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BAD UI BATTLE 2.0 was the second round of NoA Ignite's deliberately terrible UI hackathon — same inverted brief, new teams, new levels of hostility. I joined on 18 November 2025. Every submission from both editions is collected in the Bad UI Gallery (also linked in the Live project section below).
What if the goal was to make the worst possible interface — on purpose? That was the brief again for 2.0. I leaned in hard: misaligned buttons, illegible colour combos, mystery navigation, and flows that punish curiosity. The worse the reaction in the room, the better I was doing.
The format did not change — teams, timed build, live demos, QR voting — but the bar had been raised. Everyone had seen the first gallery. New entries had to be more creative, more hostile, and more confidently awful. The extra images on this page are from the 2.0 session: more teams, more screenshots, more evidence that designers enjoy breaking things when they are allowed to.
Full event details are on the BAD UI BATTLE site. Quick recap:
It sounds like a joke, and the room treats it like one — until you start building. Breaking every rule forces you to understand exactly why those rules exist. When you remove contrast, you feel readability die. When you hide navigation, you feel discoverability collapse. When you add motion to buttons, you feel motor accessibility disappear.
That is the hidden value: BAD UI BATTLE is competitive anti-pattern practice. You leave with sharper instincts for real client work — and a gallery full of cautionary tales.
The gallery is live at bad-ui-battle-signup.vercel.app/gallery — submissions from both 2024 and 2025. Scroll through, cringe, laugh, and steal ideas for your own internal design critique sessions. It is the most honest museum of what-not-to-do I know.