Toy 03 · Silly

Is It Bad UX, or Am I Just Old?

"You submit the screen. The crowd votes. I rule."

Weekly · every Friday

Readers submit baffling interfaces, the crowd votes, and I deliver the Friday Verdict.

Surface vibeLaughing at a TV remote together. Big Text Is Free.
Profound layerSeparating "this is broken" from "this is just unfamiliar to me," the call every product team gets wrong.

This week's vote

Ruling Friday 2026-10-17 · Submitted by Jason, from the show floor

The conference matchmaking app that hasn't changed in years

The screen: A B2B conference's official meeting-request app. Requests, calendars, and a team of sellers trying to coordinate who is meeting whom.

The gripe: Meeting requests go missing. Calendars disagree with each other. There is no way for teammates to see each other's bookings, so three of us show up to one meeting and nobody shows up to another. It has looked exactly like this for years.

Bad UX
You're just old
Vote is local to your browser until the tally is wired up. The verdict is mine either way.

Past verdicts

2026-10-10 · Bad UX

Discord has no "remind me later"

The screen: A Discord message you want to come back to.

The gripe: Someone asks me a question in a busy server. I can't answer now. There is no way to mark the message so it comes back to me. My workaround: copy the link, email it to myself, snooze the email.

The ruling: Bad UX. Email solved this with snooze a decade ago, Slack has a reminder on every message, and the workaround is three apps long. Being old would mean I can't find the feature. This is the feature not existing.

Credit: Jason · Original post, October 2024

2026-10-03 · You're just old

Email now equals "Other"

The screen: A new app's install survey: how did you hear about us?

The gripe: I try apps from the email newsletters I'm on. I'm being helpful and answering their attribution questionnaire. Email is not an option. The choices are social networks, an ad, a friend, and Other.

The ruling: I'm just old. For my employees under thirty, and my kids, email is where receipts go to die. The app knows its audience and I am not it. The one note: if you let people pick Other, give them a text field, or you've just learned nothing.

Credit: Jason · Original post, November 2024

2026-09-26 · Bad UX

Where is the "Book a Haircut" button?

The screen: A barbershop's website, on a phone, on a Saturday morning.

The gripe: I'm trying to book my son and me for a haircut this weekend. There is a hero image, a story about the founder, an Instagram feed, and a map. There is money in my hand. There is no button.

The ruling: Bad UX, and part of my occasional "why do you hate money?" series. The site has one job and buried it. Age doesn't enter into it. My teenage son couldn't find it either.

Credit: Jason · Original post, November 2025

2026-09-19 · Both

The context-sensitive button that does nothing

The screen: A context-sensitive action prompt in a modern console game, recorded while replaying a game I worked on.

The gripe: The prompt appears sometimes, but not every time the action is available. When I press the button outside the right spot, nothing happens and nothing tells me why. After a while I stop pressing it at all.

The ruling: Both. Old: I was playing in ultra-wide and missed the prompt because I was focused on the task, which is exactly when even the best prompt fails. Bad UX: a button that does nothing and says nothing trains the player to ignore it. Silence is a lesson too. Make it the lesson you meant.

Credit: Jason · Original post and clip, November 2022

Submit a screen

Form not wired up yet. For now, email a screenshot to [email protected].

Co-op variant: Versus Mode

PlaceholderPlaceholder. Same clip, two verdicts, recorded before we talk. Then we argue. The age gap between us is a feature, not a bug.

Versus Mode: a guest Stacker twenty years younger than me watches the same inventory screen I do. We lock in Bad UX or Just Old before either of us speaks. Then the fight.

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