sloppy health insurance application

Filling out this form, and after I filled out "First Name:" I tabbed and it put me in the "Street:" box. This is a questionable layout choice from the start, two columns isn't bad but feels unnatural, arbitrary margins between labels and fields is no good. The current place in the process is nice, but not when it tells you, "Additional" for the current location. Last thing is those awful buttons, take caps-lock off don't smash 30 characters in a button, and give me some color variance so I know which one I will probably want to press and the two less common options make less prominent.

Manning Publishing Checkout

This one was a subtle one, I entered what I thought was all of my information, clicked submit and got an error saying the shipping method was not available in my area. It didn't do anything about the fact that I entered a US city and a US state. I think the proper behavior should be either you select a country first, and it gives you the corresponding states/provinces or you enter the state/province and it figures out your country. The worst part about this in my opinion was that the select box default, the DEFAULT was Argentina. A publishing company from Argentina might see value in this, but a US publisher selling books written in English, probably shouldn't have the default as Argentina. In this scenario, I think that "Choose Country" would be fine, or if you are going to default to a country maybe choose the country native to your company.

Facebook Scrabble

The worst of the worst when it comes to UI failures, in my opinion is an incorrect validation error. When you have entered information in correctly and you receive an error ironically because there is an error in the provider's application. The error I received says "You need to invite one friend at least." As you can see, I have my one friend entered (the blurred name in the box). The error is also output no where near the locality of where the error originated. I am now forced to leave the application entirely and give it a shot another day (if I even bother).

netflix account hold

Went to put my netflix on hold since I usually end up keeping the one dvd the whole season without watching it. The following menu was presented to me. Not only was I able to select a date outside of the range of acceptable dates. I was also able to select a date that doesn't even exist (9/31). This fails for a couple of reasons, one: there is dozens of date selects out there that let only allow correct dates, two: it wouldn't be too hard to limit the days to the range of acceptable dates to select.

google groups unintuitive menu

This isn't horrible, but the layout of these links seems unnecessarily odd. I am used to horizontal oriented menus, and vertically oriented menus, this one snakes around so that the top of the second column is a continuation of the first column. I am used to this in newspapers, magazines, even on the web there are places where this is appropriate, but a menu is not one of them. Duplicating the search box doesn't help this situation.

southwest flight reservation

Southwest is one of the few airlines that doesn't suck. I am down with their no first class, first-come first-serve seating, and dirt cheap flights. I am not down with letting programmers design your UI for possibly the most important part of the entire website. I am not asking for beautiful, I am just asking for usable.

Riviera Hotel reservation calendar

I was looking at a calendar for room reservations and saw this gem. There are literally thousands of color options available and they choose 4 colors a shade apart.