Dumb Design in Household Electronics

In My Humble Opinion
1

A few months ago I bought a DVD recorder. (Yes, I know, they’re pretty obsolete what with hard-disk PVRs and all, but it was cheap and I don’t record much.)

The other day I wanted to record an hour-long show. I set the timer using the VideoPlus code, there was a disc in the machine. Fine.

The show started at 8pm. I was in, but busy doing other stuff, hence wanting to record it. About 8.20, I glanced at the DVD recorder and noticed the red recording light wasn’t on. I turned the TV on to see what was happening, and saw the following message:

“Disc has insufficent space for timer recording. Press OK to change disc or CANCEL to cancel timer recording.”

Well, you could have told me earlier, like say… when I set the timer! :smack:

As an experiment, I tried the same thing again, to see when you actually get the warning. The machine happily goes into timer mode, and then two minutes before the scheduled start time, powers up and then and only then does it think to check how much free space is on the disc, and inform you that there’s not enough space.

WTF? Had the designers of this device (it’s a Philips, not some no-name Korean brand) not considered the possibility that I might be, you know, out when the show I wanted to record starts? :confused:

I could understand it in the old days of VHS tapes, where you had to check you had enough tape left, but if it can check the free space remaining before it begins recording, why can’t it do it when you set the timer?

Anyone else got any similarly dumb home electronics?

2

I’m amazed at companies who distribute remote controls with the numbers painted on the buttons themselves, instead of on the remote istelf beneath the buttons.

Or, at least amazed at how not indelible (is delible a word?) the paint is.

Or, they could form the button in the shape of the number, or something. It’s bad bad design, and should have been worked out of the system by now.

3

Yeah, but don’t most just follow the 3x3 grid, with the on extra underneath for zero? Of course, if the grid is adrift in a sea of other buttons, like menu, next, exit, etc… and they ALL get worn off, then yeah, you got problems. :stuck_out_tongue:

4

I have one of those cheap Daewoo VCR / DVD combo players that I am about ready to dump in the trash, it infuriates me so much.
For one thing, whenever I turn it on, it automatically defaults to “VCR”, even though I use the VCR about 1% of the time. I’ve looked for a menu option to have it default to “DVD” when it turns on, but no such luck.
And speaking of the menu, I can only access it while in VCR mode, not in DVD mode. You’d think I should be able to pull up the menu from either mode.
But the thing that drives me nuts the most is when I play a CD on it. For some reason, it pauses for a second or two between every track. CDs have been around for, what, twenty years now? You’d think a CD player would be able to play continuously by now.

5

My cell phone is the first i’ve had with a vibrate mode. First day I got it, I went to the library. Before going in, I pushed the volume control until it went to vibrate. While inside,I get a call from an unknown number. Rather than disturb other patrons, I let it go to voice mail figuring I would check the message and call back if needed. The phone,to let me know I had voice mail, RINGS!!! :smack:

6

I have a DVD recorder that is definitely a bit special.

Recording off air longer than about 45 minutes is hopeless as the video lags further and further behind the sound.

Timed recordings are hampered significantly by a clock that loses two minutes a day.

On powering up from standby it takes a dozen or so ejects to open the tray, unless you leave a DVD in place in which case it opens first time (unless it’s a strangely compressed video CD of House (or was it Bones?) in which case the whole device will simply go insane, continuously thrashing back and forth and not responding to any buttons on the remote or the case and refusing to TURN THE £@$#! OFF). It did respond to having the plug pulled. It has never gone quite as mad as that since but I have to remember to leave a honest proper DVD in place and it routinely needs re-booting*.

Consequentially the trusty old VHS still gets plent of use, and it is clever enough to switch to long play if it senses there isn’t enough time left at standard play. I’ll have to move into the 21st century when it finally packs up.

Oh, and the buttons on the DVD remote will stick down un-noticed and jam the TV remote, sending the user into a panic that they’ll miss Hogfather tonight dammit.

Pause when playing is cancelled by hitting play again. Pause in record is cancelled by hitting pause again. WTF?

There is a zoom function (why?) but you can only zoom into the top left half of the screen.

*The IT Crowd comes to mind. Have you tried turning it off and on again?

7

  • Any electronics designed to be placed on a table – i.e. not portable – that you have to grab on to if you’re actively using it. Clock radios with front and side-mounted switches are a classic example, and even then, if there’s a tough sliding switch on the top, one still has to grab onto the radio to switch it. I’ve seen clock radios with front-mounted snooze buttons that are impossible to press unless you’re holding on to the back of the radio; otherwise, the radio is just pushed away.

  • Blindingly bright blue LEDs. Yeah, blue LEDs look nice, but when you can practically read by them … what’s the point?

  • The growing usage of confirmation prompts in EVERYTHING for actions that aren’t potentially destructive or damaging. Pretty soon, a company will release a television where, when you change the channel, will prompt you with “Are you sure?”

  • My cell phone has a camera button on the side that activates with a very light touch. Practically every day, I’ll hear several consecutive “chuur-chink” sounds coming from my pocket. Deleting a photo from the phone takes four steps, including an “Are you sure?” prompt.

8

I have a microwave (an expensive, built-in one paired with an oven) that will beep 4 times when a timer ends and food is done. It will then beep four more times 30 seconds later. It will do this forever, until you hit cancel. Even if you open the door (which has a sensor) and remove your food. You still have to hit cancel.

Oh, and if you leave the door open, after 30 secs or so it will start beeping, with “DOOR” on the display. It will also do this forever.

9

One of the things we use everyday, the computer keyboard, has an inherent flaw that drives me bonkers: If you center the keyboard properly for typing, so that keys |G|H| are centered in front of you (or centered so that |G|H| are under the center of the screen), the number pad on the right is sticking way out and your mouse is almost in another ZIP code. Most of us wind up typing with our left and right hands/arms extend to the left of us, as we center the whole keyboard, forcing the QWERTY section out of alignment. If you just center the actual typewriter-style keyboard in front of you with the |G|H| keys centered, as they should be, you will type as you should…but your mouse is out in right field.

10

I have some experience with how the software is designed for consumer products like DVD players. Often after the hardware is prototyped, a hardware-oriented engineer is given the task of writing the software. In my mind, this is as big a mistake as asking a software expert to design the hardware; each are specialties. Most experts of one are not experts in the other, and it shows.

I have noticed that many companies treat the software (actually firmware) development as an unimportant task, and something that holds up the production line, so they put pressure on to finish it and don’t allow much time for testing.

One example of design principles that I often find lacking is the concept – developed many years ago – of interrupt-driven tasks. This is rarely used in consumer devices, which use instead a single-threaded program. This means that the only time the device responds to the “play” button is if it is in the proper mode. At all other times, not only does it not respond, it doesn’t tell you that it is ignoring you, either, and the operator logically presses the same button again. But if a double-press has a different meaning than a single-press, guess what happens? Probably not what the user intended.

I have one player that takes about 10 seconds to open the tray after the “open” button is pressed. But it doesn’t show anything on the front panel during the 10 seconds. Pressing the open button once is supposed to open; twice, close; thrice, open, etc. So the operator has to wait 10 seconds to see if it responded every time the button is pressed or run the risk of cancelling the desired operation without knowing it. It would have been so simple for the device to display “wait, opening…” instantly after the keypress and remove the ambiguity! A countdown “10…9…8…” would be even nicer.

Also, instead of ergonomics, the designers emphasize how many functions a device can perform, which just confuses everything.

11

Oh yes, my DVD recorder does this too!. Press “open/close” and nothing happens. Press it again. Still nothing happens, until several seconds later when the tray opens and immediately closes again, because I pressed it twice. Gah!

12

MINE TOO. Cheap-ass Toshiba VCR/DVD player. GRRRR. I’ve been known to use the most foul language toward that thing.

13

As a hardware / firmware engineer, I make an avocation of picking apart poor designs…
I had a DVR that had a few really bad design choices:

  1. When you scheduled a recording, a screen came up giving you start and end times. Instead of using the numeric pad on the remote, you had to use the Up and Down arrows to set the times. Braindead.
  2. The DVR had nice little “thumbnails” of the recordings you made. Unfortunately, the thumbnails were always taken from the beginning of the show, so they were almost always of a commercial. Also, there wasn’t enough horsepower to generate the thumbnails quickly, so browsing through the stored recordings was agonizing.
14

I’m the guy everyone always asks to set their watch or clock and fix their cellphone.

How about the fact that phones have a “123/456/789” keypad and computers have a “789/456/123” keypad? That will mess with you if you regularly use both.

Older clock radios were terribly hard to set and to reliably enable the alarm on. Things have gotten a bit better.

VCRs. Let’s see, right channel, right time, AM/PM, tape in, has space. It was a minor miracle when you actually got the show. AM/PM problems were the worst. It was so easy to get everything else right except that. I was so glad when I got my Tivo 4 or 5 years ago, never looked back.

15

On our old VCR, after you’d set up the recording, you turned Off the power. Baffling and completely counterintuitive. But eventually we got used to it.

And then on our new one, you leave the power On. Geezus, stick with one thing, okay?

16

Sticking with Alarm clocks:

Who on earth needs 1 minute resolution on thier wake up time? 5 minutes would be plenty, and would trim 80% off the setting process. Heck, analog alarm clocks (with the single hand for the alarm time) give at best 10-15 minute resolution, and that worked just fine for many decades.
VCRs:
We have one that doesn’t start recording when you press record. NO, NO, NO…you have to tell it how long you want it to record for before it will start recording, and you can’t change this time while it is recording either. Note that there IS a record button on the front of the VCR, but it is impossible to make it actually record without using the remote.

We have a DVD/VCR combo. The pause button only works in VCR mode. You can pause the DVD, but you do that by pressing the play button a second time. WTF?
Confession: I’m an engineer who has done some programming. I can assure you that the WORST user interfaces are those that are based on detailed requirements documents from the customer. Good user interfaces take 3-5 iterations, but following the requirements document only gets you one.
And I totally agree with the single-thread explaination for poor user interfaces. PLC based industrial controls usually avoid this because ladder logic is inherantly multi-threaded. Reliability considerations aside, the resulting poor user interfaces are a big reason PC based control isn’t catching on in a big way.

17

My computer printer has no on/off switch. To turn it on, I plug it in. To turn it off, I unplug it. Maybe it was designed to always be plugged in and ready, but since days can go by when I don’t need it, it just seems wasteful to always have it ready for printing. Still, the lack of an on/off switch means that when I do want to use it, I’m under my desk, trying to put the printer’s plug into the power bar.

And as for clock radios–why is the Snooze bar so huge, and the alarm shutoff so small? I’m not at my best in the mornings, and it’s not unusual for me to just drop a hand on the clock radio. It shuts off, I get up, and nine minutes later, from another room, I hear the radio blare. By just dropping my hand on the radio, I must have hit the huge Snooze bar instead of the tiny shutoff button.

18

My phone…to delete all of my stored SMS messages, you would think a simple “Delete”—>“Delete All” would be ideal.

Instead it is “Multimedia”–“inbox”–“options”–(scroll past the item that says ‘delete’ and make sure you don’t click it because it will only delete a single item and then kick you back to the main scree)–scroll down to page 2 of the menu–“Mark”–“Mark All”–“Delete” (yep, that one on page 1 of the menu you didn’t click earlier)–“Yes”—“Confirm Delete”

Crap incarnate :mad:

19

We had one like that. Made. No. Sense. I screwed up recording a bunch of times because of it (I’m a slow learner, but what can I say…it made no sense.)

That same VCR had another feature I hated…it had no buttons on it other than on/off and eject, so you had to use the remote for everything. If you lost the remote, you were out of luck.

20

Makes no sense to me, either. Turn if OFF so it can start recording? But AFAIK that’s how they all work.

That’s quite common in units. It saves a ton of manufacturing costs if the front panel doesn’t have to have a lot of tiny switches that are duplicated on the remote anyway.

Our problem as consumers is we expect these gadgets to be useful for more than 6 months. From the manufacturer’s standpoint, if you lose the remote after 6 months, it’s been obsolete for 5 months and time to buy a new one.