Hi

Being new(ish) to a mac. I've found UI to support creating a new folder really frustrating.

Essentually i want to be able to right click on the parent folder and click "Create new folder". However, the option doesn't exist!

I know it's a small thing but i forget every time and it always frustrates me.

Matt

I see your Finder niggle Matt, and raise you Assyst Enterprise!!. It manages helpdesk calls, and I have to use it to raise change requests. Their website is bad enough...

It is so obscure, hard to use, and manage that I cannot believe people actually use it. There must have been literally no user testing.

(It looks even worse with data — modal dialogs galore, confusing options etc etc etc).

Here is another one from the local authority (UK) world: IDOX Uni-form.

I don’t have any screenshots of my own doing, but their planning product brochure (PDF) says enough.

The app uses tabs everywhere, and you use the tabs as the process. So start on the left, and work right. However, you’ll see from their product brief that there are TWO sets of tabs. Yes, that’s right, hierarchical tabs!

What’s worse, I remember working with one of their products that handles automatic generation of “what’s around this property” type searches. For it to work, it required the underlying data to be fundamentally altered.

My contempt for this application was well known. They never let me meet the sales team!!

This is the laughable webmail interface that our university's Computer Science department forces us to use:

Most messages can't even be displayed since it's so old that it doesn't support HTML emails, as you can see above.

Blog post: The Blackberry Enterprise Server.

It's the worst piece of garbage I have ever used. Made me want to pull my hair out. Pictures on the blog post.

The admin interface for Drupal. While the CMS itself is very powerful and offers a lot of features, wading through that admin interface to figure out /how/ to set things up is like pulling teeth. Different options are hidden under categories that don't necessarily make sense from a /user/ perspective, though they do from a developer's perspective. The poor categorization of common tasks has led some theme developers to create admin themes that try to get around the problem and those can be enormously helpful, but out of the box, as a CMS admin, just contemplating setting up a Drupal site, having now put together four of them, gives me a massive headache.

I would have to go with the admin interfaces for DotNetNuke. They are absolutely atrocious. Nothing is organized like it should be, and several things that I think should be there just aren't. I love the power that the system provides in building custom sites and allowing for simple plugin development, but the admin UI is absolutely horrible.

I've actually just thought of an even better choice for worst UI ever - Lotus, the entire suite, but especially Notes. Lotus is an absolutely horrible user experience overall. It seems like they purposely make their apps hard to use because they want to cause pain in their users. I have never met a single person that liked Lotus Notes if they have ever used just about any of their competitors. And as for the other apps in the suite, I'd actually be surprised to hear anyone actually uses those applications anymore.

Lotus Notes.

I would like to say it's something I had to use in the past, but sadly it's something I'm still forced to use today! And we're a fairly progressive IT company!! Although it's becoming less often, which is good.

No two windows/pop-ups/functions are the same. Things that you believe should be easy are simply not possible (i.e. not supported, as opposed to difficult to do). And the password entry field? Seriously...

"Yes sir. You've logged in. Would you like to change your password? No problem, please execute the following 7 incomprehensible and unintuitive commands".

It's a tie between anything PeopleSoft makes and SharePoint.

Microsoft Visio makes me want to hurt myself everytime I use it

An advanced search form. Full size at Flickr. If anyone has ever found something through this form … I probably don’t want to be his friend. :)

The Interface Hall of Shame has many good examples.

With all my heart I hate Taleo. Looking for a job I stumbled upon this everywhere and it pissed me off so much. There are actual hate-site for Taleo. Now I'm not that extreme, but in the moment of searching and filling out miles of inputs, with duplicates, I get more upset.

Not the worst, since it is dead simple, but unforgivable for the same reason.

ATM software used by the Bank Of Nova Scotia:

1)Enter PIN # (4 keypresses)

2)Select “Deposit”(1 keypress)

3)Select Account (1 keypress)

4)Enter Amount (probably 6 or 7 keypresses)

5)“Incorrect PIN” go back to Square One. Like they couldn't have told me that immediately after step 1?

If I ever fatfinger my PIN, I can't help thinking "trained monkeys..." 10 or so keystrokes later.

I take it nobody's used 'vi' in Linux then?

It's a keyboard-controlled text editor for the command line, where there's obviously no mouse available.

This would be fine if it had nice logical keyboard commands like, ctrl-s to save, but no do save you have to type ':w'.

Or how about exiting without saving changes - that'd be ':q!' of course..!

You know that nice 'end' key on your keyboard? Want to use that to go to the end of the line? Tough luck - you'll need to type '$' for that.

To be fair to it, it's about a zillion years old, from way before all your ctrl-s type conventions came around - but I still have to use the bloody thing most days!