Bad Usability Calendar 2007 is here!

Looking for the 2009 version of the Bad Usability Calendar? Go grab it at www.badusability.com.

Finally, it’s here: This year the Bad Usability Calendar is, if possible, even less usable than previous years. Take a look at the earlier editions from 2005 (in Norwegian) and 2006. This years calendar displays exaggerated use of AJAX, navigation overload and a questionable topic map solution.

Download the Bad Usability Calendar 2007 (PDF, A3, 1.2 MB) (PDF, A4, 1.2 MB)

Update: As Jacob Nielsen pointed out in his latest newsletter;

“Violating yet another usability guideline, the file is formatted to print on European-sized paper, and there doesn’t seem to be a version designed for American paper sizes. It’s easy enough to scale the printout, even though it doesn’t look quite as good.”

As the largest room in the world is the room for improvement, we’ve made a version of the Bad Usability Calendar for all of your non ISO printers (PDF, letter-size, 1.4 MB) and (PDF, tabloid-size, 1.4 MB)

The process of making a new calendar started in November when we asked for suggestions on the new version. A special thanks to all of you that contributed! We recieved many creative ideas that we enjoyed and some that we used. We pledged that the best suggestion would be awarded a numbered version of the 2007 edition.

The winner idea came from Design Architect Dov Rosner at Amdocs Product Group. He proposed to dedicate one month in the Calendar to bad error messages. Bad error messages is one of the most annoying usability problems we know, and must rightfully be included in the Calendar. We have dedicated Mars to bad error messages. Thank you Dov! We also would like to give honorable mention to Sebastien Billard who proposed: – Use plain language : not “the month of the god of war” for “mars”. We used this idea on the making of February. Thank you Sebastien!

An important criteria for the monthly displays of the Calendar was that every month should be possible to use, but only in a most unusable fashion. Please let us know if we have succeeded!

This year we have chosen to give the calendar a Creative Commons license. This implies that we will allow other people to distibute and further develop the Calendar as long as we are credited (read the conditions here). We also allow translations of the Calendar.

We hope you all will enjoy it, and that it can help raise awareness of usability challenges.

If you would like to translate the Bad Usability Calendar 2007, you can download the source files, 13 MB (containing .eps, Adobe Illustrator, .svg and .swf files). If you translate – please tell us about it!


The Bad Usability Calendar 2007 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 License.

Localized versions

Danish version, thanks Jesper!

Portuguese version, thanks Pedro!