HCI- bad user interfaces

we were given homework this week, to document interfaces that are frustrating to use and discuss why they are this way. Any family reading, feel free to skip this one it’s mostly just me complaining about issues I wish weren’t issues.

it’s important to note that I am an iPad user, and instead of a standard laptop, I carry an iPad. I prefer the versatility an iPad has and for the most part find it much better for me than a standard laptop. But this schoolyear, I noticed that there are some compatibility issues with using an iPad for school. There are some school required programs that just don’t work on iPad, like proctorio which is a proctoring service I had to use for tests. Another one was called “myMathLab” with “Stat Crunch” which mostly worked on my laptop except for the dropdown menus which- for no apparent reason- worked until you needed a sidebar menu which only worked with computer mice/trackpads or keyboards, and not by touch like the rest of the program worked. I spent the whole semester needing to use arrow keys to manage any sort of statistical function I wanted to do in Stat Crunch. Another frustrating interface was called Mastering Assignments which is a homework system I needed for most of my science classes. Mastering Assignments uses interactive assignments that the student must complete, and while it worked fine for most things, it did not for drag to match questions. Because dragging a pen or finger on an iPad is an indicator to scroll the screen (such as one might do with a mouse or a scroll bar) when one would click an item to drag it to the place it needed to go, the item could be activated and would drag… but so would the screen. As the item moved, the screen moved so moving the item to the place it needed to be on screen was very frustrating. I don’t have visuals to explain any of these situations, but suffice to say it was very irritating. about half of my assignments had questions that required using the drag function, so I had to use an alternate computer whenever I wanted to finish those parts of the assignment. The compatibility issues of many applications with iPad makes the user experience occasionally very frustrating.

The other very annoying UI issue I’ve been dealing with is on my Xbox. When I arrived here, my husband set up the Xbox for me, but since we didn’t have internet yet, I had to deal with that myself. Setting up the internet was very irritating. I attempted using my personal log in code for about 20 minutes before giving up and using guest access. Guest access works fine, except that it takes 10 minutes to load, requires typing on an Xbox, which just isn’t pleasant, and then after the internet says its working and you leave the “internet access” menu, it’ll spend 5 minutes trying to load something, only to tell you that the internet isn’t in fact working, and you have to try again. After three tries I realized that it’s because you first have to sign into the guest internet, authenticate the access on a separate tab (both of which I was doing) and THEN you have to go to yet a third tab and VERIFY that you authenticated the internet access. Nowhere does it indicate that this is a necessary step, but I have yet to get the internet to work without doing this step, which leads me to believe that it is. And while this is annoying, the more frustrating part is that it must be done every single time one wishes to use the internet on the Xbox. Because I’ve been tasked to play a lot of video games for research purposes, (BTW, the cool factor to getting paid to play video games has not, and will not go away) I am using my Xbox a lot, so I have to sign in to the internet a lot and it is tedious. Anyway those are some of the bad user interfaces I’v head to deal with. That’s all! Thanks for listening to me complain.