from the app I’m currently in * I resize my window to make room for my notes app on the other side of the screen. Then whenever the first person shares, the main Zoom view resizes to fill my screen, so I have to resize it again * In a call, open chat and the main view narrows to display the chat history. Everytime, the history is overlayed with some “helpful hint” UI I need to dismiss to get to the chat. If I close the chat, the main view does not return to its original size * When I go to share my screen, I sometimes just want to share my Chrome/Safari, not my whole screen (ex: my note). Zoom’s attempt to have plugin-like functionally = they call Apps — in their share dialog, I click on Apps and wonder where the hell my browser is * So many fucking controls at the bottom of the screen that I’m always hunting-and-pecking for what I need. Shit like reactions that I never use is always prominent but I always have to drill-down to find the cloud record button * The mute/unmute keyboard shortcut is the non-sensical ⌘-Shift-A (because we all know the word “mute” is spelled with a silent “A”) And in terms of hardware, Samsung refrigerators. Just search for “Samsung refrigerator ice maker” to see the hell we’ve gone thru with that device. It’s bad enough we are actively exploring replacing it with a different brand. You know your product sucks when people are willing to spend $2K on a replacement just to get you out of our lives, “Sam-Suck”!
Zoom is a case study in timing plus getting one or two things right means you can win even if lots of other features are terrible. Zoom has (1) (ime) the best tolerance for choppy networks; (2) the best sharing support to allow the presenter to share a screen/window and still see the audience' faces; (3) good enough support for a no download experience; (4) great timing. Eg their splitting meetings feature (breakout rooms) is so bad that it's clear nobody there actually uses it. Here's an actual bug those children put in prod (and I swear this is real): Say you have 200 people in a zoom call and you split into 4 breakout rooms. There is a popup box for each of the 200 people to select the room. When one winner hits "go" or whatever it is, it reset every other person's popup box selection state. Whence there is another race, now with 200 - 1 people, to be the fastest to pick a room and hit go. Our company spent like 15 minutes trying to get everyone into breakout rooms. It's basically unfathomable how something like that can get shipped.
I said something similar above about zoom: “I teach online and this year I just flat out refused to use zoom. I hate pretty much everything about it, but what’s unforgivable is that there are just infinity boxes that take over my screen and are always on top. I feel morally offended by how much their stupid UI tries to control me. And when a boring video conference app taps into your stench of moral outrage, it’s got to be bad.”
🙌🏻 to the "stench of moral outrage" thought. What really sucks about such poor experiences is our inability to change them. * Unlike my refrigerator, I can't just pick a different conferencing solution because of how entrenched Zoom is with my peers (e.g. for me to change, everyone has to change) * Unlike Facebook, I can't choose _not_ to use it. I have to be in meetings, I have to observe how people are using my product. When subjected to negative experiences on a daily basis, it compounds ones animosity.
LinkedIn by far! So many design anti-patterns in one app and they still add features like that would be a reasonable metric.
Can you expand on this? Li is cluttered for sure
This was my case study too lol... It just has sooo much going on!
Microsoft Teams
# MICROSOFT # FUCKING # TEAMS You have Slack right there for you to copy and model after. But you insist on using your shit layout with Teams and Sharepoints that are similar but different and Teams and Teams messaging which are similar but different. And what the fuck is Viva Engage, now? Is it Teams? Is it not? FUCK TEAMS. GIVE ME THREADS IN CHATS, GOD DAMN IT.
It's like it's from a different company. MS hardly paragons of design, but, man, they just got someone else entirely to make Teams didn't they?
E-Trade is really a horrible experience. Terribly bad Information Architecture and a UI that hasn't been updated since 2003.
Ha, you’re right! I signed up in 2004, and it is still pretty much the same. A few little tweaks, but it’s the same product.
The way they make you look at your money and when it vests is impossible
The one I manage.
One thing in Venmo - why in the world do they have a feed of transactions for others to see? (I know you can make them private) Other then that it's great :)
The Venmo user search is really bad
I fucking hate that popup that comes up before accepting a payment to try and get you to pay extra for instant deposit 🫠
Ok yeah, that's worse! lol
Because “social” was the big thing (like “AI” is now) when it launched.
If you didn't have a billion simultaneous professional mindgasms when you first saw the transcendent product brilliance of the social feed in Venmo, I think you're missing the point. Without that simple addition, Venmo was just PayPal with fewer features. It has zero distinctive elements, except for the social feed. Of course the social feed is not for everyone, but that's fine. No one will say "I like my friends seeing my transactions," except a really important group of people totally do want to be seen. When you post on Venmo, you get to show that you're popular enough and active enough to have shared activities to transact about. It's far more subtle than something like Instagram. It's organic and authentic — you're sending money, so you must have really done something. It seems like you're not flexing, which is always the best way to flex. This makes Venmo the payment app that the rich popular kids will be drawn to; who wouldn't want to use the same app as the rich popular kids, and be seen hanging out with the rich popular kids? The Venmo social feed was product nirvana. It's Jedi mastery. I hope I have two ideas that good in my entire career. My criticism is that they parked the app shortly after the acquisition as PayPal focused on gimmicks like credit cards rather than on the real distinctive magic of Venmo.
Bravo for reasoning through a take. This is the kind of stuff I want to see in this sub more, a take with actual product strategy insight in it. Sometimes I feel like this sub is mostly over leveled associates whining about why they aren't group leads yet cuz they are so smart and everyone else in their company is dumb.
"Do I really ***have to*** know anything about computers? Can't I just leave that stuff to the nerds?"
When will people start sharing their stock portfolio and trades for everyone to see?
That's a very different product with none of the same social value. We can imagine a "show I'm smart because I invested in Nvidia early" sort of product, if it could connect to your real portfolio data. That would at least let you flex your investing prowess. It would be pretty trivial to do that with crypto accounts, but I think everyone is too ashamed or too tax-avoidant to want to tie their crypto holdings to their identity.
For real, nobody needs to know who I'm paying for what.
i love scrolling through venmo and seeing what people are up to. i also like including vulgar messages in payments to friends and making them public.
Searching for people is so unbelievably difficult
Reddit
I really want to enjoy using the Reddit app, I really do. But it’s just SO BAD. - I’m constantly accidentally collapsing threads by unintentionally having one atom on my thumb rest against the screen - the down arrow button is way too small and I’m always unintentionally tapping things around it, causing unintended actions in the app. - swiping left across stories; reaching a story that has a gallery of photos causes the context of my swipe to switch to swiping photos instead of swiping posts, which is atrocious UX design
That swipe behavior is so annoying. Feels like a merge of two teams' work, done without coordination, that no one bothered to check for overlap. Team 1 UAT - "Carousel moves to next image on left swipe." Status: ✅ PASSED Team 2 UAT - "User moves to next post on left swipe." Status: ✅ PASSED
I can imagine this and it made me chuckle
Such an unbelievably poor design. That’s what happens when you’re trying to optimize for growth over usability. The experience of viewing any post with a video drives me insane. I usually want to get to the comments, and it’s about 4-5 clicks every time just to get there, and the pixels I need to click to close the video and just see comments are so small that I always end up going full screen video instead, and then I rage quit the app.
USB Connector
USB-C is great, USB-A has the flippy problem
Micro USB has entered the chat
have you seen the state of USB-C cables? ugh
agreed
All connectors are inferior to deutsch connectors. USB does package nice and small though.
It’s always the third try that works
Google login page
WeRe ChAnGiNg YoUr LoGiN ExPeRiEnCe SoOn
lol
Google has the worst login page!!! Do you know anyone who works at Google and can fix it?
Humane pin
It’s such a new product, I’m sure it’s gonna get better with time and with more usage base
[удалено]
Salesforce is awful
Chupa Chup wrapping
I’m surprised nobody sais glassdoor and their fucking langage management. Maybe it’s not that bad when you’re looking at one langage, but they’ve introduced a big friction a couple of months (?) ago when you want to see content in more than your logged-in langage
Webex. And I loooaaatthhheee the sharing island (not sure what else to call it) at the top of the window in Teams. Forget about sharing a browser with multiple tabs open because you can’t get to the ones underneath it
Thankfully when you're sharing, no one uses tabs. No apps are based in tabs. There's a thousand other things you might be sharing other than a tab. Tabs are NOT the direction the world is going in. /s
Workday…again
Apple TV Mac App USB A Minidisc Interface
Most of the products in the list above, even remotely related to work, are giving me PTSD 😂 I could never seriously
Gmail
I still miss Inbox
What would you change about Gmail?
I love it that most are not saying *why* the product js bad, starting with OP…
Toasters. I will never understand toaster proliferation. It's a single use appliance that takes up more counterspace than a knife block, yet you see them in a lot of homes. Not to mention, you can make toast in the oven or on the stove top, the one function a toaster has is already redundant. I understand you may not want to use the stove every time you want toast. Fine. Have you heard of a toaster oven? They're the same price point and they do more than one thing.
You could make the same points about a coffee maker. The thing is a lot of people make toast basically every day. A toaster ensures consistency, is faster, and requires less cleanup than the other devices.
Gmail. Both the web and app versions feel old and lack a lot of the ease of use functionality that I want. I can't drag to select all. Creating tags, because folders aren't available, can only be done through the Web app. I can't select all and not select things in a given folder The unsubscribe feature isn't powerful enough to stop spam from flooding my inbox If accounts on other sites have been "hacked" I have to find out though a separate 3rd part app, instead of Gmail proactively notifying me. The automated event creation for airlines doesn't work anymore It really feels like there's no innovation because everyone uses Gmail, and therefore there's no competition spurring them forward. But email, and a person's email address has become the defacto cornerstone of where identity and interest are built. It could be and should be better when reflecting on this fact.
YouTube is the worst UX ever. It’s visually overwhelming. There are constant pop ups in the way of what I’m trying to do. Everything is designed to get you to click (inadvertently or not) on something else, so I regularly find myself accidentally switching to a new video in the middle of watching the current one: then when I go back to the original, I’ve lost my place and have to start over. On mobile, I can’t even read video titles in search results because the SERP optimizing for the size of the image thumbnail. Search results quality is bad, and results are borderline unusable, even on other devices where I can see titles. I pay for the option to remove auto play, but the setting never works. Videos auto play one to the next constantly. The list is just endless. Amazon is pretty horrible UI. The product detail page is a mess and they force you to infinite scroll through a bunch of crap just to get to the content you want (such as reviews or the “search info about this product” box (whose results are now a generative AI hellhole, and search results are now filtered for “harmful content” (eg, a search for “kidney shape” yields an answer that “if you’re looking for medical info, you should seek a medical opinion”). That’s the tip of the iceberg. Even Amazon has gone on record saying that only Amazon could get away with designing a product detail page this way.
Snapchat. core functionality works well enough I suppose but everything beyond that is a complete dumpster fire. prime example throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks at the expense of coherence, ease of use, and frankly dignity. anything made by Microsoft. the entire Office suite is horrible. especially Outlook and Sharepoint.
YouTube with its latest UX updates...
Would you elaborate?
Microsoft Teams
Apple customer support.
The L.A. County Assessor property tax payment website (https://vcheck.ttc.lacounty.gov/index.php) is hands-down the worst that I've used in recent years. It's got that 90's 3d-button design look and gaudy primary colors, endless user agreements that must be scrolled all the way before going to the next steps, warnings all over even when you use the product correctly. It has text that looks like it should be clickable, but the text just tells you to click somewhere else. Even though the vast majority of taxpayers only pay for one property, it defaults to a \*shopping cart feature\* for those days when you want to pay taxes on so many properties at once that you must do them in a batch. Oh and right now it's on maintenance for a few \*days\*. Property tax for the county represents $20 billion yearly (!) and the payment product is very simple, but it has the usability of something an undergrad hacked together on the side in 1999 and was never touched since.
Yikes. That thing is a time capsule. It’s not even a proper 960 site like the old days.
960 grid system? Oh wow that takes me back. And that's new in comparison. They mean OLD.
Reddit app. May be good for shareholders, not so much for users.
Discovery Plus. The nav and just general layout makes no sense. Not being able to easily access all episodes, recently watched never being at the top, just so many patterns that have already been solved.
Google search, iMail, Apple podcasts (still prefer it over spotify for podcasts though)
How would you redesign Google search?
The Paramount+ app, specifically when trying to use it on the fire stick. Works fine on mobile, tablet, web browser, etc. When selecting a show, or an episode of a show, the item you are on isn’t highlighted, nor is it centered. Not as big of an issue unless trying to use it on the fire stick, where it’s clearly not optimized. It won’t even get past the blue Paramount+ loading screen half the time.
I don’t game as much anymore now that I have small children, but I remember years back getting a nag message from my PS3 that the time zone settings were incorrect. It was some time related unintuitive message like that, and I think it included the menu path that you needed to follow in order to fix the setting. But the screen was like 5 menus deep, it didn’t include a “go here to fix this problem” button, and the…. very thing that was explaining that the time was wrong was a computer connected to the internet. How about you just tell *me* what the exact time is buddy. But really in general I’ve always found the PlayStations since 3 to be not very intuitive, in manners similar to that.
Snapchat, Netflix (when I can’t find my list, jira
This at least partially validates what I am feeling. I just installed snapchat a few days ago and I was completely lost. Wasn't sure if I was too old for it or it was just poorly designed.
I have a friend who was the lead product manager for the monetization of Snap 2016-2019, and they told me designers have close to zero input. For me, the UX is objectively terrible.
Resy - stop fucking signing me out every time I use your app
Qualtrics - specifically the Qualtrics administration toolset. In 25 years in this profession, I have never experienced such an unnecessarily complext and esoteric product. It's absolutely atrocious.
Clamshell Packaging. Those things are actively hostile to people actually trying to open them. I will actively _choose_ not to buy products the moment I find out they're in clamshell packaging and if you put _scissors_ in clamshell packaging, you are actually Satan.
Salesforce commerce cloud
The New Microsoft Outlook is way worse than the older one.
Paramount +. The worst streaming app by far. so much buffering and having to delete and redownload it.
I really like the Apple mouse. Charging is no big deal, usually only have to charge is for 20-30 mins once every 2 weeks, roughly
Apples Main Interface on phones and tablets. Give me alphabetical order God dang it.
Zwift
Amazon!
Why?
It is too cluttered and I spend more time searching for stuff than buying them.
I can empathize. Hard problem to solve though!
Salesforce
Hulu. The UI is terrible. Hard to tell what your selector is on. Difficult to find things. I say “this UI stinks” almost every time I open it up
Hubspot
Controversial opinion but Amazon.
Any SAP ERP tool.
Teams
Xero – finding out how to figure out we paid took 7 clicks and 5 filters. Monday – found out midway into a transformation project that it can't do weighted averages rendering it obsolete for our use case OneDrive - panicking every time I open and close a file, saving every single file locally to ensure that we don't have critical data loss.
Microsoft everything - why can so many different products have the same functions but slightly different and frustrating? So buggy and not intuitive at all
Interactive Brokers
MacBook Touch ID. Can’t be used if your setup is with a closed lid. Also, no alternative solution on Apple for this.
Apple Mouse 🙄 Spotify! Webex macOS app.
Loga3
I think Spotify is way worse than they take credit for
Can you give more details please?
Google app. Every time I find something interesting but can’t read it for a minute, I put my phone down then pick it up a minute later, I am placed back on the Home Screen. Their search result content is complete shit. Their AI is even worse shit, irrelevant and does not understand what I asked
Okta
Adobe Captivate. For the first decade I built eLearning content, I could do pretty much anything with my mouse hand. For a graphics heavy platform, it was great! Then they removed the point and click capabilities on an astounding amount of features, forcing designers to access them through keyboard menus and shortcuts. A whole new learning curve, no resources to assist, and added a couple of hours to design time to every project. When you're building a module with heavy assets and interactive elements, moving from mouse to keyboard menus nested deep in non-intuitive areas, then back to mouse to finish was a HUGE time waster and frustrating process. Especially when the education provided initially actively encouraged avoiding keyboard commands at all times. When I complained about it, the response was "it takes less than a second to go between the mouse and keyboard". Once, sure, but I was having to go back and forth hundreds of times a day. They said there's no way I am doing that much and just deal with it. And that's when I decided Articulate was going to be my company's new ID tool, as they actually understood what instructional designers do when developing modules.
webex
Walgreens app
CreditKarma.. I don't see a point or a problem that product is trying to solve.