The Worst Interface Sin

One of the small bugs I squashed last week was one rogue link to vacation rentals on the Spanish site. We don't have vacation rentals in Spanish yet so the link would bounce and go to hotels. Faking out the user is terrible user experience.

But that's a very small version of how the grocery store was screwing with me today. I weakened in my anti automatic checkout stance and tried it again. First I put my own bags in the bagging area. It asked as I started "are you using your own bags?" so I pressed yes and it beeped. Then nothing happened. Basically the are you using your own bags button beeps and then does nothing until you take your own bags out. Awesome.

I put them on the floor eventually and started stacking things in the bagging area to transfer them when I finished. I got to the parsley, and rather than looking up the number on the tiny twist inside the bag, I looked up parsley through the interface, which was easy. Unfortunately, on pressing "flat parsley" it responded that it didn't know what I meant. What was the button for then? And extra exciting, this tripped the "unknown item" flag which meant that after rooting through the bag and looking up the number I was in need manager mode and could not finish and pay.

Nice interface design! I'll be sure to use a real human in the future.