baddesigns.com is badly designed, and bad, generally.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Well, I’m going to stick up for the poor bastard, even if he makes himself look stupid with his over-the-top examples. Yeah, the people ‘trapped’ because they didn’t think to push on the door instead of pulling are a bit much, but his overall point is good. The door handle design should reflect if it is a pull or a push. I’m not so sure that’s bad design though, just that the wrong handle was installed.

Simple everyday items should not require reading a manual. If you have to read a manual to understand its operation, the design is lacking.

So… can we do better? I’m trying to think of bad designs that I can bitch about that don’t make me look like a lazy dumbass. Here’s one:

My VCR has on-screen display for setting the recording time, channel etc. The button you press when you are all done and want to quit is labeled ‘clear’. I don’t want to ‘clear’ anything; I want it to save what I just did. That’s exactly what the ‘clear’ button does though.

22

My guess is that the site was done as a school assignment by someone quite young, which explains a lot. (For example, he might have been stretching to find enough appropriate examples. Or the whole thing might have been a website design exercise, and the human factors analysis was just something around which he built the site.) Also, the copyright dates are six to nine years old, so the site design was acceptable for that period.

23

Actually, reading through his FAQs, he was apparently a usability engineer for WebTV, which is interesting. I never used WebTV; was it a supremely easy “plug it in and get going without ever reading an instruction” product?

24

Me too. Some of his comments are certainly dumb, but some are spot on.

A lot of good design means ;

  • considering what a really dim person would make of something.
  • designing something so that the vast majority of people don’t have to pay attention, or think it through. It just works as you expect it to.
  • following principles you might think are blatantly obvious, but still need to be said.

Unfortunately a fair amount of his suggested solutions are nonsense or unhelpful. And his website design just screams “for god sake update me, it’s no longer the 90s!”

25

That’s what I thought at first, but his FAQ sez that he got his Ph.D. in 1983. Of course, having a Ph.D. is no guarantee against being a dumbass.

The site design is fine for, say, 1994 (too bad he apparently started it a couple years later than that…) My guess is that he’s one of those people who wanted to jump on the Web bandwagon when it started becoming more popular; there were a bunch of design-type folks who were trying to establish a web presence and get reputations as design & usability gurus.

26

I have to agree with him on on this one. We’ve had the Caravan only a week and between us we opened the hood a least a dozen times when trying to release the brake. Once I did it right after getting back in the car after closing the hood from the first time I pulled the wrong handle! :smack:

Most of the rest are just whining.

27

The doors, as doors in public places have been required to do since the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, open outward. I don’t know how they decided that this particular walkway was the “inmost” spot, but if it’s connecting two buildings I can see the assumption that in an emergency the traffic would likely head away from it and toward the nearest stairs.

28

I’m going to stick up for him too. Some of his examples are stupid, but some are correct. And some of the concepts are correct, but he could have used better examples.

Take, for example, the door issue. Simple solution - you put a handle on the side that you’re supposed to pull, and a push plate on the side you’re supposed to push. Then no one EVER gets confused. The doors in the picture aren’t too bad, because at least it’s obvious which side they are hinged on. But if you’ve ever seen those glass doors where you can’t even tell which side they are hinged on, and they have those horizontal bars on each side of the door, then you’ve essentially got a one in four chance of getting it right the first time you open the door: You could push or pull on the hinge side, or pull on the side you should push, and all three of those attempts will fail.

His example with the metronome is dead on as well. It would have been much better if the front had had up and down arrow push buttons, and a linear tempo scale on the side. Make sure the scale goes the same direction as the arrow (ie if you push the ‘up’ arrow to go faster, the faster stuff on the scale goes to the top). The functionality is then immediately obvious.

These are trivial things, but good usability design is all about the trivial things. For example, my Escape has a power seat switch which is very good - it’s a long plastic bar sticking out of the side of the seat. Pull up on the front of the bar, and the front of the seat lifts. pull up on the back, and the back lifts. Slide the whole bar back and forth, and the whole seat moves back and forth. Simple, intuitive. No manuals required. On another car I had the seat control was a complex series of buttons, and I could never hit the right button on the first try.

His point about the ticket vending machine is correct as well. We have those machines here in Edmonton. To use them, you have to push a button for the ticket you want. Then the price comes up on a screen. Then you put in your money until the ‘price’ window drops to zero. Once it hits zero, the ticket comes out automatically. What’s wrong with this? EVERY other vending machine I’ve ever used works the other way around. You feed money in, then you pick something to buy. By reversing the order, you force everyone to stop and read the instructions to do something they’ve known how to do since childhood - buy stuff from a vending machine. In this case, the lesson is that standardization is a good thing.

I also liked his point about shampoo and conditioner being in bottles that look the same. More than once I’ve purchased conditioner when I needed shampoo - this is especially likely because often people would pick up conditioner when they wanted shampoo, then seeing their mistake put the conditioner back - with the shampoo. So no you’re forced to stop and read the little bottle to make sure you buy the right stuff. I never have that problem buying, say, Kraft Dinner. And what makes it worse, if you buy shampoo and conditioner from the same manufacturer and have it in your shower, then if you’re almost blind without your glasses it can be almost impossible to tell which is which in the shower when you need to the most.

29

I liked the example of the Path worn in the grass. I remember reading a similar example of this a few years ago, and an ingenious solution. An architect was building a university campus, and they were trying to decide where all the footpaths should go. It’s not a simple problem, because there are many different paths students want to take to get to and from various classrooms and campus areas. And almost every university campus I’ve seen gets this wrong - they’ll have a complex series of paths, but there are still some worn paths in the grass where students take common shortcuts. I liked the example because it points out the folly of top-down, central design vs bottom-up design. No one ever gets it right when they try to ‘plan’ where the students will walk. The students will decide that for themselves.

The solution the architect came up with was simple, and ingenious - he didn’t put in ANY paths in the first year. Just grass. Then they let the students walk wherever they wanted, and at the end of the semester they put paths in where the grass was worn the most.

Of course, the other problem is that the pathing changes if classroom schedules are changed, or new buildings added to the campus, or classes are moved from room to room. That’s why some ‘quads’ on campuses are simply completely paved. Every arrangement needs a different type of design. Too often architects will lay out the paths in the original plan, usually in some aesthetically pleasing fashion. But it doesn’t look so nice when that nice S-Shaped path through the quad is surrounded by muddy paths cut through the grass.

30

I only ever used WebTV one time, when stuck in a hotel without my computer for several days and going through net withdrawal. And I must say that even though I’m fairly good at intuiting how to use most items, that was one of the most annoying products I’ve used in a long, long time. Maybe if you’ve never used a regular computer you don’t have the problems I encountered, but it seemed as if you had to use keyboard commands to move around that bore no resemblance to anything I’d ever done before using probably dozens of different programs over the years.

So if he had any hand in the design of that, I certainly wouldn’t pay much attention to anything else he had a hand in the design of!

31

You guys are being way too critical here. Thinking about how things are expected to be used, and how they will appear to people who haven’t used them before is an essential part of designing pretty much anything. Flipping through his examples, I find myself agreeing with just about all of them.

There’s a very interesting book called The Design of Everyday Things (review here) on very much the same topic that I highly recommend.

Extra time spent making sure something is intuitive and easy to use means less time spent by users ‘learning’ how you put your particular item together, and means people think of your product in a much better light.

32

The first one - the kitchen timer - I have one that looks nothing like that, but you also have to turn it back > 15 minutes to start it, then turn it to the < 15 min time you want to actually use.

Of course it had instructions to do this on the back of the blister pack/card that it was packaged on. I wonder if he threw out the package before trying to use it. Or if it’s an almost universal requirement of mechanical kitchen timers. I figured there was a mechanical reason it needed to be turned like that to get it going for short amonts of time.

33

Either that or he is brilliant at parodying the intellectual ability of the average American. But I’d still vote for stupid.

34

I’ve been reading through these, and I’m guessing no one’s having trouble with this one any more…

35

You’d think the giant $ sign before the dollar amount would’ve clued him in.

As for this, it’s a fairly simple matter of taking either the deadbolt, or door handle out and turning one around. He should have actually went ahead and changed all the locks in the house as soon as they moved in, and avoided that inconvenience all together.

36

That page is still online?

That Web site has been around for at least nine years. I remember visiting it back in grad school, which means it’s been around since 1996, if not earlier. The stock graphics – the “turn page” arrow buttons – were a common sight on almost every Web site in 1994. Poor design now, but considering the limits of mid-1990s HTML, it’s not that bad.

FWIW, about 13 years ago I used to live close to the corner of Hillrise and Hillrise.

37

Dude, that design problem was fixed in, like, 1979.

Next thing you know, he’ll be complaining about how you turn the front wheels on your horseless carriage with a lever (“If you want guide your Satanic auto-mobile contraption to the right, you twist the steering-lever to the left!”), when a wheel that is turned in the direction you want to go would be so much more intuitive.