Look at this. Look at it.

The company is 23 years old and lists $15M/year in revenue.

The UI is so nonstandard and unintuitive that every year I talk a few people through screams and tears.

I like the product in a general sense; it basically works. However, it requires far more frustration, clicks, and hyper-specific, non-transferable knowledge than is reasonable to do that.

Reason 237 I fucking hate #brightspace: they lock all conversation about their product behind a soft paywall (e.g. I get stupid emails like this where I can't just see what Yi Yan.L.782 said). Every fucking interaction has to be on their platform, under their control. Much of the content is hidden from search engines.

Of course, once you get into their little walled garden you discover that searching for unfixed bugs or unmet feature requests is only possible on a one-term-at-a-time search basis. There's almost no way to see if related issues exist.

No surprise: when I dove into this last year and spent a couple of hours trying to answer some questions about basic, industry-standard functionality (spoiler: the answer to all of them was "No"), I figured out that they have hundreds or thousands of unresolved issues going back 20 years.

This company is worth a billion dollars.

Edit: I clicked the link. I did. The message was "We have also had this question. Does anyone else know..."

Holy fuck this is stupid.

Three different layers of pop-ups: ToS update notification, newsletter sign-up and cookies. I think I'm not interested anymore, #NYTimes #cookies #popup #annoying #shittydesign

This post might seem like it's about #brightspace (the #lms the #suny system is forcing us all to use), but it's actually about having bosses who hold you in such contempt that they can't even be bothered to explain why they paid millions of dollars for a product that doesn't work while telling you to use it or else.

Today's Brightspace issue: hundreds of questions with images (trapped within BS's little walled garden of impenetrable database locations) that appear only as placeholders, but might or might not render when placed into a student quiz. The odds seem so far to be about 50/50.

There is no way to know which items are affected *even when I edit each of the hundreds of items by hand*, because I see this placeholder for MOST of the questions but then the students sometimes see the image. Sometimes not.

It's silent failure. No flags, no checks, no indications of what's wrong. No way to know if any changes will fix things.

Other silent failures: BS will cheerfully tell you it has imported your 5,000 or so items (painstakingly created over the past decade) from your previous LMS--which was also mandated--and then just *won't tell you* that hundreds or thousands of them did not import because BS simply choked and pooped or because BS doesn't even have the functionality to use those question types.

I fucking hate this LMS, but I really hate the fact that the people in charge think so little of me and 30,000 of my colleagues that they shove shit like this at us and tell us to pretend it works.

Hey LibreOffice developers, here's a hint for you: Zoom level is a viewer state, not a feature of the document. Don't save it in the document file.

I don't want to reset zoom every time I open a document from an email. 100% fits perfectly on my screen, 150% does not.

Also, "the sender probably needs glasses" is medical information that that you have no business leaking.

Dear Google Docs,

Thank you so very much for your principled stand against (checks notes) using a mouse. Now I'm spending half an hour searching for how to do your fucking thing when the fucking CTRL keys on my keyboard aren't working, instead of getting my fucking work done.

Is this what desperation smells like? FB uses deceptive UI bullshit to drive traffic to #threads

Award-winning podcast creators circa 2015: We don't really know what "mixing" or "mastering" mean, but what if we all mumbled kind of fast, half as loud as these cool ambient sounds we recorded, and then randomly started screaming at full volume? Awesome, right? Audiences will love it. We are going to win so many Webbies.

Screw you Microsoft Office.

You know what you did.

#AmazonPimeVideo has had, what, 15 years and BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to fix its shit, but its #UI is still trash. It is so far behind the simplicity of Netflix that I shake my head.

Amazon hates its customers. It's like the worst incel boyfriend ever: once it has what it wants from you it feels the urge to shit all over you while it works to attract new customers.

Given all the absurdity that the iOS 18 control center is I don't feel ashamed to suggest a shortcuts toggle.

I think this is Meta, not Firefox. If it's #firefox, great. I have no problem with FF saving my deets. If it's #meta then it's #deceptive and nasty. It feels like an attempt to trick people like me, who refuse to give #instagram or #facebook more info than absolutely necessary, into giving login control to Meta instead of my #browser. In other words, an attempt to take yet another little bit of my online experience away from me.

If I'm wrong and it's just a new Firefox prompt, I'll happily amend this post.

OK What the fuck?
#PayPal has this bullshit when you update your phone number.

Do I check the boxes or not? I definitely do not want any contact from those twits.

Dear everyone posting Bluesky bsky links:

Please indicate whether I'll have to "log in to see content" or whatever. 80% of the time that's the case.

I'm absolutely not getting a fucking bsky account so I can read your shared tweet. In fact, I'm just scrolling past anything that has bsky links in it, for now. It's a waste of time to click then see "you gotta log in, yo."

Как поломать нафиг навигацию для человека? Нужно всего лишь сделать активную кнопку похожей на неактивный декоративный блок.

Вот Todoist показывает прекрасный пример, как это можно сделать. Берем и в левом глобальном меню делаем секции. Из-за того что секции безразмерные добавляем им шефрончик, чтобы их можно было раскрыть и свернуть. Также добавляем кнопку быстрого создания проектов.

Ну и чисто прикола ради делаем одну из этих секций ссылкой на страницу-индекс, а втору так и оставляем просто неинтерактивным названием секции. Какая из этих секций является ссылкой, а какая информационным блоком ― это задачка надом для читателя.

I have a new phone. I had to log into discord again. It required one of my backup codes. Cool, fine, whatever. I go to enter it and it only allows numbers - I can't get letters to appear on the keyboard. The backup codes are numbers and letters. I had to figure out on my own that to enter the code you use a kebab menu to open a new modal. I'm half unsure if the design is shit or if I skimmed an important guiding step???

What. The. Fuck. #Discord. #shittydesign

Also, #Evernote, why the hell must I confirm every singled delete? Why is the point of the trash if I first confirmed my intent?