Examples of bad design

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

I share this particular grievance with you. Maybe we should start a support group.

However, my TV power-button’s little blue light is actually on when the video is off, and vice-versa. It’s purpose in life, apparently, is to say, “Rest assured, we have power!” when you otherwise couldn’t tell. I guess that’s important information to report on, every single second.

And since this TV is in my bedroom, the blue light is on throughout the night while I sleep. It’s amazingly bright for a dinky little LED, especially after your eyes have become dark-adapted, or tried to. You then notice that it’s illuminating the whole room. I think you could repair watches by it.

This light used to keep me awake for a time, but I’ve since grown numb to its horrific blueness. I now regard it as a free nightlight that came with my TV, inadvertently.

42

Electrician’s tape, my friend.

43

Another thing I just thought of: any product with a tear string or tear strip or perforated area that you tear to open … nope. Never works. I instinctively reach for a scissors; otherwise, I’m going to rip the package down the middle.

44

I’ve been reminded of my absolute worst example, as it is a system actively maintained by humans.

Our school district Information Services (or whatever it is) has a phone line to call.

“Hello, you’ve reached IMS. To continue, press 1.”

There are NO other choices. Pressing 1 only gets you the the only choice (besides hanging up), which is the only logical reason you would have called in the first place. It’s as if your car wanted you to press 1 to confirm that you meant to start the car. “Why DO YOU THINK I TURNED THE KEY???” There will never be enough reason for that to satisfy me.

45

As I sit here there are 5 steady blue lights on the Belkins router, 3 on the D-link that like to flash at a higher or slower rate to let me know how much traffic is going through the internet connection in the house, as if I could interpret blinks per second into some usefull information, and 5 green lights on the DSL modem from the phone company. That is just on the top of my desk!

You know, I don’t need all these lights to let me know if things are working. If I lose my internet conection, the computer will tell me. Blinky, blinky, blinky! Look at all the technology. These people have completely destroyed the night-light industry.

I do not need for any of these devices to have lights on them. And don’t get me started about the TIVO in the bedroom.

46

OHH, you’ve reminded me of my USB hub. There are 9 LEDs that glow at all times regardless of connective status. Apparently, nothing short of unplugging it totally will darken these lights. Therefore, they impart no information besides “there is power here generally”. I suspect that the photo of all the lights on the packaging was judged to outweigh the cost of including the actual LEDs. I feel like a bit of a sucker.

47

There’s been a trend of increasing confirmation prompts in user interfaces in recent years, even for actions that are not potentially destructive. At a grocery store near me, the debit card reader asks for double confirmation for purchases; something like:

TOTAL PURCHASE $21.21
PRESS YES TO CONTINUE

followed by

$21.21 WILL BE DEDUCTED FROM YOUR DEBIT CARD
ARE YOU SURE?

“Press 1 to continue” could be the confirmation prompt taken to yet another extreme.

I’m also seeing a lot of validation prompts, which I call “no shit Sherlock prompts” For example:

YOU ARE USING VERSION 2.21
VERSION 2.22 IS NOW AVAILABLE
PRESS UPGRADE TO DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL VERSION 2.22

followed by …

CONTINUING WILL UPGRADE TO 2.22
ARE YOU SURE?

and, after the upgrade …

YOU HAVE UPGRADED TO VERSION 2.22
PRESS CONTINUE TO PROCEED

48

::slinks off embarrassedly into the night::

49

When did this trend start?

I have an LCD monitor that flashes orange when it is receiving power but not on. This effectively just makes it a “you have power” light, but I’m never in any doubt that I have power because of every other friggin’ electronic device in the apartment. When the monitor is on the orange light becomes that bright, piercing blue. I know the monitor is on. How do I know this? Because Batman is on it, running around beating people up. Batman can’t do that on a monitor that’s turned off. Jesus Christ.

When nobody was looking some company started a “100 free blue LEDs with every PCB” promotion, and now you can’t even buy a damned fan for your computer without LEDs stuck in it. The laptop I’m writing this on has 14 LEDs (more, actually, since many of the lights change colour), including two (!) to demonstrate that it’s plugged in and two (!!!) to demonstrate that it is turned on, which I can generally tell because that’s also when hitting keys on the keyboard makes letters appear on the screen.

But that’s not bad design.

Bad design is the way, on the same laptop (an HP TX2) the power and wifi switches both protrude from the front of the case and slide with very little force, so that putting the laptop in your satchel or handing it to someone frequently results in turning it off or dropping your wifi connection.

The HTC Dream cellphone has a camera button close to where you would hold the phone while talking on a call. In some builds of the operating system, this brings up the camera application; in others, it starts Google Voice. In all cases the button activates at the touch of the breeze disturbed by an angel’s polite cough two states over. Both for the hypersensitivity and the placement the Dream (T-Mobile’s G1) gets a fail.

Also, unless I am simply doing it wrong the tiny, tweezer-requiring connectors for the power/HDD LED/reset switches for a computer case generally force you to peer down into the abyss of a mainboard and contort around various other cables and PCI cards to plug them in, when and if the connectors are labelled on the board. It’s ok if you can connect them before you seat the mainboard, but if you install some other card and they come out (they always do, although like Neil Patrick Harris it’s not a great surprise) you have to do it all over again. Seriously to hell with those.

Badly-designed may also be any menus that force you to choose between “Press 1 for billing inquiries,” “Press 2 to upgrade your service”, “Press 3 to order pay per view”, “Press 4 to return to the previous menu” or something similar that are apparently designed to make it difficult to complain and in any case don’t give you a button to press for your real issue, which is “if the next tech you send out does not actually fix my problem, I will draw and quarter him”.

50

I have a Harmony and I kind of hate it. Mine’s an 880 – the One is better in some regards, but still has most of the things I hate about the 880. Some of the problems are fundamental to this kind of device. For example, if one out of fifteen signals is missed by one of the six devices you need to have set right to watch a DVD, things can be left in a very confusing state. This is kind of ok if you’re geeky and understand all the different devices and what role they play. But for people who don’t, it’s confusing as hell. The whole thing tends to be baffling to visitors who aren’t familiar with the setup. And even for me, someone who is completely familiar with what everything does, and has been using the damn thing for over two years, it’s amazingly frustrating how often things get messed up.

But like I said, those issues are at least partially not the Harmony’s fault (though I think it could do a better job of handling them). Things that are the Harmony’s fault (and therefore make it fit into this thread, at least a little):

[ol]
[li]The shape is awkward for almost everyone who has tried it. Somehow the TiVo “peanut” remote magically fits wonderfully into almost everyone’s hand. The Harmony’s shape feels like a cheap knockoff, and just isn’t right[/li][li]The buttons are fiddly and often too hard to press[/li][li]The buttons are hard to operate by feel alone[/li][li]The most important buttons are in places that are hard to press with one hand[/li][li]The fit between the remote and the charger is poor, so you have to make sure it’s in the charger just right so it actually charges[/li][li]The screen is hard to read[/li][li]The programming “software” is one of the worst apps I’ve ever interacted with[/li][/ol]

Many or most of those may be better on the One, I dunno. The shape and buttons seem worse to me, the screen might be better.

Anyway, I think it’s a good idea on paper, and better than most of the alternatives, but I don’t tend to recommend them. Obviously, YMMV…

51

Well, to be fair, the purpose of the LEDs is more for diagnostic reasons. Imagine you turned on your computer and no image was on the screen…at a glance you can tell if the LCD is on, off but receiving power, or not receiving power.

And I guess I’m in the minority, cause I love blue LEDs. They just look so darn cool. My alarm clock, the one that’s right next to my bed as I sleep, has bright blue LED numbers. Doesn’t bother me in the slightest.

52

The Google spellchecker I’m using, which can accidentally add misspelled words to the dictionary with a single mistaken click, but which as far as I can tell doesn’t let you remove them.

I’d recommend the book The Design of Everyday Things on this subject by the way; I recall it having many interesting/amusing examples.

53

Every DVD player should have a standard five-button control (usually circular, up, down, left, right, with “enter” in the center) on it’s face. My cable box does (plus a few others), and the directional buttons double for play/stop and FF/RW. It may take longer, but there isn’t anything you can’t do with just the box itself.
Still, every remote control should also have a beeper built in and a locator button on the device box.

I’ll add Designing for People to that.

54

With my old phone, the power button, the end call button, and the go back button were the same button. Plus, I think that the programmers tried to pack too much phone into too little memory because there was always a delay no matter what you did with it. So, many times I would be trying to end a call that I didn’t mean to make. The phone would then interpret my frantic mashing of the end call button as a desire for the phone to shut off. So, I’d have to sit there for five minutes waiting for the phone to shut off then reboot.
The lag meant that phone never managed to register that I wanted to hang up before it rang at least once, so about half the time, the person I accidentally called would immediately call back wondering what the hell I wanted, only to get booted straight to voicemail (the voicemail system being a poorly-designed clusterfuck in its own right).

My only design complaint with my new phone is that it won’t let you turn off the boot up/shutdown music. No, when it occurs to me in the middle of a movie/lecture/what have you that I forgot to turn my phone off, I don’t want to alert the entire theater to my oversight, thank you. Yes, I could just pop out the battery, but that’s a lot of distracting rustling.

55

Their answering machine uses Vista with User Control turned on?

“You are trying to move a file! That is DANGEROUS! Are you sure you want to move a file? [Continue][Cancel]”

“But it is DANGEROUS! Are you sure you want to move a file?[Continue][Cancel]”

“You need administrative permissions to move the file. You have administrative permissions. But moving the file is DANGEROUS!Are you sure you want to move the file?[Continue][Cancel]”

OK, if you insist… finally moves the freaking file

56

This sounds just like the TV in my bedroom – and, as you say, you do become used to the constant blue glow. EXCEPT that every now and then, at three o’clock in the friggin morning the TV receives a software update, which makes the LED flash insistently for fifteen minutes. Wakes me up every time, and then I have to bury my head under the quilt to escape the silent disco apparently going on in my bedroom.

Whatever happened to the idea of an actual on/off switch? You know, the kind that actually cut power to the device instead of just putting it on standby? We’re supposed to be more energy conscious these days – devices we could switch off when we don’t need them would help.

57

I have the Harmony 880, the predecessor to the Harmony One. I’ve installed a Harmony One in a friend’s home. I have to restrain myself every day from purchasing the Harmony One. The button layout is superior to the 880… and the 880 is pretty good!

I can’t recommend them enough. While I haven’t quite been able to throw out my other remotes, I’ve dug them out of their hiding spot maybe 3 times in 3 years.

I had to edit this just to add this: If you are spending $100/month on cable, got yourself a Netflix subscription, got a fancy TV and some surround sound, the $150-200 for the awesome remote is money well spent. There isn’t a single other device in my home that has so elegantly solved a complex and common problem. We’d be lost without it. My parents (who, FTR, live elsewhere) would be calling me every week to fix their TV if they didn’t have this remote.

The remote isn’t perfection, but given the parameters it has to work in (specifically unidirectional communication with a variety of devices), I’d say it’s the best one could ever expect. We’re long past due on commonplace bluetooth remotes/devices though.

58

Cellphone voicemail!!! I hate, hate, HATE! having listen to all the prompts just to get a message! Only one I know that isn’t like this is the iPhone. Also, hate the prompts for leaving a message. Grr!

59

Those goddamn alert bubbles that pop up every 15 seconds in XP. If I didn’t want to clean up my unused desktop icons fifteen seconds ago, I probably don’t want to do so now.

60

This problem was partially fixable on our Moen faucet. On the front and center of the base there’s a little piece with a brand logo on it. It turns out that this piece can be popped off to reveal a screw. Tightening the screw helped. We still can’t quite get the minimal flow we sometimes want, but at least now we have a range instead of a choice of full-on maximum or nothing.