Bad Design in Everyday Life

In My Humble Opinion
41

A few years back I had a USB flash drive that came with a Spiffy Lanyard™ that attached to the cap protecting USB connector. Occasionally being a somewhat fidgety fellow, I enjoyed spinning the drive around my finger at the end of the Spiffy Lanyard™. This went on until the day the drive separated from the cap mid-spin, flew across the room with astonishing force, hit the wall, and shattered.

When I went to get another drive, I noticed that the newest revision from the same manufacturer was identical in every detail, save one: the Spiffy Lanyard™ now attached to the body of the drive, rather than the cap.

Also, I recently got a TV that offers no visual cues regarding volume adjustment. I know that I should be able to tell the TV volume is changing just by listening-- but I find the lack of a bar at the bottom of the screen which shrinks/grows to provide visual feedback of my actions… disturbing.

42

<snip>
You left out - no reverse button, for the times you go one minute past the time you want to set the clock for, and have to go all around the clock again.

My clock radio - a GE, does everything right I’m happy to say. They even had it in the Omni Hotel in Montreal. But most of the clock radios you see in hotels are almost impossible to use. You know, the ones with eighteen music channels prominently displayed, settable by a single button push, but setting the time requires a five button sequence and the knowledge of BCPL.

43

Why does my computer not have the USB ports ON THE DAMN FRONT, where I can actually reach them? Even crappy Chinese TV’s have dual AV inputs at the back and front so you can actually plug stuff in without dragging them halfway around the room.

44

I can see *D for delete, since that keeps people like me from deleting stuff accidentally. But you are absolutely right about it being stupid to hit 2 to get your messages. 1 should be get your messages, 2 should be record a message, and 87 should be send one. And what does “scan all your greetings” mean anyhow? I keep my standard greeting as 1, and record a new one as 2 whenever I leave for a few days. They make this simple task as hard as possible.

45

The classic example of a bad design is the Norman Door, so named after Don Norman, who popularized how awful they are in his book “The Design of Everyday Things”.

Imagine a glass door with hidden hinges, and a chrome bar that extends all the way across the face of the door. This door could possibly be opened in one of four ways - pulling on the right or left, or pushing on the right or left. When you first approach such a door, you have a 25% chance of getting it right.

Now imagine a building that has two sets of these doors (half the malls in America at one time, it seems). You’d have to open one door, walk a few feet, and open the next door to actually enter the building. Your odds of success: 12.5%. Norman used to go to such buildings and just sit and watch as people flailed with these doors, trapped themselves in the area between the two sets, and in general got frustrated as hell.

It’s really very simple: you put the mechanism for opening the door on the side of the door that opens. If you should pull the door open, you put a handle or grab bar on it. If you should push the door open, you put a push plate on the door. No chance of confusion, and these little affordances intuitively guide people to the right action. And yet, doors are still made incorrectly all the time.

I also hate digital up/down buttons instead of knobs. Whoever thought it would be a good idea to make people repeatedly press a button or press-and-hold a button to get the volume they want, rather than just turning a knob until they hear what they want, should be shot.

GE made a dishwasher at one time where some bright boy decided to make the ‘on’ button multi-purpose. Press it once, and the dishwasher starts. Press it again, and it starts in another mode. Press it a third time, and it dumps all the water and goes into shutdown mode. The problem is that to make it work in modes like that, you had to put a time delay on the switch. Added to that was the fact that the dishwasher took some time to prepare to wash, during which there was no apparently movement or sound. So people would press the button, and nothing would happen. So they’d press it again, and the dishwasher would be in a new state, but nothing would immediately happen. In frustration, they’d press it a third time, and the dishwasher would go into dump-and-shutdown mode.

A whole lot of those dishwashers were returned as defective. and many, many extra service calls where made when there was nothing wrong with the dishwasher, because people just couldn’t figure out what the hell it was doing.

Then there are stoves. Every see a stove that looks like this:



  0       0
                  <-- Burners
  0       0
  ---------
   @ @ @ @  <-- Switches

Which switch controls which burner? It’s a mystery! You can guess that the right two probably control the right two burners, but which one is the top burner, and which one the bottom? There’s no way to know.

A better design might look like this:



  0       0
                  <-- Burners
    0   0
  ---------
   @     @ 
     @ @  <-- Switches

There is no chance of confusion now. More and more stoves are using this kind of layout, but you still see plenty of the older lame ones.

46

I have an Aveo with the same problem. I don’t smoke, but I do keep change and other little things in the ashtray, and I hate having to take my coffee cup out of the holder to get to it. Also, the cup holder in the front has two holes, which are different sizes. One is fine, it’s big enough to hold my travel mug or a normal sized bottle of water or carry out cup. The other is completely useless, unless I had the need to store a marker nearby. What could possibly fit in this holder?!

Of course the single cup holder in the back is huge, which means anything that gets put there better have a cap, or else the floor mats get drenched any time I make a turn.

47

I have this toaster.

It combines good design elements with bad. I bought it for the good, and I still think it was a good choice, but the bad are slowly increasing in irritation level and threaten to overtake the good and tip the balance of my opinion.

The good: Long wide slots handle a variety of bread products. Nicely spaced heating elements produce very even toasting. Darkness dial produces consistent setting.

The bad: The button labels on the front are printed in a matte silver-gray on a neutral gray-green background, and are almost impossible to read, so until the user memorizes them he will do a lot of bending over and point-blank squinting. Also, the metal body is poorly isolated from the interior, so the thing gets second-degree-burn hot, and you need to keep everything else on the counter six inches away from it if you don’t want to melt its plastic neighbors.

To me, bad design is most frustrating when it’s combined with good design. Something that’s poorly designed top to bottom, I just get rid of it. Something that has a few smart features I really like, plus a couple of what-were-they-thinking aspects I have to tolerate if I want the positive… that fills me, slowly and incrementally, with stabby-grr.

48

I have a built-in towel rack in my shower. It’s not even that unusual. My grandmother had one too and she felt compelled to actually use it so if you wanted to take a shower at her house you had to take off all the towels and lay them gently on the toilet seat and put them all back on the rack when you were done. That’s livin’.

I just balance shampoo bottles on mine and it sucks for that purpose too.

49

Any tool that has a commonly used accessory and no built in storage for that accessory. Specifically, wrenches for changing the bits. Everytime I use the router, I have to figure out where the wrench is.

My Hitachi grinder is a particularly heinous example of this, because to remove or attach a grinding wheel, you need a special pin wrench that has two prongs that fit into two holes in the arbor. If you lose the wrench, you’re screwed. If they’d put a normal nut-shaped bolt on the thing, at least you could use a standard wrench if you lost the one that came with it.

50

Oh, sure! That’s all well and good now, but don’t come crying to me about your Y2K1C problem in 93 years!

51

The light fixture in the stairwell in our townhouse. It’s about 12 feet above the landing, and we don’t own a step stool or ladder tall enough to reach. We have absolutely no use for a ladder right now, we’d be going out and buying a ladder just so we can change the damn light bulb in the stairwell, and then the ladder will just take up space in our tiny garage until next time the bulb burns out. The bulb is inside a globe that’s held in place with tiny screws, so there’s no reaching tool that can help. Can’t reach from the top of the stairs. So, basically, one of these days we have to remember to borrow a ladder from my in laws. Or call the landlord, which I refuse to do for such a tiny matter as a burnt out light bulb.

52

Or you could just wake up one minute later or earlier? (Depending if the alarm was 1 minute ahead or the clock.) Or, set the other one one minute ahead, too?

53

Another alarm clock question. Why do most clocks have a setting that lets you combine the radio and the buzzer? I can understand having two different options; some people need that obnoxious buzzing to wake them up, while other people (like me) would decide to test the radio’s resistance to shotgun blasts if they had to wake up to EEEE-EEEE-EEEE-EEEE!!! every morning. But why have an option that combines the two? Does anyone actually use this?

54

And here’s the clock radio with buttons on the front which are nearly impossible to push with one hand. This is because the force necessary to push the buttons is greater than the force required to push the entire radio around the surface of the end table. Maybe, as you’re lying in bed, you could reach your arm over at an ungraceful angle, and grip the whole side of the radio with your palm to hold it in place. With luck, maybe your thumb will find one of the buttons. Or maybe, the entire radio will accidentally fly off the end table. Maybe next time it won’t be an accident.

[sub]Most fake sounding nature sounds I’ve ever heard[/sub]

55

I always, always, always set the sucker from an upright position. And I’d love the ocean waves sound except for the damn bird calls every few seconds. But the number one reason I hate this alarm clock is that the stupid TIMEX can’t keep time.

My personal pet peeve is with my shower head with the shiny, slick plastic ring to turn to adjust the spray, using my soapy wet fingers. Grrrr.

56

We have the original ceramic toothbrush holders mounted on the wall in our bathroom. In 7 years, I’ve never found a toothbrush that will fit in it. It does hold dirt well.

I have a toddler. Every stinkin’ baby item is made of indestructible plastic. With little grooves and designs and swirly things that make them impossible to clean. Yes, I’ve tried baby wipes, old toothbrushes, q-tips. Damned impossible

Computer desks that aren’t reversible. I better buy a desk that has the computer hole on a side I like for all eternity. God forbid, I place it in another location where it would be more convenient for it to be on the other side. Sure it’s a cheesey fiberboard desk. Make a few more screw holes and it would work on either side!

Monitor power buttons that you can’t push. Either your fingernail gets stuck between the button and the case or you need a jack hammer to work the thing.

Dunkin’ Donuts had the perfect coffee cup. It was plastic, insulated, sealed reliably. Didn’t have a wacked out handle sticking out 3ft from the side of the cup. You could microwave it. You could put it in your purse, you could shake it upside down and it wouldn’t leak. They stopped carrying it. You can find them for sale on ebay occasionally for about $20. Why with all the different traveler mugs is it impossible to find one that doesn’t have metal or a handle? The cups downfall? It looked exactly like the regular dunkin’ donuts styro cup and people often would throw it away thinking it was trash. I’ve had 3 of them.

I’ve often wondered why my stroller has a basket, two cup holders, a clock, a thermometer, but doesn’t have a hook anywhere to put a purse. Yeah, the basket underneath. Sure, with all the other crap under there.

57

Nintendo’s WaveBird wireless controller.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fine controller (still one of the best), but it has a really annoying facet. Here’s the thing: The WaveBird has two parts, the controller and the receiver (which plus into the GameCube). On both pieces is a small black dial which can be rotated to choose one of 16 channels (1-16). For each controller, the number must match that of its respective dial so they’re “on the same frequency,” so to speak.

While that’s annoying in and of itself, the worst part is that the numbers that designated the frequency were also written in black. In fact, they weren’t even written, they were simple imprints on the black dial itself, which made it damn near impossible to read those fucking numbers except in the best lighting conditions. Even worse, those stupid dials, I swear to God, would rotate by themselves overnight. No matter what you did, whenever you came back to the GameCube, you would have to reset the numbers again.

58

A Radio Shack digital timer. It’s about four inches high, two and a half wide, and has a nifty easel leg you can open in the back to make it stand up on a desk top so you can see it without hovering over it. The problem? The leg is about three-eighths wide and the bottom edge has a convex curve built in it. Every time you nudge the thing, it rolls over on that round bottom and falls on it’s side. One of these days I’m gonna glue a couple outriggers on that usless rounded base.

59

I have an instant read oven thermometer/alarm with a heat resistant cord so you can keep the thermometer in the oven while it’s cooking, and you set an alarm to go off when the dish reaches the right temperature - sort of similar to this model, but mine’s not as nice.

Mine is fairly intuitive to operate, it’s easy to switch between Celsius and Fahrenheit (handy if your recipe is in different units than you’re used to), and it’s easy to set the temperature you want.

However, the model I have doesn’t have an off switch. You put the batteries in and the thermometer is on. To turn it off you have to remove the batteries. And then, inevitably, I’ll end up misplacing one or both of the batteries before the next time I use it, and then don’t have any more AAA batteries in the house when I need them.

60

Can they be set for different times? Because then I would. I prefer to wake up to the radio, but there are plenty of times when I’ll just sleep right through it. When I was living alone, I’d set my radio alarm for my ‘would like to get up’ time, and a separate clock with a buzzer alarm for my ‘absolutely have to get up’ time. It’s moot now since I work at an office that starts an hour later and is 40 minutes closer to my house, plus they don’t care if you’re 30 minutes late.

Anyway, count me in as another who’s got a dozen cell-phone pictures of the inside of his pocket. Plus, the camera function stays on after you shoot a picture, which drains the battery much faster than the regular sleep mode.