Back in the UK and it's time to do some work in the office. Part of this involves extensive use of one of our internal applications. I won't name names, but anyone at Sun will know what I'm talking about when I say that it's a very frustrating application due to the way the user interface has been 'designed'. Good user interfaces are very difficult to get right, as anyone who's tried to build one will know, but this particular applications suceeds in being really bad.

Here's an example. I mistyped my badge number on the login screen and was presented with the following pop-up error message:

Somehow I don't think this is the best way to explain to the user that they typed in the wrong login number.