I'm starting a log of UI bloopers (because oh, there are so many) and will occasionally post some of the more obvious ones here for your enjoyment and contemplation.

Today's blooper comes from my Sony Vaio 505. The trackpad on the Vaio has a lot of cool features, including the ability to use it as a scrolling tool by using just the right or bottom edge of the pad, or using it to navigate forward or back through sites, by tapping and tragging at the very top of the trackpad.

Sony does a nice job of making this feature obvious when it's happening, but I've got to wonder about their labels:

Now the convention of course is back/forward. I'm guessing that some engineer was ardent about the fact that to be able to see the forward button, that page must have already been visited, and that the user must have hit "back" to get to a point in the history where they could go either way, thus previous would mean "go to the page I was just at" while "back" means go to the previous page in the history breadcrumb. Either way it's confusing, one term dealing with navigation in the temporal experience, and the other dealing with navigating the path metaphor that allows for backtracking. I imagine this got past testing because it's a feature most novice users don't even find, and those that do are familiar enough with the arrow pattern that they don't even read the text. I know I didn't for a while.