The worst interface I ever seen….
With all apologies to Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, I present to you one of the worst interfaces I've ever seen –> WHATYOUWRITE.COM. First, when you get to the site, your browser window is resized to… well, I'm not sure, but it's bigger than my screen (which is set to 800 by 600.) Then, after you resize your window back to something comfortable, for "navigation" you're faced with 5 drop down menus, and one image that sometimes is and sometimes isn"t a link. There's a large image, which while often interesting, is never a link. And there's never any copy in regards to what the hell it is, so you've got to guess at which picture it is on the dropdowns. If you can first figure out what category it is of course. And forget about finding out what's new. The only hope you have of that is via memory- piecing together what you have and haven't seen. Did I mention that every link opens a new window; or that, since everything is in a drop down menu you have no clues as to what you've already seen; or that you can't even directory browse? Ad banner popup windows, did I cover those?
Why go on like this? It's a perfect example of poor, overworked design getting in the way of what users want. Serving up a gallery of images is simple design- thumbnails, decent organization and back and next buttons. Is that so hard? The crappy thing about all this is WhatYouWrite.com has one of my favorite collections of New York City graffiti photos on the Internet, but every time I visit I just give up before I've probably seen a third of what's new. I just can't be bothered fighting that hard with a web site.