I regularly encounter stuff that’s badly made and designed and thought I’d share.
The thing that got me thinking about this is a large plastic coffee mug with a lid mechanism for car travel. All in all it’s a fine mug, but it does have one tiny little design flaw. The handle of the mug, instead of being solid, has a series of tiny square opening inset in it – maybe 1/4" on a side and deep enough you can’t really see how deep they are without using a flashlight (the mug is black, so is the handle).
What is the purpose of these holes? I have no idea. It is almost as if the designers put them in there to save on weight without sacrificing strength, perhaps thinking the owner of the mug might be engaging in speed coffee swilling contests.
Or maybe someone just thought they looked nice.
The problem with the square holes is this: every time you pull the mug out of the dishwasher, you have to bang it against something over the sink to knock all the water out of those square holes. If you just pick it up and set it on the counter, the water will drizzle out of the holes onto your hand or onto the counter, generally both if you’re holding it by the handle.
Those tiny holes can hold a surprising amount of water.
And do those tiny holes release all that water instantly and easily when you bang the mug? No. Almost inevitably, for a few minutes after you first hold the mug, your hand tends to be a little damp.
Ruinous? No. But annoying? You bet! And bad design? Indubitably!
Well somehow GM manages to make half the things in the car completely inconvenient. The big two for me is that the seatbelt constantly gets in the way of closing the door, and the visor knocks the mirror askew every time you put it down.
It also seems like computer casings are always designed to have lots of little grooves and decorative textures that serve no purpose except to collect a lot of dirt that’s really hard to get out. I used to have an IBM that was all ribbed all over the place for no reason and the only way I could see I’d ever get the dust out of those ribs would be to give it a bath with a scrub brush.
I’ve got a landline cordless phone/answering machine (a BT 2150) that I only keep because it has an absolutely superb hands-free capability on the handset and is robustly made.
But it has an awful user interface. My biggest gripe is that it stores incoming numbers in a list under a ‘Caller ID’ entry on the menus. Whether you answer them or not. And the flashing LED on the base unit doesn’t distinguish between answering machine messages and calls. Listening to messages or taking calls doesn’t make any difference.
So, say someone rings up and I answer the phone and talk to them. When I end the call, the LED is flashing. It’s saying “you have a call in my memory”. Yes, I know that - don’t you remember I just answered the call, you moron? So, to stop the flashing and leave the LED for missed calls and/or messages only, I need to clear out the caller ID memory after each call. That’s 13 key-presses, three of which have delays of about a second (plus annoying, long beeps). Add one key-press for each additional call.
Essentially, I have to scroll though the list of received calls, then back out, go into “Delete old”, confirm, then back out. And I have to do that so that the flashing light means what I want it to mean: I have answering machine messages which I haven’t listened to yet. Why would I need to be reminded that someone rang and I answered the call?
I’d replace the phone for that reason alone if it weren’t so wonderful at hands-free.
Don’t even get me started on automobile cupholders. I rent cars occasionally and so have encountered a lot of them. I know it’s a tough design job to come up with a cupholder that will hold cups you don’t really know the dimensions of, but some cupholders do not appear to be able to hold ANYTHING without spilling it.
My laptop won’t tell me that its battery is seconds from dying, if I’m using a full-screen application. The message does come up, but behind the application so I can’t see it and have no idea until it suddenly goes into Hibernate mode. Then I plug it in, and the first thing I see when I un-hibernate it is “Low battery! Switch to AC power immediately.”
So, when I need to switch to AC power, I don’t know it. When I’m on AC power, I’m told to use AC power.
I recently bought a new iron (this one ) that falls over if you look at it funny. I can’t quite figure out what went so horribly wrong with the design process that led to this, but it will barely stand up. If I slightly bump it in any way or even set it down without using both hands to gently steady it, it flies through the air and smashes into the ground. It has two little nubs on the back that are meant to act as a sort of tripod in conjunction with the tip of the handle to prop it upright.
The other day I opened a window in a different room and the iron flew off of the board and smashed into the ground.
There’s an entry hall in my new apartment. The light switch for the living room, adjacent to the hall, is in the hall, by the door. Awesome. Now every time I come in the house, I turn on the light, go into the living room. Except when I leave that room for another room, I have to amble over into the space-wasting entry hall and turn off the light.
It would be totally brilliant if there weren’t any other rooms in the place. Plus, the switch in the living room turns on the light in the kitchen. No excuses here, that one’s just dumb.
Sprung flaps on letterbox slots for doors. I appreciate that the spring is there to stop the wind from rattling the flap, but when it’s so powerful that it severs the postman’s fingers, or shreds the mail as it is pushed through, it means something went a bit wrong somewhere.
Very similar to your mug issue: I have two stacking saucepan/steamer sets, different designs by different manufacturers but both of them have exactly the same flaw - the handles are made of metal folded over into a kind of tube shape but with big gaps on the underside. The result being that when you put them upside down in the dishwasher, the handles fill up with water (and nasty particles of food washed off other items) during the wash cycle. When you take the pans out of the dishwasher, said water is then redistributed over the rest of the clean items in the dishwasher, and over your feet. Drives me mad every single time.
I don’t know why clock radios are so badly designed, but they seem to be deliberately awful. Let’s make a list:
[ul]
[li]Setting the alarm requires more steps than launching a Titan missle[/li][li]Snooze is nine minutes, which is a perfectly natural number (if you’re missing a finger)[/li][li]The process of setting the alarm is often bizarrely similar to setting the time. Hope you’re not sleepy when you set your alarm![/li][li]The snooze button is often bizarrely close to the button that turns off the alarm. Hope you’re not sleepy when you hit your snooze![/li][li]25 buttons to control a device that does two things (buzz and not buzz)[/li][/ul]
The only acceptable clock I’ve ever found is this one, and it has 12 buttons, 3 slide switches, a volume wheel and two freaking knobs. What, no handcrank or foot pedal?
Pickle relish in a squeeze bottle.
If you can’t figure out why this is a bad idea, remember that the hole is big enough for liquids but not for solids. If your favorite condiment for hot dogs is vinegar, then this is the product for you.
What’s up with TVs that have an LED that is brightly ON when the TV is OFF, but is OFF when the TV is ON? Even when you have become accustomed to the non-intuitive behaviour of the LED, it takes a good few seconds to respond to the remote control. It still trips me up sometimes, and I find myself pressing the button twice, thinking that the TV didn’t notice my first press. Result: TV switches on (a process that unaccountably takes about 15 seconds), then immediately switches off.
If you want to scroll up numerically via the ‘guide’ you press the ‘down’ arrow. But to go up numerically one channel at a time, you press the ‘up’ arrow.
And the rest of the remote is pathetic in terms of layout.
After 15 minutes surfing with a Comast remote, I could commit a murder if someone annoyed me.
My cell phone has a camera - something I don’t want or need, but something that I apparently have to have if I want a screen on the outside of the phone (it’s a flip phone). It has a button on the side, that if you hold down for a few seconds, it turns on the camera with the phone closed. Then, everytime you hit the button it takes a picture and stores it to the phone.
The problem is that I keep this phone in my front pocket. When I sit down, somehow the button gets pressed and the camera gets turned on. Then, I end up with 60 pics of the inside of my pocket.
I finally just took a needle nosed pliers and ripped the button off. I did find out later that there was a way to disable the button, but of course it was too late. Why not have the button default to off and have to user turn it on if they needed it? Why have the button at all? What kind of narciccist needs self portraits with a shitty camera phone?
The most egregious instances I have encountered these last years with telephones in my elderly parents’ household:
cordless phones: All models that we gave gone through need the user to press a hangup button on the handset after the call is finished, even if the other party has hung up. Result: if the hangup button is not pressed, or not pressed firmly enough or not long enough all callers get an ‘occupied’ signal.
We had the neighbours ring several times, and one time we had the Red Cross mobile nurse call (my brother and I live in other states) out of concern because our parents’ phone had been ‘occupied’ for long periods.
non-cordless phones: in the good old times (up to early 80s) telephones were clunky apparatus that, for hanging up, you only had to aim the receiver in the general direction of its cradle for the receiver to reliably slide into its cradle and hang up.
Nowadays phones have slim receivers, to be put into vague depressions, and you need very fine motor control indeed to put the receiver down in a way that effects a hangup.
Again, a source of ‘occupied’ lines and filial anxiety.
Seconded! And the commonly used buttons like mute and previous channel are tiny and hard to find. But the ON DEMAND button is huge, shiny, and prominently displayed at the top of the remote. I keep mixing up the specific device “on” buttons with the “all on” buttons and turning the cable on but the tv off.
The whole thing seems like a big advertising device that I’m forced to use to control my tv now. (unless I succeed in convincing my husband that this whole digital thing is overkill and go back to conventional basic basic - fat chance)
My company’s voice mail. It’s Audix, which I understand a lot of companies use, but the options are all in the wrong order. So, the red light on my work phone is lit, meaning I have a message. I dial up voice mail and enter my extension and password, and we’re off and running.
“Press 1 to leave a message, press 2 to get a message.”
Right here, this is where it starts going wrong. To leave a message for someone else, I simply dial their number - I never need to use the 1 option. Ever. Maybe my exec do, but I don’t. I’m calling because I want to get my messages. 90% of people are calling because they want to get their messages! They totally need to reverse this order.
“Call received today, July 16. 20 seconds. To listen, press 1, to delete…”
Gah! Yes I want to listen! Just play the damn thing - don’t make me press any other buttons!
“…to delete, press star + D.”
What? The hell? Why are the other ones all numeric, then we start with the star D stuff?
Drives me bananas. It’s a good thing I rarely get phone calls at work.
