My candidate for bad design: I used to have a 1984 Ford Tempo with the horn button in a very unusual place - you had to push in the turn signal stalk on the left of the steering column. Very bad in an emergency, because instinctively you’re going to want to hit the center hub of the steering wheel where you would normally expect the horn button to be in a normal car. Why on Earth would a major automobile company such as Ford even consider changing the position of the horn? As far as I know, it was only done for the one model year, as my father had bought an '85 Tempo with the horn in the normal position. I jokingly told him, “Ford learns from its mistakes.” 
I have no idea when they started doing it or if they’ve (hopefully!) stopped, but at one point Dell started shipping desktop units with USB ports on the front. This was good. They were hidden under the hinged light gray flap on the front of the machine, which lifts maybe 60 degrees. The bad is that the ports themselves were, for some reason, on this angled little bit, angled about thirty degrees out from the computer. So, unless you get flat on your back and stick your head right up next to the tower, you cannot see the port to plug anything in, you just need to grope blindly.
Oooh, also those (Dell?) laptops with multiple USB ports stacked right on top of each other, meaning…you can’t fit two plugs in the amount of space provided.
I kind of doubt that a fire over three hundred years ago is the reason for modern British power cords. I don’t deny that the British government tends to go a little bit crazy with various safety regulations, but I’m having trouble attributing that to something that happened in the 1600’s. And regardless, those plugs are still terrible design - compare a British plug to a North American or continental European one, and the British style is just a pain in the ass. And as far as I’m aware, there’s no great plague of houses burning down across North America and Europe due to our more practical plugs. (And, uh, I may seem kind of worked up about this, but when I was living in Britain I was just constantly irritated by the plug design. It struck me as just obnoxiously large, and it was just one of those little things that grates on you relentlessly.)
Remember, we Americans use different voltages and cycles than others.
220V 50cy may do strange things.
Man, I hate those. I have little squares of black electrical tape on devices all over my apartment. Designers, just because you CAN put little blue LEDS on anything doesn’t mean you SHOULD. The worst offender? The new DirecTV HD DVRs. They have a spinning ring of blue LEDs right in the middle of the face of the unit! Forget having this bad boy in your bedroom, especially if it’s recording something. It would be if the TARDIS was landing in your bedroom - over and over, all night long.
There are good showers controls though, but if you rent you might not have much choice. The ones I hate are those moronic “one knob” types - turn fully counter-clockwise for off, turn clockwise to go from freezing to scalding, all at the same volume. My brother the Master Plumber has installed Delta controls in the baths in my apartments, his home, all his rental properties and all our relatives. He really believes in this product. It has a handle for volume and a knob for temperature. If you’re the only one who uses the shower, it’s always correct. You can turn it off, or turn the water pressure down, and the temperature won’t change.
Trust me, installing and fixing them is a nightmare too. The way they mount to the floor flange is mind-bogglingly stupid.
I have them everywhere. Brilliant design.
The European ones are smaller, granted. But the American plug is horrible! One of the two blades is hot as soon as the plug is partially inserted into the outlet. Which means that if your hand slips, you can shock the shit out of yourself very easily, and makes plugging in anything “blind” (like under a desk or behind a couch) a thrilling adventure. Both the British and European plugs I’ve encountered have pins that are mostly plastic with metal on the end only, so contact isn’t made until the pins are far enough in the socket so all the metal is no longer accessible. Perfectly safe.
It’s the explanation they like to give. And your other examples aren’t fused.
The Brit ones, though, are rated for 13 amps, and have a fuse inside them. Continental ones are 2.5 amps. (or 7.5 amps, depending on what reference you use.)
At least the date format is one most non-US citizens are familiar with, dd/mm/yy. Using MM/DD/YY is bad design, IMHO.
An aside: check box 5. What other sex would people put if they weren’t guided to choose male or female? Apart from the jokers who put “Yes, please.”
Ah yes, the good old I94W.
You’ve got to love a form which tries trick questions like, “Have you ever been or are you now involved in espionage or sabotage; or in terrorist activities; or genocide; or between 1933 and 1945 were involved, in any way, in persecutions associated with Nazi Germany or its allies?”
I can just see a terrorist thinking, “Damn, I nearly got away with it, but now I have to admit it.”
I’ve been sorely tempted to tick “yes” then cross it out and tick “no.” Never done it though, because on arrival in the US I could do without a couple of hours of questioning.
Well, if you are gonna force people to put male or female you might as well do it as a tick box, but in other (typically somewhat less authoritarian) circumstances, some forms provide a fill-in-the-blank for people who do not identify as male or female.
My wife has a hot plate to keep her coffee warm. The on/off switch is about 18" from the late, meaning that depending on where you put it, the switch might be behind something else. Why not have it two inches off the hot plate?
Our refrigerator has an inane way of adjust the refrigerator and the freezer. If you turn up the refrigerator you’re turning down the freezer and vv. It’s impossible. In fact, I think I’m going to try to find an answer to this one this week.
Another nod to the overuse of bright blue LEDs. I have an el-cheapo disc player that has a blue Blu-Ray logo that lights up whenever it’s on. One might think that it would only light up when the machine was playing a Blu-Ray disc, but noooo… it’s on even when there’s a DVD or CD in the machine. And there are blue circles around the buttons as well. Bright blue circles.
And then there’s the computer disc burner that has three LEDs on the front that show what kind of disc is in: green for CD, green for DVD, and blue for BD (you saw that coming).These LEDs are behind a transparent plastic piece that blurs their light out to the sides and means that you can’t even completely isolate one LED from the light of the others.
And the external case I put it in has a big blue light on one side that stays on except when the disc is being accessed. I hope that’s just a question of something being plugged in backwards, because otherwise it and the disc-type LED go a good way towards lighting the room all by themselves.
And putting “are you coming to the US to work” in the same question as “have you ever been ejected” and “have you ever tried to enter by fraud or misrepresentation”? :dubious:
There’s got to be some term for the statistical conflating of things that are unrelated to each other. I suspect some low-level minion ran out of space on the form while arranging the required content under a deadline.
And how many people even know what “moral turpitude” even is without checking a dictionary? Are there other kinds of turpitude? And does it have anything to do with turpentine?
We have a Harmony and love it love it love it. Agreed that most “universal remotes” simply don’t work but Logitech has made history with this one.
except every body in this thread wishes they could upgrade their appliances to stop them from beeping and flashing LEDs
Some SatNavs. The ones that require the street to be entered first. Some streets cross multiple suburbs, so I enter the street name and then I’m prompted with a list of suburbs the street crosses. Great, I’m not familiar enough with the area so I guess the suburb. Rats, the number range for that suburb is outside my required address. Lets go back a step and choose another. What, there’s no back?? Start again from the beginning!!
My SatNav got nicked a couple of weeks ago. Good job. With my new one I can enter the number first, then the street. No more foaming rage.
Regarding UK power plugs. My understanding is that the the outlets are/were ring fed with a 30 amp breaker. This meant an individual outlet could provide more that the allowable 10 (or 15?) amps the plug contacts can handle. The way around this was to require fused plugs. This wiring scheme was designed to save copper during the rebuild after WW2.
Agree on LEDs. I wouldn’t mind them if they weren’t so bright. At least mine convey possible semi-useful information (well except the rear case fan but that’s off at night). The only blue ones are on the switch and they’re enough to light my whole room at night.
A lot of web sites that I just want to hit for the data that I need immediately, hide that information several layers deep in the navigation and have useless graphics/photographs instead.
A prime example a museum web sites. When I visit a museum’s site I usually want the following two pieces of information:
- opening hours
- location
Both are usually hidden two or more clicks away from the front page, often under menu items that don’t clearly indicate what’s hidden under them. For example on the English version of this museum’s site the opening hours and location are under “Pay a visit”, not under “The Museum”. (I initally did not look at the “Pay a visit” item because I thought “who are they to order me around?”)
Why can a museum’s web site’s front page just say:
Museum's name
Opening hours: ...
Address: ... (click here for map)
Click here for more information
?
My old Nokia phone had the action button perform two functions when sending an SMS:
- Spell word
- Send
Thus fast fingers often sent a text before I’d corrected the autospell in the message.
I can’t believe the number of times I told my girlfriend that I wanted to kick her aunt.
::badoom-tish::
I was reading this thread again and thought of exactly this example. It’s one of my favorite design rants because it’s not just thick-headed or pointless, it actually significantly impedes the use of the device. WHAT is that flap supposed to do, keep out dust? How is every other manufacturer getting away without that, if it’s so important? My brother told me that in the US Army they just broke off the flap, they were so sick of it.
HOOOWW do you put the ports together like that and not actually take a guess at the max width of a flash drive to see if both can be used by flash drives at the same time? I mean, I’ve had a flash drive since about '03, so Dell knew that would be a common use.
And now I want to throw in one of my personal little niggles that may not resonate across the world: Toyota putting a steering wheel spoke at the bottom of the wheel. I want to put my hand on the very bottom so my arm can hang comfortably there instead of having to hold up my arm all the time. I end up resting my left elbow not too comfortably on the window sill and holding the left spoke of the wheel. It’s something I may actually pay a couple hundred dollars to get changed.
Yeah, aftr the third or fourth time I had to crawl on the floor to plug in a USB drive at work, I ‘accidentally’ kicked the flap off. The ports are still at a stupid donward angle, though.
Good handheld shower heads solve the shower pressure/volume problems.
Just don’t buy the kind I recently did. It’s got a dozen settings and it’s much bigger and heavier than its more basic model. Unfortunately it’s sold with the original model’s wall mount bracket, which is too flimsy to hold this shower head. It constantly leaps out of its bracket and beats us about the head and shoulders while crazily spraying everywhere.
Which reminds me of a design flaw in my male adolescent kitten.
Thought of another one. Turning off the screen, but not the phone, entails hitting the red “hang up phone button”. To turn off the phone or switch it into silent mode requires holding down that button, for some length of time. How long? Who knows. When you want to turn it off or put it into silent mode, it’s anyone’s guess as to whether you’ll actually bring up the menu or just put the phone to sleep again. This is compounded by a generally dog-slow UI that also doesn’t give any indication of what the phone is doing at that moment, so swiping your finger could move the screen or could open an application; you won’t know for a while.
For that matter, one of the worst designs in computers has to be any program that queues up your keystrokes or mouse clicks. Click something, nothing happens… wait a couple seconds, click again and now your first click has gone through and you have… selected another option in the menu that just popped up.
Also any applications that steal focus, particularly if they do so without an easy way to figure out what the hell they’re talking about. Alt-tab unfriendly computer games compound this problem. If they want to connect to the Internet, then my computer goes “President Windows!” “Yes?” “A game is trying to connect to the Internet” “SHUT. EVERYTHING. DOWN.” This pops up a window in the middle of my screen informing me that my computer has shut its ports down, which depending on the game I may or may not be able to alt-tab or task-manager to. Though now that I think about it not responding to this dialogue has never caused my games to stop working, so maybe it doesn’t matter.