Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money? Hey all,
Gathering data for a potential blog post. |
Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money? Hey all,
Gathering data for a potential blog post. |
The UI/UX is still horrible though.
I also find it ridiculous they have some much advertising on it - both buyers and sellers are producing revenue through seller fees and paypal transactions. Why do they need ads as well?
I've tried to use other selling sites but always end up back at ebay as they have far more stuff for sale, and more buyers.
Or perhaps some of us are?
That's a fairly lazy question, and I cannot see how it would really start a good conversation.
In which case you could create a better competing app and it wouldn't matter.
And yet, 25 minutes and 42 comments.
I do stand corrected though :-)
Their webapp and mobile app are full of lies and bugs. Sometimes they won't take your money but they say they did, sometimes they take 5x extra money from your account, etc. Making billions though.
It is one of the most unintuitive design I have seen. It only works because we're trained to it's quirkiness.
I also feel the UX is horrible because it will often log you out and demand that you log in again if you have performed a set number of actions repeatedly.
That and the fact that most themes/plugins are coded by juniors, in the best case...
So, yeah, it “just works” as long as you don’t actually pretend to use it for something useful.
For what it's worth, it has made me say "Wow, that is really cool and useful!" more than a few times but also very often "WTF! Why does this take so long! This is a common operation!" and "Why is this so unnecessarily complex!"
The API is SOAP and routinely takes 5+ seconds to do a common operation like "Create order" - and ad hoc searches can take minutes.
Business people like it because it gets them every critical piece of business operations data they need at their finger tips but also hate it because of the hundreds of thousands they ultimately pay consultants to deal with the complexity.
Runner up: Jira
A lot of people say Wordpress but I think a lot of the Wordpress UI is good design. Which is part of why it's popular. It is just really slow (unless you spend a LOT of time optimizing). So Netsuite wins for being both slow AND poorly designed.
Edit: That said I can't say that I wouldn't recommend Netsuite. If you are a multi-national corporation (or even a large domestic one) and sell or manufacture a physical product, and have the time and money to pay the licensing fees and the consultants it does everything you could possibly want and more. If someone asked me for a recommendation I'd say: "It's great but don't expect it to be perfect day one. It will take a year with possibly multiple full time consultants to get everything where you want it to be."
Many things are arbitrarily complex. But Atlassian constantly gives items of differing importance the same level of attention, in a shotgun blast of UI.
("Dreckstool" = sh*tty tool)
Ima stop now, cause it still makes me mad.
Recently (may be a few months ago), MS upgraded Skype to make it "better". I must upgrade Skype since old client stopped working as they break backward compatibility.
After upgrade, new Skype started using a lot of CPU, memory and disk IO. To the point that I can't work in browser while running Skype. If you launch Skype, it started very slowly. Since I still have HDD, I can hear scream of my HDD during heavy Skype launch. New Skype is so bloated and slow that, I had to remove it because I didn't want to torture myself and my poor old laptop.
You may say that I have to upgrade hardware but I find this argument quite annoying because Skype is just a messenger and video/voice call app. This functionality worked perfectly well for years and now just because of Skype developers, I have to upgrade my hardware in order to use the same app with the same functionality.
In the bigger picture, I see that modern apps have a tendency to be fat and bloated. And it looks like many developers are totally OK with that.
I would recommend Skype developers read this:
The page loads fairly quickly for me, and the design is highly optimized. Not optimized for users, mind you, but optimized for profitability.
If you don't like Facebook, that's one thing but it's hardly fair to say they're slow or poorly designed.
It's slow and buggy and awful to use on most Android phones for most of history. It sucks the CPU and battery while you're not using it and slows your whole phone down.
> hardly fair to say they're slow or poorly designed.
No it's completely fair and totally true. The Facebook apps are really badly designed and so are the websites.
EDIT: typo
man you have got to experience that one
It's dominant in its space and definitely belongs on this list.
As someone that has created and destroyed so many blogs, it was easy to get going, choose a theme, and post. At one point, they may have gotten $10-20 from me so I could use my own domain. Not sure how they make their other money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_health_record#Barri...
I forget, but I think there was some criticism that came out in a major paper about Epic Systems a couple years back. They all seem to be a mess (and salesperson's dream).
That's another case of bad design. Intentionally making the webapp worse for you by removing perfectly good features so they can extract more $/user on average.
They make lots of money and the make very poorly designed and user hostile software.
+1000 to JIRA as a response to this. I'd probably support confluence here too but every company y I've worked with killed it one the WYSWYG editor became mandatory and all of engineering refused to use it.
It's a pain to use.