I've interacted with canva twice, now. Once was last year, and it took 30 seconds for me to remember how fucking much I hate that fucking trash fire of an excuse for a document platform.

Zoom doesn't work (in desktop anyway). Search doesn't work unless I'm looking at the correct page; it only searches that page, not the full document (in this case, a 20+ page conference program). The only way I can go from page to page is clicking the shitty little left-right arrows, to go forward or back one page at a time. Can't save the page without bizarre workarounds (e.g., hundreds of screeshots).

Someone looked at documents, like Word or Gdocs, and said, "What if we made it really, really bad, basically useless? Genius!" Presumably they have made ten million dollars from creating an absolutely terrible version of something that has existed for decades.

(I am not particularly interested in any clever ways I can make Canva do what I want, unless it's "you click the usability button and then everything works". I won't see this shitshow of a platform for another year, at least, and I managed to wrestle the information I need from it. I don't want to learn new skills to use what should be fall-off-a-log usable; I want the people organizing this to choose something better)

#canva #shittydesign #baddesign #ux #complaint #rant

I would like to propose a new rule for life.

"Each item of flat pack furniture that an individual assembles is more badly designed, needlessly complicated and more difficult to assemble than the previous item the assembled."

I spent most of the morning assembling 2 garden chairs. The actual process involved dropping every single screw, nut, bolt and washer at least 3 times, cutting myself, discovering I had assembled a subsection back to front then taking it apart then putting it back together back to front all over again TWICE, hitting things out of frustration and lots and lots of swearing.

Two separate sub-section on each chair I was assembling this morning required me to align a "nut", a bracket, a washer, a piece of wood with a hole drilled in it, another washer, another part of the bracket, and a "bolt". The "bolt" didn't go all the way through the whole assembly as the "nut" was one of those fasteners that look like a bolt but have an internal female thread to accept the male bolts thread. That meant I had to align the "nut" plus its washer and the "bolt" plus washer independently only to discover that the threads were not engaging when I turned the fucking allen key a few times. I would run out of fingers trying to keep things aligned before doing up the whole sorry mess. I seriously thought about holding the long end of the fucking allen key in my teeth more than once.

I fucking hate allen keys with a passion. There is no reason for their existence. What is so wrong with conventional nuts and bolts anyway? Oh yes... allen keys are cheaper to make than spanners.

I bet the people who design this shite give themselves a little pat on the back when they create a way of assembling something that is almost impossible for anyone to achieve. These bastards probably get a little sexual thrill when they put "requires minimal assembly" on the instructions that you have to download as the fuckers are too cheap to print 5 sheets of A4 themselves.

There is no court in the land that would convict me of the crimes I would commit if I ever meet one of these sadistic motherfuckers. My defense would be to open a big card board box of flat pack furniture, hold up a fucking allen key and the piece of paper with a QR code on it that says download instructions.

#FlatPackFurniture #SelfAssembly #ShittyDesign #FuckAllenKeys

Look at this. Look at it.

The company is 23 years old and lists $15M/year in revenue.

The UI is so nonstandard and unintuitive that every year I talk a few people through screams and tears.

I like the product in a general sense; it basically works. However, it requires far more frustration, clicks, and hyper-specific, non-transferable knowledge than is reasonable to do that.

#sonasystems #educorporate #monopoly #ish #shittydesign #webdesign #highered

Reason 237 I fucking hate #brightspace: they lock all conversation about their product behind a soft paywall (e.g. I get stupid emails like this where I can't just see what Yi Yan.L.782 said). Every fucking interaction has to be on their platform, under their control. Much of the content is hidden from search engines.

Of course, once you get into their little walled garden you discover that searching for unfixed bugs or unmet feature requests is only possible on a one-term-at-a-time search basis. There's almost no way to see if related issues exist.

No surprise: when I dove into this last year and spent a couple of hours trying to answer some questions about basic, industry-standard functionality (spoiler: the answer to all of them was "No"), I figured out that they have hundreds or thousands of unresolved issues going back 20 years.

This company is worth a billion dollars.

Edit: I clicked the link. I did. The message was "We have also had this question. Does anyone else know..."

Holy fuck this is stupid.

#lms #highered #enshittification #monopoly #shittydesign

This post might seem like it's about #brightspace (the #lms the #suny system is forcing us all to use), but it's actually about having bosses who hold you in such contempt that they can't even be bothered to explain why they paid millions of dollars for a product that doesn't work while telling you to use it or else.

Today's Brightspace issue: hundreds of questions with images (trapped within BS's little walled garden of impenetrable database locations) that appear only as placeholders, but might or might not render when placed into a student quiz. The odds seem so far to be about 50/50.

There is no way to know which items are affected *even when I edit each of the hundreds of items by hand*, because I see this placeholder for MOST of the questions but then the students sometimes see the image. Sometimes not.

It's silent failure. No flags, no checks, no indications of what's wrong. No way to know if any changes will fix things.

Other silent failures: BS will cheerfully tell you it has imported your 5,000 or so items (painstakingly created over the past decade) from your previous LMS--which was also mandated--and then just *won't tell you* that hundreds or thousands of them did not import because BS simply choked and pooped or because BS doesn't even have the functionality to use those question types.

I fucking hate this LMS, but I really hate the fact that the people in charge think so little of me and 30,000 of my colleagues that they shove shit like this at us and tell us to pretend it works.

#professor #rant #highered #broken #shittydesign #baddesign #badsoftware #capturedmarket

Dear Google Docs,

Thank you so very much for your principled stand against (checks notes) using a mouse. Now I'm spending half an hour searching for how to do your fucking thing when the fucking CTRL keys on my keyboard aren't working, instead of getting my fucking work done.

#googledocs #baddesign #shittydesign #design #ui #google #fuck

Is this what desperation smells like? FB uses deceptive UI bullshit to drive traffic to #threads

#facebook #fuckmeta #meta #ux #badux #deceptive #shittydesign #antiuser

Award-winning podcast creators circa 2015: We don't really know what "mixing" or "mastering" mean, but what if we all mumbled kind of fast, half as loud as these cool ambient sounds we recorded, and then randomly started screaming at full volume? Awesome, right? Audiences will love it. We are going to win so many Webbies.

#podcasts #audioengineering #sounddesign #shittydesign #baddesign #accessibility #fail #hearingloss