No user interface design mistake bothers me more than when too much information is forced into a tiny non-resizable area. As usual, Microsoft is the worst offender.

Microsoft Money won’t let you see enough categories:

Internet Explorer’s settings pane forces you to scroll right:

Add hardware wizard makes you scroll a huge vendor list in a tiny space:

This is so frustrating because it smacks of lazy programming. Is it really that hard to make all windows resizable? Any time you force users to remember things instead of showing them what they are looking for it’s a UI failure.

Version 1 of Newshutch had this problem because too many important interface options were at the bottom of a huge feed list. If you checked feeds to delete, you would forget what you had checked by the time you reached the “delete” button. Since then we’ve added scrollable panes and we use fixed positioning (which doesn’t work in IE) for the “manage” options. I’m not saying Newshutch is perfect, but we aren’t worth billions and our add hardware wizard hasn’t sucked since 1995.

If you want to see some real doozies, check out the Interface hall of shame.