The Daily Sucker

Submitter comments: I hadn’t been to your site in months (sorry), but as soon as I saw this page, I thought instantly of you…and by the way, thanks for making me a better user interface designer. I design (among other things) realtime UIs, not strictly web pages, but most of what you talk about does apply.

Anyway, this site is a home decor web site, the furniture catalog part, and here’s what got in my way as I tried to use it:

• Very dark background (OK by itself) divided by very light blue lines and title bars.
• Titles IN the bars are bold white letters on light blue. The contrast is low, and the “fatness” of the text makes the title difficult to read.
• The navigation bar at the top is more of the same, but has varying shades of light blue background. The minimum width of the page seems to be about 1280 or so - it uses up the entire width of my monitor.
• The products displayed are tiny thumbnails almost lost in the sea of white text, blue bars and lines, and input text boxes.
• The page is huge from top to bottom - 11 full screens top to bottom at 1280 x 1024.
• If you follow a link to an individual product page, it’s just as wide. You have to scroll sideways to read.

I’m a programmer. And now that I was thinking of your web site I began to wonder if I had a winner. I clicked ‘view source’ and also looked at the thumbnails. The source doesn’t use a BASE tag, and every single IMG and HREF has the full URL of the target— 240 times (yes, I counted!) That’s >100Kbytes spent needlessly repeating this string: http://www.mycountryhomedecor.com

Then I saw the thumbnails weren’t really thumbnails. The ‘catalog’ page had downloaded the full size images of all 44 products and scaled them down to thumbnail size. The images range from 10-30 kbytes in size, totaling 805Kb for about 50kbytes of thumbnails.

This may not be the suckiest user interface ever, but it’s in the running for the most wasteful of bandwidth! The only POSSIBLE excuse would be that the code is generated by a drag’n'drop tool.

There’s lots more badness here, but I’m positive you’re better at seeing it than me.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Oh, I wouldn’t say I’m better than you.

I often complain about how poorly web logos are constructed. This logo is just text on an image. Very strange — it’s like an anti-logo. Since my biggest pet peeve about web design is the lack of contrast, the submitter’s comments are spot on.

Doesn’t anyone at the organization look at the final result and say “I can’t read the menu.”

The home page has even more contrast issues. The black text and the blue links on the green background are hard to read. I also don’t understand why the text is centered.

My Country Home Decor (Furniture page)