Leigh :) Stark

Category: …and Everything

  • I entered the Bad UX Awards… for fun.

    I entered the Bad UX Awards… for fun.

    You’ve probably never heard of the Bad UX World Cup, and neither had this guy. So I decided to enter for fun. I’m weird that way.

    My ears pricked up when Google’s John Mueller forwarded a link to something equally fun and cruel the other week: a World Cup of terrible UX.

    It became one of my favourite things of the week.

    Bad UX World Cup is a contest, to make the worst date picker, ever. I love it. Some of those examples are pure evil, muuhahaa. The memory game, haaa, pure evil I said! badux.lol/

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    — Stef Walter (@stephaniewalter.bsky.social) October 23, 2025 at 6:30 PM

    In an era where UX is (apparently) a high paying job, platform framework maker Nordcraft decided to run a bit of a competition for who could come up with the worst web UX.

    The mission: make a functional and usable website date-picker with a genuinely bad user experience.

    As Barney Stinson would say, “challenge accepted”.

    Browsing through the list, there were some brilliant executions in what was a genuinely cruel list of poor UX principles.

    I love the scratchy style, as did Ms 8, while and the options that combined lesser used skill sets were also a lot of fun.

    One expected you to know Roman numerals, which credit to my wife, she actually accomplished it. Another wanted you to know how to read kanji, Roman numerals, and Morse code. At least one felt built for time travellers, while a different one was a slot machine.

    Almost nothing was designed to be deceptively fun and crazy. At last, an opening.

    So I went to work in a few minutes of spare time building a functional and usable datepicker with bad UX.

    In typical Leighlo tradition, I probably went further than I needed to.

    Turning the date picker into a game

    This is “Datehack”, a game modelled on the classic rogue “Nethack”, where you have to explore a dungeon filled with dates over various levels, while not being killed by the months of the year (monthsters).

    As a heads up, January is a bit of a prick. It starts the year and doesn’t let up. You should probably expect that.

    Datehack runs in four levels: you have to evade Monthsters to pick the date of the month, then the number of the month, then the year, and then finally find the submit button. A timer will run to track how long it takes you to do this.

    You can choose your character between a Duck, an Assassin, the letter T, and an Educator (every first letter together spells “DATE”), and each comes with hit points and an attack.

    Your character can be hurt, the Monthsters will follow you and try to kill you, and you may end your journey before picking the date. Just like life.

    In fact, there are some little catches to make the bad UX even more bad. Potentially evil.

    For instance, you can use the WASD and arrow keys, but they will change their direction every round.

    Datehack doesn’t just have bad UX, it has bad physical UX.

    If you choose to, you can use an onscreen D-pad, but it will move around the screen to make life horrible. Because life is rarely easy, and neither is picking a date. That’s bad UX, and it extends to mobile, as well. Can’t forget our users on phones.

    There are potions to restore life, and there is also poo. If you step in poo, you lose a day of your life just trying to scrape it off your shoe. Just like real life.

    If you tried to select a real date only to find stepping in a poo emoji, you may want to go back through the various trapdoors to other levels to fix that date.

    Of course, you also need to find the trapdoor, which isn’t easy, also like life. There’s a life lesson somewhere in here. It’s poor life UX, clearly.

    There is also a fully working replacement for WASD and the arrow keys that never breaks in Datehack, but because we have poor UX and poor physical UX, we also have poor documentation, so I clearly can’t tell you what it is.

    What I can tell you is that Datehack is a datepicker experience with evil UX, if that’s such a thing. But if you like it, I’m genuinely considering adding scoreboards to it.

    I probably won’t end up winning the Bad UX World Cup Finals, and that’s OK.

    As Australia’s only entry (something I am still confused about myself), I have given it my all, and tried to make the UX as awkward as possible, something you’ll be able to see when they air the World Cup Finals on YouTube on October 29 (October 30 in Australia).

    Good luck to everyone who entered. We all made the world a weirder place.

  • Literally, not figuratively: more WordPress themes for writers in 2016

    It’s been a good couple of years or so since I summed up themes for writers, and since I’m still a writer, I think it’s time to do it again. If you’re a writer, a publisher, or just someone with an idea for an online magazine, these themes could help make your site look a little more like ink on page.

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  • Playlist: New Orleans Jazz Fest 2016 (weekend 2)

    This year, I’m hoping to actually head on vacation (finally!) so my beautiful wife and I can take that honeymoon we’ve been talking about doing since we got married.

    Keep in mind, we got married back in 2014, when the weather was hot and New Orleans came to Sydney. That was the dream, since both my wife and I had left our hearts in New Orleans. I left mine back when I was a kid, and when I went back on holiday with the girl who would eventually be my wife, she left hers there too, and I knew she and I would be linked.

    The wedding was on November 14, 2014, and there’s a webpage showing the day, but there hasn’t been a honeymoon yet, due to the constraints of work.

    This year, though, we’re hoping to change it, and Jazz Fest is on the agenda.

    I don’t need much to get myself geared up for New Orleans — the music, the people, the food, the vibe; sheesh, I’d probably live there if I could — but just in case you wanted to get a glimpse of what Jazz Fest will be like on the second weekend, which is when we’re hoping to be there, I’ve been working on a playlist.

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  • Taxonomic tracking: how to find articles by using site construction

    I’ve been a member of the technology media in Australia for over five years, and if there’s one thing I’ve seen from the journalism side, it’s that often members of the PR world don’t quite know how to quickly track what we’re doing in our realm.

    I can see how it must be complicated: we’re all writing tons of articles. I generally run the site I work for (GadgetGuy.com.au) by myself, and even I can’t remember half the stuff I’ve written. Tech journalists are always writing, generally at a frantic pace, and in some ways you could say we’re all pushing out so much work that it’s hard to keep up with it all.

    I’m sure I’m not the only one to get emails asking for links to stories, and for a PR trying to find the story for their reports, I can see why emailing a journalist could be fruitful. It doesn’t help that website searches can be very unhelpful, and much of this is due to the nature of website search engines just generally not being very good (apologies, we can’t all be Google).

    I’ve never worked in PR — a quick look at my wardrobe will tell you that — and I’ve heard that people who work in this field regularly have to make daily or weekly reports showing the client which media has written about the topic. Tracking all of this can’t be easy, especially when there are a good 50 of us working on random stories, forcing you to visit our sites and trawl through listings of articles until you come across the magic one.

    I understand that, and as a journalist who also codes websites, I can see how this can be a problem.

    However, there is a solution, and for a lot of websites across Australia — and no doubt the world — it’s staring at you right in the face, and most PRs (and I suspect journalists) don’t even know it.

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