UI Blunders

I've made my share of design blunders and other mistakes on the web, but those are for you to blog about.

As a result of my graduating from UHD with a Bachelor of Business Administration (B.B.A.) in CIS I benefited from a few graduation presents. One in particular was a $25 gift card to Barnes & Noble. Spending it at their online store was a 2 hour ordeal. Partly due to the fact that I didn't know what I wanted and partly due to the fact that their site is a navigation nightmare. B&N's design blunders inspired this post, below are a few User Interface and/or design blunders found recently on the web.

Be Consistent

Be consistent. Either hyperlinks are underlined or they aren't. I didn't realize that there were any pages after "10". First because the "Next" button is so far away from the last page, "10", and secondly, because "Next" didn't appear to be. hyperlinked. Also, give your users a preview, show them that pages 11, 12, and 13 exist if they do, lead them on a little.

Make Sense

There aren't 10 items on *this* page.

Protection by Limitation

This is one way to thwart would-be crackers... don't allow *anyone* to use *special* characters. That's taking the easy way out and potentially restricting some to not use one of the dozen passwords they already know.

More password weirdness

Did a DBA make the decision to only allow 12 characters in my password? Again, now I've got to remember one more password to comply with another site's bizarre password criteria.

White Space

I never knew the dentist office could be so fun!!!! White space is key here. The text describes a different picture, but isn't a little too close to this picture?

link: www.whitersmiles.com/our_office.htm

The same image "zoomed out" a bit.

Bugs & More Bugs

I had to unsubscribe from Dave's feed due to this issue. The only way to mark all of Dave's feeds as read is to first read ALL my other unread feeds, click on "All Feeds", then mark my complete repository of links read. Clicking on Dave's folder, or subscription alone wouldn't do it.

"5" gets singled out.

Is that debugging code? What's up with the curlies around the pages? I hope this is a bug and not a cryptic feature.

All images used in this post can be found in my "UI Blunders" flickr set.