The Bad UI card

Make a ridiculously, hilariously terrible interface. Something that works, that a person can actually use, and that is an absolute misery to use.

This is a comedy card. The project is the joke, and the joke has to land.

The rule that makes it work

It has to function. A volume slider that is a hedge maze is a great bad UI. A volume slider that does not change the volume is a broken slider.

Everything that makes it painful should be a decision you made deliberately, and underneath all of it the thing should genuinely do its job. That contrast is the entire joke: the user can get there, and they will hate every second.

What tends to be funny

• A perfectly ordinary task made absurd. Picking a date, entering a phone number, setting a volume, choosing a colour, agreeing to terms, typing a password. The more mundane the task, the better this works.
• Physics where physics has no business being. Draggable, throwable, bouncing, gravity-obeying form controls.
• Honest hostility. A cookie banner that fights back. A form that validates in the cruellest order possible. An unsubscribe button that runs away.
• Wildly disproportionate effort. Selecting a number by playing a small game of Snake to reach it.
• Correct but useless. Everything is right there on screen, and finding it is your problem.

Prior art worth studying

• Not a robot, a CAPTCHA that escalates. Neal Agarwal’s whole site is a masterclass in this genre; look at The Password Game too, which is probably the most famous bad UI ever made.
• Phone slider selector, a phone number entered with sliders.
• Date picker, from the same collection, which is worth browsing in full.
• The r/badUIbattles subreddit, which is an endless supply of the form.
• The User Inyerface game, a single form that is a sustained act of aggression.

Look at a few before you start. The genre has conventions, and knowing them helps you find a joke that has not been done.

What to build it with

Anything. HTML, CSS and JavaScript are the popular choice for a reason: they run everywhere, the demo link is trivial, and the browser gives you animation, physics, drag and drop, audio and pointer events for free. A single HTML file is a completely respectable submission here.

But nothing stops you making a desktop app, a terminal program, a mobile app, or a physical device with a genuinely terrible control panel. A hardware bad UI would be a delight and nobody has shipped one yet.

Ideas, if you want one

• A colour picker that only accepts colours by their hex value, read aloud.
• A login form where the password field is type="password" and so is the username, the submit button, and the page title.
• A file browser with no scrolling, only a catapult.
• A calculator where the buttons swap places after every press.
• A settings page where every toggle also toggles a random other one.
• A text editor that autocorrects towards nonsense with total confidence.
• A checkout where the quantity is set by holding down a button with an unpredictable acceleration curve.

Steal the shape, not the joke.

Shipping one

• Demo: a live link. Essential for this card more than most, because it is not funny described, it is funny used. Host it anywhere static: GitHub Pages, Neocities, Netlify, whatever.
• Screenshot: a still that sells the joke if one can. Some of these are only funny in motion, in which case pick the most confusing frame.
• Description: say what the ordinary task is and what you did to it. Do not over-explain; a reviewer is going to click the demo anyway.
• Repository: the source and a README. Worth writing down what you were going for, because in six months even you will not remember why.

One thing to avoid

Bad UI is not the same as ugly UI. Clashing colours and Comic Sans are not a project; they are a stylesheet. The joke has to be in the interaction, in what the interface makes a person do. Something beautifully designed and unbearable to operate is far funnier than something that merely looks bad.