Bad Design in Everyday Life

In My Humble Opinion
81

I hate cell phones. They always seem to have buttons on the outside of flip phones that are amazingly easy hit either if you are talking on it or it is in you pocket. My last phone had an option to lock the outside buttons. I loved it. It had the flaw of a very easy to break antenna. After I broke it the third time they no longer made the phone so I couldn’t get another. I would have just to not get the R2D2 effect.

I started working as an electricians apprentice a while back(need the license). I can’t believe how companies that make electrical components go out of their way to make these things inconvenient. It’s obvious the people designing things have never had to work with them. I could write a book on the stupidity.

82

Are you wooshing me? I hope you are. Because that pisses me right off. Again all of us law abiding citizens have to suffer because of a few assholes that choose to get high.

83

I have something much worse. The top of my stove (the piece with the burners in it) is separate from the rest of the stove, so there’s a big groove around the edge. That means that if I drop any food on there, when I try to wipe it off, it ends up in the groove, so I have to take a knife and scrape it out. It was obviously designed by someone who has never done a bit of cooking, or they would have known that was an incredibly stupid idea. And it’s burnt orange, so it’s ugly and badly designed.

So many bathrooms are poorly designed. I remember one bathroom where you had to stand up and walk across the stall to get toilet paper. :rolleyes:

84

And on the subject of public toilets, why do the doors on the stalls all open inwards? Some of the stalls are so small that you have to practically stand on the toilet to open the door (and Og forbid you have a bag or a heavy coat, which gives you even less room to move inside the stall).

85

I hate my cell phone for its call volume button. My last phone had an up-down elongated button recessed into the side of the phone, right about where your fingers might rest if you were holding it during a call. This one, I couldn’t even find until I recently sat down with my home phone, my cell phone, and worked it out. The volume button would only adjust during the course of a call, and of course during a call I didn’t want to be screwing around with the phone. The manual’s diagrams didn’t actually show where the button was. Turns out it was the circular “D-pad” style button that normally selects an option on the phone screen; during the call it changes the volume.

86

It’s so you don’t clock someone standing nearby when you exit the stall. Note that bathroom doors open inwards as well - no windows to allow you to check outside before opening the door, so this keeps passers-by from being hit.

87

Sony is a frequent offender, which is funny since they also often get it almost right.

The Sony VCR I brought because it was inexpensive, but decent quality. It has Play, Fast Forward, and Rewind controls on the face, along with an On/Off button and an Eject. It does not have a TV/VCR button. Yep, you guessed it, if you turn the VCR off it defaults to TV and you can’t switch it to VCR unless you have the remote. No, pressing play doesn’t automatically switch it. It will start the tape running, but you can’t watch anything unless you use the remote control to switch it to VCR function.

In addition, they included a remote which is for the higher-end version of the VCR, that also can be used to control certain Sony branded TVs. That means there are two sets of channel buttons. If you’re not paying attention you’ll use the wrong set and be wondering why the VCR channel isn’t changing.

The surround sound/stereo system I have is worse. It has: a DVD player, CD and SuperCD function built in, an MD player, tape deck, and radio. There’s a USB cable, but that can only be used with Sony’s proprietary program and Windows XP. Frankly, I can’t see what use it would be even if I wanted to use it; shitty and useless feature. It comes as two separate decks, the main one with the mixing functions and DVD/CD player, the other with the MD and tape deck. The cord on the main console is meant to be plugged into the MD/tape deck and is only long enough for that purpose. The thing is, I never use MD or tapes (I bought the system used from a friend who was upgrading, so I didn’t have much choice of features) but I have to plug it in and waste power and space with the component, even if I never use it.

The remote control has separate buttons for each and every component that uses Play (and eleventy-billion other buttons that are very rarely used) but only one set of Pause, FFD, RWD, Skip buttons. I think it was meant to provide easy access to most of the different functions, but in practice this means that you have to be very careful which of the 5 or 6 Play buttons you hit, or you’ll get switched to the MD player when you want to play a DVD. Then you have to run through the functions to get back to the DVD player.

Which brings up the main annoyance. The Function switch is a tiny nub button hidden under a slide plate at the bottom of the remote. So to get to the alternate input, you have to slide the plate down, and use your fingernail to hit the itty-bitty button. A plethora of Play buttons, but the Function button — which I use more often than anything else but the DVD controls on this remote — is almost inaccessible, and in fact took a visit to the owner’s manual to find. The damn thing has buttons for almost every conceivable function built into either deck (including a full set of apparently useless number keys; useless because it doesn’t control cable access or change channels of anything) but the button to change to alternate inputs is hidden and extremely inconvenient to use.

Usually, good design consists of two things: 1) Making controls or parts work the way most people intuitively expect them to (intuitiveness), 2) Limiting immediately available choices to those most-used or most needed (simplicity). Not having a TV/VCR button when your player defaults to an unusable state without the button is bad design, even though the simplicity ideal is preserved. Puking up every button for every feature you can think of onto the face of the remote, while burying commonly-used options violates both simplicity and intuitiveness.

88

I have some T-shirts that have the care instructions on the left-hand seam – on two three-inch-long strips of plastic tape, not on fabric as God and nature intended. They itch like a motherfucker.

89

Based on everything I’ve seen from Sony, this is actually excellent design from their point of view. The primary purpose of every Sony product is to push you toward buying more Sony products. Proprietary software, proprietary storage media, extraneous functions that are useless with anything but other Sony products, etc. Internally, they refer to this by saying their unique branding position is their interconnectivity; what it means for users is that nothing works as promised unless you replace everything you own with $30,000 worth of overpriced Sony crap.

90

Oh, and here’s one that moved me to call in: Woolite’s dark wash liquid detergent comes in a bottle with a black cap, that unfortunately completely prevents you from seeing the fill lines scored inside the cap.

91

Mine doesn’t. Just one alarm, with 3 different sound options - radio, buzzer, and radio/buzzer. I guess I just have a really cheap alarm clock.

92

Or the ones that cannot be completely removed, no matter how carefully and closely you cut.

93

I recently bought a new Panasonic DMR-EX75 DVD player, with a DVR built in. It came highly recommended, but they neglected to mention a few key shortcomings.

It doesn’t have a second digital tuner, so when it’s recording, I can only watch what I’m recording, and not a different channel. A fairly basic VCR function completely eliminated for no good reason - I doubt it was for cost, as it was a relatively expensive product.

When you use it as a regular digital tuner to watch TV, it has three possible ‘drives’. The HDD, the DVD, or the SD card. The only one that shows the channel information in the LED display is the DVD setting. If you’re on the HDD setting, it only shows the word “SLEEP” while the HDD is in rest mode, which is always because I barely use it. The SD setting doesn’t show diddly squat. If I have a DVD in the drive, but stopped, and I switch back to the DVD setting after switching it back on in the morning, it starts to play the DVD when all I want is to know what channel I’m on.

I do not understand why they completely removed the casual television watching functions from this otherwise excellent product.

94

Train Ticket Machines
Every time I ride a NJ Transit train to NYC, I am amazed at the crappy machines that sell train tickets.
Not only do you have to press fifteen buttons to tell it you speak English and you want to go to Penn Station, but it takes another five steps to get the machine to understand how many tickets you want and another seven to charge your credit card.

The worst of it is this: why does it take the machine 20 seconds to print a single ticket? Then another 20 seconds to print a receipt? Why does it print one receipt for each ticket, even if you told it you wanted four tickets right from the start?

Fifteen years ago when I worked at a movie theater, their ticket printing machine could print ten tickets in about five seconds. Why is the train ticket machine so agonizingly slow for a procedure where speed is truly of the essence?

I’m just glad I never am in a hurry when I go by train. Imagine what it must be like arriving ten minutes before your train only to see a short queue of three people in front of the machine, and then watching how slow the process is.

Cup Holders
My Volkswagen has two little cup holders right under the radio that can probably hold a can of German beer safely, but nothing else. Nothing taller than a can will fit. Useless except for storing loose change.

Credit Card Machines in Retail Stores
Why is every single one different? There must be forty different competing brands out there. They all have entirely different menus and layouts. It seems that most of them agree on the totally unintuitive “Cancel” keystroke to tell it you are using a credit card and not a debit card and you want the transaction to go through anyway.

Card Readers in General
In high-volume places, why not have more than one magnetic head inside the reader, one on each side? That way, it doesn’t matter which side the stripe is facing. If it’s the kind where you insert the card in a slot, why not have four read heads? That way it is goof-proof. Of course, it may cost an extra couple of dollars, but the machine will be far more user friendly. I have seen one or two machines like this, but they are rare.

95

The camera flip phone with the picture button on the outside. Yes I have one and yes I have taken numerous pics of the inside of my purse and the BF has numerous pics of the inside of his pocket.

The volume button is of course right next to the picture button so we have other random pics as well.

One of my DVD players does not turn off. You can put it in stand by mode but it has no “off” button. It also will not allow closed caption to come through. I am not sure why but it blocks it. I am hard of hearing and when I want to watch TV in my bedroom the A/C is loud enough that I can’t make out what the characters are saying. I have to raise the volume to hear the soft vocals but I don’t need it for music so I am constantly raising and lowering the volume of the TV.
The remote also has no pause. The play and pause button are one in the same.

I have another DVD player that lets the CC come through with no problem but it will not play some DVDs so I am always flipping between the two players. Thank goodness the video/audio jacks are in the front.

Of course the cable/antenna connection for the TV is in the back, in a blocked in area, about two inches by two inches in the lowest corner of the TV and all instructions are printed in black on black in a 4 point font.

96

ATMs.
Good Og, why can’t they make the contrast on some of these things a bit darker? The one I usually go to (rather than driving another 4 miles into town to use the one at the bank itself - I don’t want to use the others that are not from my bank, as the charge for using them just pisses me off), is facing north.
You can only read it clearly around noontime, on very cloudy days, and after dark. You can’t see what the screen says on sunny days until around 11am. That is good until around 1pm…because it has a bit of a canopy over the machine, and the glare of the sun doesn’t wash out the screen.
I’ve asked our bank about it, since it is their machine, and they said they’d ‘let them know’ (whoever ‘them’ might be) that it was hard to read.
That was about 7 months ago.
No changes at all, yet.

97

Which has the side effect of causing one to be bashed in the face by the door when one is attempting to exit the bathroom but a frantic arrival has beaten one to the other side of the door and rushes in just as one is reaching for the handle.

98

My parkade at work installed a new automated ticket system, so that they could eliminate the job of the person who sits in a booth at the exit of the parkade, collecting cash from people who are leaving.

The new system requires that you take a ticket when you drive in. Then you are supposed to take the ticket with you, and when you are ready to leave you have to find a vending machine that allows you to pay for your time and validate your ticket. Then you get in your car, drive out, and put your now-validated ticket in another machine, which verifies that you’ve paid and raises the gate to let you out.

The ticket machines are only on two floors out of 9. So if you’re going from, say the main floor to your car on floor 9, you first have to get off on 2 or 4 to pay for your ticket. So the elevators are now much more heavily utilized, and slower.

There are always lineups at the ticket validation machines, because they are extremely difficult to operate.

But here’s the kicker: This behaviour in general (having to take your ticket with you and validate it at a separate machine) is so non-standard that many people don’t validate it. Instead, they drive in, take their ticket, throw it on the dash, park, and then drive out later, expecting to find a toll booth to pay for the ticket. So what happens when they get to the exit gate? They block traffic. They get confused. Then they had to read the fine print on the exit machine, realize they have to pay at a vending machine, and get out of the car and go hunt for one while everyone waits behind them.

The problem is so bad that the parkade has had to hire an attendant as a ‘runner’. He stands at the exit gate, and if someone forgot to pay he takes their money and ticket and bolts for the ticket machine, pays it for them, and brings it back.

So in the end, they saved nothing, inconvenienced everyone, and bought a whole bunch of very new, expensive ticket machines and vending machines for validating them. And the attendant no longer has a booth to sit in.

99

Sam Stone, they did that at the new parking garage at the train station I mentioned earlier. I went there for the first time last month. Fortunately for me they have signs ALL OVER saying “Pay your ticket in lobby before leaving parking garage”

I agree that it is a totally butt-headed system.

100

Sounds like a mis-placement of the pay machines to me.

Pearson Airport has a similar system in the car park at Terminal One. However, the difference seems to be that the walk-up pay machines are at the pedestrian entrances. People returning to their cars must pass the machines to enter the car park, then take the elevators to the different levels to get to their cars.

Where are the pay machines in your car park located relative to the entrances? Is it possible to enter your car park on foot and not pass a pay machine?