Anti-Patterns

Design patterns are a useful and important tool, but just as useful are anti-patterns - “commonly re-invented bad solutions to problems” (Wikipedia).

Probably the most widely used and known anti-pattern is the use of "click here" for links. Another example is the Novel Notion - "creating a new interface for a common idiom that is more confusing than the original."

The above example uses a new way to scroll that is less usable than the usual scrollbar:

• No visual cue (scrollbar size) to indicate how many news items
• No way to tell where you are in the list - beginning, middle, end?
• Scrolls on hover rather than click, which is unexpected
• No way to jump down like you can by clicking in between the arrows in a scrollbar