Scratch

Raised as a usability problem by 22 people on Hacker News over 16 years (2011–2026), in 19 threads.

People raised many different problems with Scratch, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 24 complaints

Saving work is awkward without accounts, so the child copies projects into a Google Doc2026-09-25
Becomes hard to navigate once projects grow larger2026-08-18
Simple addition needs a drawn sprite for every digit and decimal place2024-12-16
Opening a new editor instance silently creates a new saved project each time2023-03-30
Can't tell the exercises exist; tabs and next/previous buttons behave in confusing ways2023-03-30
Menus and dropdowns are so many and confusing that the user finds it frustrating2023-03-30
Large programs become confusing and require endless scrolling to navigate2022-12-28
Blocks lack local variables and return values, making code hard to organize meaningfully2022-07-16
Found it very hard and unintuitive to get stuff done2022-07-16
Hide and show in a forever loop never visibly blink, confusing beginners who can't see what happens2022-06-30
Switching between modes or levels requires lots of global messages and setup code2020-10-24
Can't work out which order things are getting executed in visual code2020-10-18
Couldn't figure out how to do functions and arrays without searching online2019-01-03
Site shows a white page and fails to work in Firefox2019-01-02
Makes certain things really hard to do in the previous version2019-01-02
Young kids struggled to drag blocks around using a touchpad2018-07-06
Kids produce broken loop and branch logic; continuous field makes collisions unintuitive and drag-and-drop miserable2017-08-14
Took several tries to figure out how to run anything; UI is unintuitive2017-01-29
Hard to find the needed block among many, then unclear how to use it2016-12-08
Dragging blocks around is cumbersome and messy, and the environment is unintuitive2016-12-08
Hard to drag and drop blocks once nesting gets deep2016-05-17
Nested blocks become cluttered and hard to drag around, so simple changes mess up the structure2015-04-12
Variable support is basic and difficult to use, with rough edges in copy/paste2014-10-31
Programming interface is too complicated to operate with a mouse2011-09-12