What's the strangest design choice you've seen on a website?

[Skier88]

I was just browsing a manufacturer's website and when you hovered over product images and scrolled, it would enlarge or shrink the image (inline, shifting the whole page around). It was clearly intended as a feature, but it was confusing because it wasn't indicated anywhere, not even by changing the cursor. It makes me wonder, what are some of the craziest things web developers have done with good intention?

[lucy24]

Excuse me while I take a quick run over to websitesthatyou-know-what for inspiration.

:: wandering off ::

:: wandering back ::

###! Well, that's an hour of my life I'll never see again ;)

Wish I could link to the-- oops, no, better not even use a pseudonym. Far as I can make out, the site designers' thinking was: To encourage people to support your position, you should make your headers and footers a really scary shade of orange hinting at nameless cataclysms, and then echo that color in your links and headers. Oohh, where do I sign up?

Maybe it's a cultural thing. Maybe the color I see as scary is seen by the target audience as warm and inviting, and the site has succeeded beyond its wildest hopes.

Then again, there probably exists a demographic group that goes ape for Mystery Meat Navigation :)

[Skier88]

Haha, oh man, I've never seen that website before. But I can't find this orange mystery you speak of ... you got any other hints?

[Novus]

The other day I was browsing a site tried a search found the result I was looking for but... if you mouse over anywhere on the navigation you get a drop down menu. Just a few pixels around search box and bang the drop down appears which covered the first three search results!

[ken_b]

The one I've been seeing more and more lately is whatever it is that moves content off to the LEFT of the screen. Unless you are iewing full screen you can't get to this content.

An example is the Google News page.

On my browser (FF) I can't see or get to the left hand nav column unless I have the browser window at full screen.

I don't know if that is a browser or design issue, but it certainly is annoying.

.

[Skier88]

ken_b, I'm not sure if we're seeing the same google news page, but for me the page actually collapses the menu at lower widths - click on "News" in the upper left to expand it. But yeah, I can definitely see how that would happen - somebody wants to put everything in a centered container, then wants to shift their menu to the left ...

Novus, yeah, that's really annoying ... I see it all the time in a slightly different form, where dropdown menus disappear if you stray off them for an instant. And the really fun ones have blank spots, so you've got to move the mouse really fast to skip over them but not so fast you can't stop before you exit the menu. Good times.

[ken_b]

Skier88;

Thanks, I never thought to try expanding the drop down by clicking the News text.

I wish I could recall some of the other sites where I have this issue, but I usually just back out when I see it and never return.

Another annoyance is sites that start the text right tight up against the left side with no padding. Again, usually not an issue if you change to full screen. Apparently designed by members of the who-cares-about-visitor-prefs-it's-my-way-or-the-highway school of design.

.

[rocknbil]

Fixed size windows of any kind, whether they are popups, iframes, or lightboxes, where vital tools like search submit buttons or links are stuffed out of view in the window.

Usually paired with frame scripts that force you back into the frame if you figure out how to bust out. I try to complain, but the submit buttons are inaccessible. LOL