Wednesday, August 27, 2008

OT: Interface pet peeves

When talking about badly designed UI’s age verification interfaces surely deserve a few (thousand) words.

The basic premise of age verification controls is quite bizarre in itself. Somehow, somewhere, someone got the bright idea that the best way to weed out those not old enough to handle mature content is to ask for their birth date. Yeah.
Next up is the fact that 99 out of a 100 controls will use the dreaded drop down menus for day, month and year selection. Drop down menus are the worst UI invention since, well ever – but that’s another story. I guess using a calendar to choose a date would be too radical.
And last but not least, the vast majority of controls out there list years in a descending order. This means that 2008 (or the year the page was put up) is the first choice offered. How many less-then-one-year olds are using the internet these days? And are they really looking for mature content?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

i like......