I’m usually not too critical of user interface designs because I usually just don’t care. But today I saw a UI on a Web page that was pretty hilarious. (Click on the image below to enlarge).

Check out the instructions for the “Order Name – REQUIRED” text box:

maximum 50 characters. DO NOT USE “|” in the order name.

What the heck? First of all, looking at the warning text, I cannot tell what the forbidden character is. Is it lower case letter “l” or is it the digit character “1” or is it the pipe character (above the backslash on the keyboard) “|” or is it lower case “i” that’s just hard to read?

And why on earth is a particular character forbidden?

As a special bonus, I like the text in the Step 1 options: ADD FROM NETWORK DO NOT USE. Uh, OK, I won’t.

Wow. This is a seriously awful UI — but so bad it provided me with a bit of geek amusement.