A review of websites whose UI is bad (and often very funny) by design

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A review of websites with intentionally bad user interfaces
A review of websites whose UI is bad by design (and often very funny as a result), including hard-to-use Captchas, irritating volume controls and date-pickers designed to exasperate.

Posted by Andy Brown on 01 March 2024

In this blog

Examples of Bad UI Design
A cursor-controlled keyboard
Playing Breakout or Arkanoid to capture letters
Choosing your country of residence by throwing a dart
Bad date selector
A Valentine's Day request it's hard to refuse
More information

What is intentionally bad UI design? It's a bit like Justice Potter Stewart's famous definition of pornography: to paraphrase, you'll know it when you see it. But just in case you're in any doubt, here are some examples to whet your appetite.

I've previously reviewed the excellent User Inyerface website, which is a whole site: this blog includes lots of ideas that you might like to incorporate into your sites.

Examples of Bad UI Design

We all know that Captchas are getting harder to complete. Is that a traffic light in the top left square? What will the computer do if I mis-identify that bicycle as a motorbike? Well, it could be worse:

Would you get past this?

Too easy? How about having to draw your own QR code?

They're easier to scan ...

Or how about a recursive Captcha?

Whenever you click on an image, it's replaced with a palette of 9 smaller ones - and so on!

Now you've got the idea, let's look at some sites to try out.

It's easy to find ideas for bad UI design on the Internet, but surprisingly hard to see implementations of it (and believe me I've looked!).

A cursor-controlled keyboard

In this site you have to enter your user name by using your mouse to drag the fan round the screen to blow the cursor over the right letters:

This was my attempt - it's almost impossible to type anything correctly!

Playing Breakout or Arkanoid to capture letters

The references to 1980s video games in the title may be a bit esoteric, but the principle of this site is easy to understand:

Use your right and left arrow keys to move the pink bar to catch the letters you want to include in your user name.

Choosing your country of residence by throwing a dart

OK, you can't try this one, but you can watch a video of someone else doing it here:

Will you release the trigger at the right time?

Bad date selector

There are many examples of bad volume and date selectors, but not many like this one that you can try out:

Click on the arrow to go back one day (or usefully, the << button to go back to ... 1st January 0001).

A Valentine's Day request it's hard to refuse

It's not quite bad UI design, but I thought I'd include this site:

I won't spoil the fun by saying what happens ...

More information

If I haven't already wasted enough of your lunch hour, here's some more reading!

Website	Notes
Fabion Kallaku's Instagram feed	A series of Instagram posts of examples of bad UI design, including a couple of the ones above.
Andre Goulart Nougeira's GitHub site	10 examples, mostly with working links to try them out, with links to the source code on GitHub.
Matt Wright's examples page	A selection of simple, working examples of bad UI design for you to try out.
The original Reddit thread	The intentionally bad user interface battles thread on Reddit (UIBattles) from which most of the examples on this page sprang.

As always, I'd love to hear from anyone who has examples that I've omitted: particularly if you can try them out on a website.

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