Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?
I once worked at Chase Manhattan Bank and one of their internal networking teams had a web site for wiring requests. They didn’t want to work too hard so their UI was designed to make data entry as slow as possible, mostly by using huge multi-level drop down lists where the slightest twitch would make them collapse and you would have to start over navigating through them, repeat a dozen times for every run of cable, several runs required to make an end to end connection. It wasn’t custom programming, just taking full advantage of the browsers of the era’s inability to render the UI component for that. So I was building out a data center and needed Something like forty thousand cables run which translated into around one hundred and fifty thousand segments. I tried to give this info via a spreadsheet but they were steadfast that the web interface was the only way they could receive it. So I wrote a script to just post the data directly without going through the UI, ran it, and went home. Turns out all their web form did was e-mail the values to a half dozen people. The e-mail system was Lotus Notes (dates this) so each person got their own copy and there was a lot of overhead. The sudden influx of a million e-mail messages brought down Chase’s email system for two thirds of the country. They spent days clearing the mail queue and recovering - they had to fly in IBM techs with suitcases full of disk drives to add the storage needed. Everyone who received the wiring requests spent days deleting them with new ones arriving as quickly as they deleted the old ones. Then when things were finally normal again they asked me to resend them my spreadsheet.