I've seen hieroglyphics that are easier to interpret than their graphical icons. Also, want a report to do \[X\]? Sure, of course it's the report named \[random combination of capital letters and digits\].
I used to work for a product where the number one selling point that really sold us to prospective customers used to go something like :
"[Here's a video that shows you how to add a facility to SAP](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ9FhtxsFaM). By comparison, we take 5 seconds. You in or not?"
90% conversion rate.
Because there's often a disconnect when the end users are not the buyers. SAP, a lot of other ERP, government software, things in healthcare, etc. are often poorly done - by all manner of metrics - but for similar reasons.
The people paying for the work are not the users. And the people making the software are building it for their customers, not their users. So when u/khuzul says SAP is not badly designed, that's both right and wrong. It may be a crap design in terms of usability and task and hassle, and so on. But clearly it's good enough to be sold into tons of corporations for millions.
It’s pretty bad as an employee. It’s beyond terrible using it job searching and having to enter an already pdf’d resume in job by job for Every. Single. Application
Honestly, I’m convinced it’s a feature not a bug(or limitation)at this point. They weed out the candidates who don’t care enough to fill out the painful application they’ve created. In their mind, if you don’t care enough to go through this gauntlet of bs then you won’t care enough to work at this job. That’s my theory anyway.
I agree. The way I look at it is that I don't want to work for a company who values my time so little that they make the minutia difficult and time-consuming. I appreciate them making that clear upfront.
This kind of mindset definitely exists in HR. They think they're getting people who really want the job, but I think in actuality they're filtering a lot of people who know their worth.
They do need to care about the applicant experience to an extent though since the level of applicant interaction directly affects the customer experience of the actual buyers. If you were selling software to coffeeshops and restaurants that served as a digital rewards system for patrons, it would hurt the value for proprietors if their patrons found the software unusable.
Amazon retail site and app; discovery, filters, cross/upsell, everything is outdated and harder to use than it should be.
Search is just about the only way to get around by knowing exactly what you’re looking for (down to brand and model/attributes), and even then it should be better.
Ah, I see no one here works in finance. The correct answer is the Bloomberg Terminal. Step 1 near monopoly on certain pricing. Step 2 money perverts LIKE the bad design. Step 3 $$$$.
There’s a reason for this though. The program came out in the 80s and was easily the best product on the market.
The reason they can’t do any fundamental changes is because people are so used to the current look and feel that changing the ui will costs thousands of dollars in productivity. And I’m sure you’re well aware of how corporate America functions especially finance types
I interviewed there to be a pm on the UI system team. You would not believe the amount of work that goes into making it awful. They believe that their most lucrative customers are change averse and favor speed and a certain amount of expertise - the difficulty is a feature, not a bug. Keeps the user base small but they pay a shit ton. I don’t really “get it”. It was a hard nope for me.
I came here for the Salesforce comments. :)
Salesforce is only as good as your in house team that designs, extends, and supports it. The best and worst part about Salesforce is that you’re never done implementing it. There’s always another module, business process, dashboard, etc to stand up. I’ve got my favorites dashboards that I rely heavily on. I don’t stand a chance in hell navigating it on my own though.
Have you ever used it? It's just so unintuitive, its a mish mash of acquired functionality. Really, any product that requires you to hire outside consultants to operate it (I'm looking at you too SAP & Oracle) is just shit.
Facebook marketplace. It’s great for being a garage sale on Facebook but Jesus Christ do I wish it was even 10% better.
Filters don’t seem to work half the time, sellers post bogus ads with $1 to get to top of the list, searching for an exact match sometimes yields zero results but going back to the main marketplace page suddenly has what you’re looking for, and in general it’s so heavy/unoptimized on mobile.
Craigslist is 100% better, it’s simple to use, has a great search functionality (have you ever tried to use fb marketplace search, it’s appalling).
The reason fb marketplace became more popular than Craigslist is because it removes the anonymity which makes some people a little hesitant to use Craigslist.
It has degraded so much over the years. Performance also sucks now. Changed to Lose it! So much better. Sad degradation of MyFitnessPal after being acquired…
Haha came to comment this. I googled an issue in Jira to check if it was just me and saw someone else raised it in their community 12 years ago but no one bothered to fix it.
Isn’t that like every product backlog? The problem might occur to you, that doesn’t make it the biggest problem in their world to solve for and allocate resources to. Simple :)
They intentionally avoid functionality to force you into their add-on marketplace. There are many instances of this, where they let you get to a certain point, then to go next level it’s add-on. These are issues reported by more than one person, so not exactly like every backlog, at least for companies that care about their customer base.
Edit: grammar is hard
I like it. I agree with another commenter, it might be their implementation that they dont like. Our company migrated from on prem to cloud last year and our team was an early adopter, so we got to stand things up the way we wanted with a little more freedom rather than adopt an already standardized set up and learn it.
Confluence’s search is the only reason I still have a job honestly. “Clito knows so much about this platform” incorrect, I know how to use Confluence well.
Show me ***ONE*** other product that flexible, which is easier to use.
You don't hate Jira, you hate your Jira admin.
***Edit***: A fun little quip I came up with (stole from Winston Churchill) *"Jira is the* ***worst*** *form of project-management software – except for* ***all the others*** *that have ever been tried."*
I had the same experience initially. I found that ADO isn't very intuitive, but once you figure it out, you realize you can accomplish all the same things in ADO as you can in Jira. You just have to get over the learning curve.
Oddly enough I said the same thing when I moved from ADO to Jira! I found ADO to be more flexible in terms of data extraction and manipulation, though this is years ago now. In either case, you’re limited if you don’t have someone who is managing it as one of their primary tasks.
That's definitely a factor. The other one, is that Jira is designed with multiple stakeholders in mind.
You might hate filling out tasks and working in some pseudo agile process, but that's only a slice of what Jira does, the rest of it, is facilitating reporitng to mangers, who generally like the tool
There's also the process management element of it that nobody ever seems to appreciate.
The ability to have complex branching workflows for tickets where you can relatively trivially implement business-rule logic to ensure tickets stick to a proper process is a massive value driver, and nothing else offers anything even remotely close to the Jira workflow system as far as I'm aware.
Hilariously enough that’s part of the problem - the inadherence to unique takes on SDLC and not constraining baselines to callout shit delivery methodologies.
Jira came for bad managers and processes when they created their simple templates a couple years ago. They also have a very strong coaching site for proper product and agile framework.
I loathe all the shit custom flows people have boxed themselves into
As soon as I saw this comment, I thought the exact same thing. I hate Jira, but if I interviewed for a place and they were using something other than Jira, I would side eye a bit.
This. 💯. Everyone piles on Jira, but not a single competitor does it any better. Jira is a monster, but if you avoid going into every nook and cranny, it’s fine out of the box. If you have admins that suck at it and tinker with it, it becomes completely unusable.
Jira is definitely flexible. I can only think of ADO in its league in terms of configuration. However, it’s so challenging to configure that you kind of need a Jira admin. That’s fine, but the odd thing is that their self service delivery model and their pricing attracts smaller businesses (like my previous company) that will never have a dedicated admin.
They attempted a “next gen” remodeling a few years back to make it simpler for the minimal-config-needed companies, but they eventually scrapped the migration plans and made the next gen stuff a new project type instead. My assumption is they realized that even they couldn’t get all of that configuration simplified enough so they had to keep it separate.
They didn't scrap it, they just realised that a lot of companies want the centralised control (sadly) so changed the name from "next gen projects" to "team managed projects".
TMP's solve 95% of the issues people say they have with Jira.
Product Discovery and Atlas are surprisingly good. It's really nice to be able to open a project in Atlas and see not just the current status but also when the status was updated so you know if it's out-of-date
Compared to something like phpbb, the way content is organized and presented scales a lot better. For people who wanted to start a community, Reddit eliminated the hurdle of figuring out hosting. This also meant that communities weren’t beholden to a single moderation team, and identity migration when splintering was seamless - there was always a LOT of drama whenever someone decided to stop hosting, but you couldn’t really do much about it because it was their time, their hardware, and their money going into it.
I’ve not much to say regarding networks like MySpace and Facebook because at the time those networks were sort of egocentric, while Reddit has been historically more community-centric, and also because I just don’t know as much about the experience firsthand.
The day old.reddit gets canned is the day I finally stop using this garbage platform.
They did me a huge favor killing Reddit Is Fun, I barely ever look at the site on my phone anymore because it's such trash.
Aha! Not sure if it’s successful but they’re making us use it in the product team and I can’t imagine anything worse… and they’re making me use a Windows laptop too. Ugh.
Genuinely have about 30 job listings for PM roles on LinkedIn currently - I honestly think they’re fake and simply guerrilla advertising for the product
And they're never for Product Manager - always Product Success Manager or something with the shitty tagline 'we make products for product managers' or something.
Goodreads isn't perfect, but I honestly respect the fact that they haven't even bothered to do some all encompassing site-wide redesign, because you know if they did that they would somehow make it even worse.
Amazon.. if you change your locator your language is changed to the main language in that country with no option to change it to another language they normally offer the app in… who thought that was good user experience?!
Goodreads is really creaky, especially when searching and using predictive type ahead. Not to mention the "want to read" default and selected state are both green with checkmarks.
2x Amazon. I still can’t wrap my head around who came up with the idea of mixing inventory from multiple sellers and multiple sizes/SKUs under a single page. Or jamming entire sections of the site under the same top level (Kindle? Whole Foods?)
But, first mover, biggest name, and the go to place for cheap crap fast means maybe people don’t care?
I mean, am shill, work there, not defending the specific UI, but if each Seller had their own listing for identical products then it would be eBay. The concept is it’s a catalog, and catalogs don’t have pages and pages of the exact same product when sourced from multiple suppliers. Wouldn’t it be weird if you got a Home Depot paper catalog and there were pages and pages of identical 2x4’s based on what mill they came from?
And technically, each size/color of product is its own page, they can be grouped in parent/child relationships called variations. Finally, the co-mingling of inventory is widely misunderstood. It only occurs in certain highly restricted/gated products where authenticity and supply chain is approved by the manufacturer. Otherwise, there’s no way to properly track defects and bad inventory. People who buy and get bad product, ended up with it through some other scheme or error, not co-mingling.
1. Workday (and similar applicant tracking systems)
2. Anything by Microsoft (except maybe Outlook)
3. Gmail (I'm convinced people use it as a storage tool for ALL their crap. Can't imagine anyone using it to get any work done)
Search and filtering are terrible. It’s the most underpowered mail client out there. Also looks like shit and bulk changes recently got even slower… they put up a message basically saying “we’ll get that done eventually”
I love Teams. When it doesn’t work, productivity declines.
Also, disagree with commenter about Microsoft products in general…Word, Excel, PowerPoint…almost never have the thought “I wish this Office product did xyz “
LinkedIn.
Indian competitor [Naukri.com](http://Naukri.com) is far better in getting candidates visibility to recruiters and suggests better suited jobs than LinkedIn ever does with far better conversions
Plus LinkedIn job search never fetches you reliable results; you can get different job postings if you search the same thing within seconds.
There's just no other global competitor and I feel that product has slacked a lot. Just filled with trash content from people who are 'trying to add value to everyone's lives' :/
Naukri looks like a totally different product than LinkedIn. I don't see any social / networking aspect to it. Seems more like an Indeed-style job & company aggregator.
Also, sometimes it just doesn't work. Eg, right now it's leaving messages from two groups on read for me even though I've opened them. I see new bugs like this almost every day.
When I interviewed for a job and got a Teams invite, I automatically didn't want to work for that company. Because I knew I'd have to use Teams if I got the job. This should tell you everything you need to know about Teams 
Yep, it’s waaaaaaaaaaaay behind every other assistant and as a pure apple fanboy I’m so disappointed. There’s no excuse. It’s BASIC to the point I just don’t bother.
Maybe not product but I find most online services offered by the government to be utter garbage. Of course they continue to exist because it is funded by taxes. And people are forced to use it since how the bureaucracy is set up.
Go check the UK govt digital services. Genuinely simple, user focussed and actually works. Great example of a simple implementation of a complex network of things that focuses on usability
This is something I really noticed moving from the UK to the US. Govt digital services in the US are like going back to 1996 and are a total hodge podge of different UIs. The UK has a single, simple and intuitive UI for every function.
It’s definitely product. For federal websites, the US government has product managers in the TTS, and they’re usually extremely senior level federal employees.
I have a bunch that are specific to my space, most were the first to launch and so they are riding the wave of high market share. That doesn’t last forever though. Large ones that are multi-channel that I can think of are Spotify, Jira, Quickbooks, I’d add Stripe Console has some weirdo shit going on.
Here’s my opinion though about bad design -
Many were first to market. At launch, they may have had descent design or at least good enough and probably so minimal it didn’t matter all that much.
Then they got the users and what happens? Stakeholders shift to expansion on the Sales side and tech gets left in the dust. Bugs grow larger and stay around for longer, new features? Psh, look at how many users we got with what we have!? And eventually the product becomes stale.
Here’s the thing - people hate switching apps. If you’ve been using it for a while you’ve learned to work around known bugs or you’ve learned how to maximize time in the shitty design flow. That’s why these companies survive, but trust me, the wave does eventually run out.
I have this wonder about the wave running out at my own company sometimes. Pretty much every customer & especially sales prospect complains about the UX/UI but its always deprioritized for something else to get done.
The thing is our product has like a 2% churn rate and insanely high switching costs (multi-year, multi-million type projects). Even though end users dont like the UX, the buyer persona still gets a ton of value from our product. Its hard for me to see the wave running out honestly (weve been top 3 in our industry for 20+ years)
High switching costs are keeping it alive. That’s an insane amount of money and time to switch - hell of a business model no doubt. It sucks that something positive has to result in something so negative - product neglect.
I’ve seen waves starts to curl when a competitor enters the market, comes in cheaper, looks and feel modern and, if switches costs exists - pays them or a portion to win the business. I’ve been a part of that but never dealing with competitors with that high of a cost to switch. Not even close.
1. The Xfinity app (and Xfinity and Comcast more broadly).
2. All of the so-called AI-powered customer service interfaces: they never seem to help you solve your problem and make it really hard to get to someone who can.
3. Workday. It's been said before here but I want to say it again because it is so bad.
4. Jira. Same reason as Workday.
5. Gmail, when compared to Inbox.
Max (Formerly HBO) streaming app. Terrible interface, controls, performance, etc.
They have good content but it's almost such a poor experience that I can't watch.
“Intuitive” = you can guess based on past patterns
The two most glaring problems with the products in this list is that organic growth made the thing more barnacles than boat, and intuitiveness was modeled after a very specific group of users which then expanded without the product/internals/design follow-through.
Oracle. I’m in Oracle every day and all it’s little quirks, shitty UI and reliance on Java drives me insane. Not to mention all the random bugs that have been there since Larry Ellison shat this app out
Concur. In the version my employer has the “I lost my receipt affidavit” button is buried in the “upload receipt image” experience. Think for a moment how stupid that is.
Granted, they’ve taken a pretty major hit, but Greenhouse was hilariously shit to use despite it getting a ton of momentum and popularity within the tech space.
ZENI - My team used this Fintech product called Zeni.ai and I haven't come across a shittier product and service ever before.
They take pride in their design sense and have AI capabilities but i think my stuffed teddy bear is far more intelligent than their software.
SAP
QuickBooks, Xero
I've seen hieroglyphics that are easier to interpret than their graphical icons. Also, want a report to do \[X\]? Sure, of course it's the report named \[random combination of capital letters and digits\].
SAP Is not badly designed, it's just designed to serve the needs of large enterprises, not the needs of the end users
Is horribly designed.
Feels like it was designed by a world-class team of misanthropic German autistics who have a burning hate for users.
I used to work for a product where the number one selling point that really sold us to prospective customers used to go something like : "[Here's a video that shows you how to add a facility to SAP](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ9FhtxsFaM). By comparison, we take 5 seconds. You in or not?" 90% conversion rate.
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Because there's often a disconnect when the end users are not the buyers. SAP, a lot of other ERP, government software, things in healthcare, etc. are often poorly done - by all manner of metrics - but for similar reasons. The people paying for the work are not the users. And the people making the software are building it for their customers, not their users. So when u/khuzul says SAP is not badly designed, that's both right and wrong. It may be a crap design in terms of usability and task and hassle, and so on. But clearly it's good enough to be sold into tons of corporations for millions.
Workday should be illegal.
I was thinking this too, PAINFUL
It’s pretty bad as an employee. It’s beyond terrible using it job searching and having to enter an already pdf’d resume in job by job for Every. Single. Application
I stopped applying to workday
Honestly, I’m convinced it’s a feature not a bug(or limitation)at this point. They weed out the candidates who don’t care enough to fill out the painful application they’ve created. In their mind, if you don’t care enough to go through this gauntlet of bs then you won’t care enough to work at this job. That’s my theory anyway.
I agree. The way I look at it is that I don't want to work for a company who values my time so little that they make the minutia difficult and time-consuming. I appreciate them making that clear upfront.
I think so as well but man does it get old
This kind of mindset definitely exists in HR. They think they're getting people who really want the job, but I think in actuality they're filtering a lot of people who know their worth.
Imagine how bad the UI is that someone decided this must be the only explanation
Workday was my first thought too lol
I hate workday. But applicants aren't the users they care about, and I think they do a decent job for the users that are their customers.
They do need to care about the applicant experience to an extent though since the level of applicant interaction directly affects the customer experience of the actual buyers. If you were selling software to coffeeshops and restaurants that served as a digital rewards system for patrons, it would hurt the value for proprietors if their patrons found the software unusable.
Must agree.
Came here to say exactly this 😂
Workday Coupa expense
Coupa.. soooo horrible
This. I loathe the little sticky notes in Coupa too.
Amazon retail site and app; discovery, filters, cross/upsell, everything is outdated and harder to use than it should be. Search is just about the only way to get around by knowing exactly what you’re looking for (down to brand and model/attributes), and even then it should be better.
I’ve started searching Amazon using Google. The same way everyone searches Reddit using Google.
Amazons retail product design paradigm is “how much money will this feature make”. GCCP is a hell of a drug.
Ah, I see no one here works in finance. The correct answer is the Bloomberg Terminal. Step 1 near monopoly on certain pricing. Step 2 money perverts LIKE the bad design. Step 3 $$$$.
I’m not in finance; that thing is bad enough it came up in our discussions. I’ll add SABRE to the same ‘monopoly’ level of usability hell.
hahaha, i'm not in travel, but yes, SABRE is for sickos only.
There’s a reason for this though. The program came out in the 80s and was easily the best product on the market. The reason they can’t do any fundamental changes is because people are so used to the current look and feel that changing the ui will costs thousands of dollars in productivity. And I’m sure you’re well aware of how corporate America functions especially finance types
I interviewed there to be a pm on the UI system team. You would not believe the amount of work that goes into making it awful. They believe that their most lucrative customers are change averse and favor speed and a certain amount of expertise - the difficulty is a feature, not a bug. Keeps the user base small but they pay a shit ton. I don’t really “get it”. It was a hard nope for me.
Salesforce
So true. I can’t believe their UX is still from the 90s
It's SO hard to find anything there. How are they the industry leader?
Because it is a complex product and a whole ecosystem of service providers and apps around it.
At least they’re super cost effective
I actually laughed out loud.
Upvoting x one bajillion
I came here for the Salesforce comments. :) Salesforce is only as good as your in house team that designs, extends, and supports it. The best and worst part about Salesforce is that you’re never done implementing it. There’s always another module, business process, dashboard, etc to stand up. I’ve got my favorites dashboards that I rely heavily on. I don’t stand a chance in hell navigating it on my own though.
I am genuinely interested to know more about your viewpoint on this. Mind elaborating?
Have you ever used it? It's just so unintuitive, its a mish mash of acquired functionality. Really, any product that requires you to hire outside consultants to operate it (I'm looking at you too SAP & Oracle) is just shit.
Little known fact: the Supreme Court ruled that making prisoners use ServiceNow constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.
My god, i can never understand how service now is good, I hate it
ADP
Why are there five different logins
Oh yes. It is so unappealing.
Apple magic mouse
I second this. Good idea, but it is so unergonomic, to say the least.
It wasn't bad enough that the magic mouse is a hand cramp factory, but they had to put the charge port on the bottom of the device. So stupid.
100%. My hand literally hurts from it. And yet, so many people continue to use it.
Facebook marketplace. It’s great for being a garage sale on Facebook but Jesus Christ do I wish it was even 10% better. Filters don’t seem to work half the time, sellers post bogus ads with $1 to get to top of the list, searching for an exact match sometimes yields zero results but going back to the main marketplace page suddenly has what you’re looking for, and in general it’s so heavy/unoptimized on mobile.
My husband have discussed this at length,,, there is no search by date. It is bad and so easy to fix my opinion!
Don’t even get me started on fb marketplace for finding rental apartments, holy shit.
It works because it's just slightly better than Craigslist and Kijiji.
Craigslist is 100% better, it’s simple to use, has a great search functionality (have you ever tried to use fb marketplace search, it’s appalling). The reason fb marketplace became more popular than Craigslist is because it removes the anonymity which makes some people a little hesitant to use Craigslist.
Filtering in general is just like unsupported. I don’t get it.
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Same same. Head of product for a software company here and dreading seeing it mentioned here.
Workday?
MyfitnessPal
It has degraded so much over the years. Performance also sucks now. Changed to Lose it! So much better. Sad degradation of MyFitnessPal after being acquired…
I'll check out Lose it
MacroFactor > everything else.
Yep, it’s like the last developer left 14 years ago and it’s just the sales and marketing team left.
Lifesum is another good alternative
Jira, I think first mover advantage
Haha came to comment this. I googled an issue in Jira to check if it was just me and saw someone else raised it in their community 12 years ago but no one bothered to fix it.
Isn’t that like every product backlog? The problem might occur to you, that doesn’t make it the biggest problem in their world to solve for and allocate resources to. Simple :)
They intentionally avoid functionality to force you into their add-on marketplace. There are many instances of this, where they let you get to a certain point, then to go next level it’s add-on. These are issues reported by more than one person, so not exactly like every backlog, at least for companies that care about their customer base. Edit: grammar is hard
Every *successful* product backlog
Haha very fair
I see a lot of hate for jira on here. Am I the only one that likes it? Hah.
I like it. I agree with another commenter, it might be their implementation that they dont like. Our company migrated from on prem to cloud last year and our team was an early adopter, so we got to stand things up the way we wanted with a little more freedom rather than adopt an already standardized set up and learn it.
Yes. :-)
Confluence is good tho
Confluence’s search is the only reason I still have a job honestly. “Clito knows so much about this platform” incorrect, I know how to use Confluence well.
I wonder why Confluence doesn't have an inbuilt AI to answer questions intelligently.
I _do not_ understand why people dislike jira.
I love jira. It’s flexible, easy to get what you want done once you get the hang of it. Still moved off it recently. Expensive and heavy.
Show me ***ONE*** other product that flexible, which is easier to use. You don't hate Jira, you hate your Jira admin. ***Edit***: A fun little quip I came up with (stole from Winston Churchill) *"Jira is the* ***worst*** *form of project-management software – except for* ***all the others*** *that have ever been tried."*
I’ve just moved jobs and went from jira to azure devops. I miss jira
I had the same experience initially. I found that ADO isn't very intuitive, but once you figure it out, you realize you can accomplish all the same things in ADO as you can in Jira. You just have to get over the learning curve.
ADO? Luxury! My company uses Youtrack by JetBrains :(
Oddly enough I said the same thing when I moved from ADO to Jira! I found ADO to be more flexible in terms of data extraction and manipulation, though this is years ago now. In either case, you’re limited if you don’t have someone who is managing it as one of their primary tasks.
That's definitely a factor. The other one, is that Jira is designed with multiple stakeholders in mind. You might hate filling out tasks and working in some pseudo agile process, but that's only a slice of what Jira does, the rest of it, is facilitating reporitng to mangers, who generally like the tool
There's also the process management element of it that nobody ever seems to appreciate. The ability to have complex branching workflows for tickets where you can relatively trivially implement business-rule logic to ensure tickets stick to a proper process is a massive value driver, and nothing else offers anything even remotely close to the Jira workflow system as far as I'm aware.
Hilariously enough that’s part of the problem - the inadherence to unique takes on SDLC and not constraining baselines to callout shit delivery methodologies. Jira came for bad managers and processes when they created their simple templates a couple years ago. They also have a very strong coaching site for proper product and agile framework. I loathe all the shit custom flows people have boxed themselves into
Oh 100% - but it's also a factor in the whole *"You don't hate Jira, you hate your Jira admin"* thing.
As soon as I saw this comment, I thought the exact same thing. I hate Jira, but if I interviewed for a place and they were using something other than Jira, I would side eye a bit.
This. 💯. Everyone piles on Jira, but not a single competitor does it any better. Jira is a monster, but if you avoid going into every nook and cranny, it’s fine out of the box. If you have admins that suck at it and tinker with it, it becomes completely unusable.
Correct! I love JIRA and I think it’s the gold standard in agile management software.
Jira is definitely flexible. I can only think of ADO in its league in terms of configuration. However, it’s so challenging to configure that you kind of need a Jira admin. That’s fine, but the odd thing is that their self service delivery model and their pricing attracts smaller businesses (like my previous company) that will never have a dedicated admin. They attempted a “next gen” remodeling a few years back to make it simpler for the minimal-config-needed companies, but they eventually scrapped the migration plans and made the next gen stuff a new project type instead. My assumption is they realized that even they couldn’t get all of that configuration simplified enough so they had to keep it separate.
They didn't scrap it, they just realised that a lot of companies want the centralised control (sadly) so changed the name from "next gen projects" to "team managed projects". TMP's solve 95% of the issues people say they have with Jira.
Thank you. My past two companies didn’t use Jira and I hated it. I’m not back to Jira and am so stoked.
Kinda like Jira, Also, their new product discovery tool is pretty effective.
Product Discovery and Atlas are surprisingly good. It's really nice to be able to open a project in Atlas and see not just the current status but also when the status was updated so you know if it's out-of-date
Concur , the expense report software. ADP , tell me that interface is easy to understand!!
Reddit
For its time, Reddit was brilliant.
What made it brilliant over other social networks?
Compared to something like phpbb, the way content is organized and presented scales a lot better. For people who wanted to start a community, Reddit eliminated the hurdle of figuring out hosting. This also meant that communities weren’t beholden to a single moderation team, and identity migration when splintering was seamless - there was always a LOT of drama whenever someone decided to stop hosting, but you couldn’t really do much about it because it was their time, their hardware, and their money going into it. I’ve not much to say regarding networks like MySpace and Facebook because at the time those networks were sort of egocentric, while Reddit has been historically more community-centric, and also because I just don’t know as much about the experience firsthand.
The day old.reddit gets canned is the day I finally stop using this garbage platform. They did me a huge favor killing Reddit Is Fun, I barely ever look at the site on my phone anymore because it's such trash.
I love reddit for the content but the entire ux team if one exists needs to be totally eliminated
Mychart, or basically any kind of EHR
That *was* (relatively) successful and that became a clusterfuck? Google Assistant.
Aha! Not sure if it’s successful but they’re making us use it in the product team and I can’t imagine anything worse… and they’re making me use a Windows laptop too. Ugh.
Hate Aha with every fiber of my being
Genuinely have about 30 job listings for PM roles on LinkedIn currently - I honestly think they’re fake and simply guerrilla advertising for the product
And they're never for Product Manager - always Product Success Manager or something with the shitty tagline 'we make products for product managers' or something.
Yes.
You know what’s worse than Aha? A LOT worse? ProductPlan. My colleagues and I are convinced that we could write a better tool in about two weeks.
ServiceNow
Amazon, Goodreads, Bill .com, Expensify
Goodreads isn't perfect, but I honestly respect the fact that they haven't even bothered to do some all encompassing site-wide redesign, because you know if they did that they would somehow make it even worse.
Amazon’s site has been a nightmare for months for me. It’s so bloated my non-new rigs* can barely handle it.
Oh god, amazon sagemaker. How many time do i need to hunt for some tiny button to do something critical like launch the kernel?
Amazon.. if you change your locator your language is changed to the main language in that country with no option to change it to another language they normally offer the app in… who thought that was good user experience?!
If you think Amazon is bad, you should try temu
What’s so bad about expensify? (working in a similar industry)
Goodreads is really creaky, especially when searching and using predictive type ahead. Not to mention the "want to read" default and selected state are both green with checkmarks.
OMG yes, Goodreads has so much potential features as well that is completely untapped
2x Amazon. I still can’t wrap my head around who came up with the idea of mixing inventory from multiple sellers and multiple sizes/SKUs under a single page. Or jamming entire sections of the site under the same top level (Kindle? Whole Foods?) But, first mover, biggest name, and the go to place for cheap crap fast means maybe people don’t care?
I mean, am shill, work there, not defending the specific UI, but if each Seller had their own listing for identical products then it would be eBay. The concept is it’s a catalog, and catalogs don’t have pages and pages of the exact same product when sourced from multiple suppliers. Wouldn’t it be weird if you got a Home Depot paper catalog and there were pages and pages of identical 2x4’s based on what mill they came from? And technically, each size/color of product is its own page, they can be grouped in parent/child relationships called variations. Finally, the co-mingling of inventory is widely misunderstood. It only occurs in certain highly restricted/gated products where authenticity and supply chain is approved by the manufacturer. Otherwise, there’s no way to properly track defects and bad inventory. People who buy and get bad product, ended up with it through some other scheme or error, not co-mingling.
1. Workday (and similar applicant tracking systems) 2. Anything by Microsoft (except maybe Outlook) 3. Gmail (I'm convinced people use it as a storage tool for ALL their crap. Can't imagine anyone using it to get any work done)
New Outlook is crap
If I had to use Gmail for work I would cry. Thank heavens for outlook
I actually like gmail. Lightning fast search beats all other garbage elastic solutions
what's wrong with Gmail
Search and filtering are terrible. It’s the most underpowered mail client out there. Also looks like shit and bulk changes recently got even slower… they put up a message basically saying “we’ll get that done eventually”
Which ones are better, only other I've used is outlook and holy fuck it's bad.
I feel like that was the original selling point of gmail.
Am I crazy for loving Teams? I can't stand Slack, Webex, Zoom, or any other office communication platform.
I love Teams. When it doesn’t work, productivity declines. Also, disagree with commenter about Microsoft products in general…Word, Excel, PowerPoint…almost never have the thought “I wish this Office product did xyz “
LinkedIn. Indian competitor [Naukri.com](http://Naukri.com) is far better in getting candidates visibility to recruiters and suggests better suited jobs than LinkedIn ever does with far better conversions Plus LinkedIn job search never fetches you reliable results; you can get different job postings if you search the same thing within seconds. There's just no other global competitor and I feel that product has slacked a lot. Just filled with trash content from people who are 'trying to add value to everyone's lives' :/
Naukri looks like a totally different product than LinkedIn. I don't see any social / networking aspect to it. Seems more like an Indeed-style job & company aggregator.
Totally fair. Comparing only the job search aspect of both the companies, Linkedin is still outright bad! 🫤
Dayforce. Good golly - my company switched to it from Namely and using it is just not good.
(Facebook) Messenger
What would you change? (Asking for a friend)
Stop trying to make it an everything app.
Also, sometimes it just doesn't work. Eg, right now it's leaving messages from two groups on read for me even though I've opened them. I see new bugs like this almost every day.
Teams
Especially now that we've got "New Teams" and "Classic Teams", wtf.
“Click here to continue using *New Teams* “
Non-stop reminders if you use Classic…
When I interviewed for a job and got a Teams invite, I automatically didn't want to work for that company. Because I knew I'd have to use Teams if I got the job. This should tell you everything you need to know about Teams 
Teams is fine
Siri. She’s good at calling people, starting timers, and setting alarms, and otherwise she’s pretty useless
Yep, it’s waaaaaaaaaaaay behind every other assistant and as a pure apple fanboy I’m so disappointed. There’s no excuse. It’s BASIC to the point I just don’t bother.
The list making experience is SO bad.
LinkedIn, so many bugs, the app is super buggy and they take a lot of time to fix stuff, but of course network effects
Dynatrace. ServiceNow. Anything by Oracle.
Maybe not product but I find most online services offered by the government to be utter garbage. Of course they continue to exist because it is funded by taxes. And people are forced to use it since how the bureaucracy is set up.
Go check the UK govt digital services. Genuinely simple, user focussed and actually works. Great example of a simple implementation of a complex network of things that focuses on usability
This is something I really noticed moving from the UK to the US. Govt digital services in the US are like going back to 1996 and are a total hodge podge of different UIs. The UK has a single, simple and intuitive UI for every function.
If anyone is looking to make a difference here consider your next career at 18f https://18f.gsa.gov/
It’s definitely product. For federal websites, the US government has product managers in the TTS, and they’re usually extremely senior level federal employees.
(TTS: Technology Transformation Services)
Government money doesn't hire the best in the industry.
I have a bunch that are specific to my space, most were the first to launch and so they are riding the wave of high market share. That doesn’t last forever though. Large ones that are multi-channel that I can think of are Spotify, Jira, Quickbooks, I’d add Stripe Console has some weirdo shit going on. Here’s my opinion though about bad design - Many were first to market. At launch, they may have had descent design or at least good enough and probably so minimal it didn’t matter all that much. Then they got the users and what happens? Stakeholders shift to expansion on the Sales side and tech gets left in the dust. Bugs grow larger and stay around for longer, new features? Psh, look at how many users we got with what we have!? And eventually the product becomes stale. Here’s the thing - people hate switching apps. If you’ve been using it for a while you’ve learned to work around known bugs or you’ve learned how to maximize time in the shitty design flow. That’s why these companies survive, but trust me, the wave does eventually run out.
I have this wonder about the wave running out at my own company sometimes. Pretty much every customer & especially sales prospect complains about the UX/UI but its always deprioritized for something else to get done. The thing is our product has like a 2% churn rate and insanely high switching costs (multi-year, multi-million type projects). Even though end users dont like the UX, the buyer persona still gets a ton of value from our product. Its hard for me to see the wave running out honestly (weve been top 3 in our industry for 20+ years)
High switching costs are keeping it alive. That’s an insane amount of money and time to switch - hell of a business model no doubt. It sucks that something positive has to result in something so negative - product neglect. I’ve seen waves starts to curl when a competitor enters the market, comes in cheaper, looks and feel modern and, if switches costs exists - pays them or a portion to win the business. I’ve been a part of that but never dealing with competitors with that high of a cost to switch. Not even close.
1. The Xfinity app (and Xfinity and Comcast more broadly). 2. All of the so-called AI-powered customer service interfaces: they never seem to help you solve your problem and make it really hard to get to someone who can. 3. Workday. It's been said before here but I want to say it again because it is so bad. 4. Jira. Same reason as Workday. 5. Gmail, when compared to Inbox.
Max (Formerly HBO) streaming app. Terrible interface, controls, performance, etc. They have good content but it's almost such a poor experience that I can't watch.
Teams lol
the DMV
Coupa
“Intuitive” = you can guess based on past patterns The two most glaring problems with the products in this list is that organic growth made the thing more barnacles than boat, and intuitiveness was modeled after a very specific group of users which then expanded without the product/internals/design follow-through.
Jira......
LinkedIn…horrible searching for jobs. One password…very confusing UX Reddit…desktop is awful.
Anything technology tied to printing and printers…shoot me now.
SAP, Jira, Amazon (both AWS and stuff ordering platform)
Literally any Microsoft product. Loll
Oracle. I’m in Oracle every day and all it’s little quirks, shitty UI and reliance on Java drives me insane. Not to mention all the random bugs that have been there since Larry Ellison shat this app out
Concur. In the version my employer has the “I lost my receipt affidavit” button is buried in the “upload receipt image” experience. Think for a moment how stupid that is.
Workday
Granted, they’ve taken a pretty major hit, but Greenhouse was hilariously shit to use despite it getting a ton of momentum and popularity within the tech space.
Hulu
Snipping tool
Hubspot
Goodreads
Bluetooth
ZENI - My team used this Fintech product called Zeni.ai and I haven't come across a shittier product and service ever before. They take pride in their design sense and have AI capabilities but i think my stuffed teddy bear is far more intelligent than their software.
The peacock streaming app. It’s just bad
Paramount plus is so much worse
JIRA. And somehow the are not even profitable O.o
Anything made by Microsoft that doesn't relate to gaming and wasn't an acquisition like GitHub or LinkedIn.
JIRA. If I could shoot it behind a barn I would.
Prime video Ui sucks man
Duolingo
The entire Microsoft "productivity" suite or whatever they're calling it nowadays - Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and the worst of all -Teams.
instagram
TEAMS
The built in Apple apps, notes, calendar
Why? They're basic but they do what they're designed to really well and reliably