Stupidest product design you’ve experienced

OK, everyone complains about gas pumps. And there’s a lot of really poorly designed phone apps.
But, my refrigerator has the most bone-headed design I’ve seen in a long time. The control panel (for selecting ice/water/cubes, etc.) is touch-sensitive. Which means that if you happen to brush your hand on it while walking by the fridge, it will change the settings. It’s irritating and unnecessary.
And stupid.

My mom’s Mac’s wireless mouse has the charging port on the bottom, mousing surface. Which of course means you can’t use the mouse while charging/wired.

Our dishwasher is like that. If you lean against it just right, it will start the wash cycle.

I lived in an apartment in Guangdong. The apartment had a squat toilet. One day at the Wal-Mart across the park from my apartment, I saw a “toilet stool” (yeah, I laughed at the name, too). So I got it, thinking, “Great, now I can sit down instead of squatting”. Well, the thing looked like this one, but with a catch: where you see the pipes there crossing, there was a crossbar connecting the left and right side so the blame thing wouldn’t collapse. Take a wild guess why that’s a horrible design.

Another thing that’s not exactly for one product, but rather seems to be a trend. What’s with the controls for a television or other product only present on remote controls? When the remote dies, the actual device is useless.

Quite a few years ago, I was in the market for a wood stove.

I looked at a lot of them. One that I didn’t buy had an interesting “safety” feature. The handles to the controls on a wood stove can get hot. Most manufacturers deal with that by using metal coil handles that stay cooler, or just telling you to wear gloves. The manufactures of this one had an interesting twist: when the handles got too hot to safely touch, they’d fall off the stove, onto the fireproof floor protector where they would cool back down.

That was obviously as far as the designers got in their thinking. I had already lived with wood stoves for probably about fifteen years at the time. My mind went a bit further: the handle – which is too hot to touch – will fall off the stove – onto a cat. Or a dog. Or some human’s stretched out feet. And that’s supposed to be a safety feature?

Isn’t that like every fridge these days? Mine is like five years old, and it has a light, touch-sensitive membrane to select cubes-crush-water (maybe in some other order). It would be rather difficult to brush them and change the setting and I could confidently state that it has never happened in the five years we’ve had this fridge. But the kitchen is not arranged such that it would be common to brush across the fridge.

Right - a membrane requires an actual push.
This is like an iPad screen. Just a brush across it is enough to change settings.

How about any moving vehicle that has a touch screen?

I met a guy at a party once who claimed to work for a car company, and he said many of the controls in modern cars are largely designed with entertainment in mind. Not, you know… driving.

So here I am again today, bemoaning the fact that I used to be able to change the heat setting with a knob by feel. Now I have to look away from the road. F***ing stupid.

Ah. That is a little different, then. My membrane, though, requires just a brush, though. I don’t need to push my finger in. If I just barely slide it over the buttons, it does switch from one to the other. It’s not an iPad type interface, though.

I’m with you in the fact that I like actual buttons.

Any moving vehicle touch screen where you have to literally lean over and press ACCEPT on the DO NOT INTERACT WITH THIS DEVICE WHILE DRIVING screen to make it go away.

A friend of mine once bought a petrol powered diving compressor, it had the compressor air intake right next to the engine exhaust

My Ford escape has handholds over the doors. Right where you get out of the car. I bump my head on them regularly. And so does everyone else.
I wrote Ford and complained. It seems the design has changed. It now folds in when you let go of it.
This always happens to me.

Beckdawreks black cloud strikes again .
I know about the dishwasher buttons mentioned. Mine turns on if you lean too close.
I like to say “If you can lean you can clean” everytime it happens. :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

My German-made washer-dryer combo has an elegant solution to this problem. Its control panel uses the same touch-sensitive face, with demarcations for each “button.” But it’s programmed to very specifically require a touch of half a second, plus or minus a small tolerance. If you just tap, you get an error beep, and the function does not activate, so the “accidental brush” effect is eliminated. At the other end, if your touch lasts for more than the half second, you also get an error beep, and no resulting action, so the “lean against it” effect is also eliminated. It’s engineered with the assumption that only certain types of touches constitute a deliberate choice by the user, and the other touches are ignored. It was annoying for the first month; I was never able to activate it within two or three touches, let alone one. But I’ve since learned the trick and it’s fine. Pretty clever design.

On the stupid side: Our Toyota Yaris hybrid has a single alert-beep sound chip under the dash, and it generates the various alerts by tweeting in different patterns. Three mediums, beep-beep-beep, or a rapid-fire bi-bi-bi-bi-bip, or two long beeeeep-beeeeep, and so on, probably six or seven different variations using the same base tone. But here’s the stupid part — the alert sound is not accompanied by any kind of verbal information on the dash screen, and there’s no explanation or pattern key in the owner’s manual or on the Toyota website anywhere we can find. We’ll just be tootling down the motorway, and the car will suddenly go beep-beep-beep for no apparent reason, and we have no idea what it means or what, if anything, we’re supposed to do.

It’s youse guys fault for having fancy-pants fridges!

The height of technology in my fridge is some knobs that you can turn to control the coldness. Actually some of it involves fancy-pants push-buttons and LEDs, but I’ve never had any problems with accidentally changing those. The fridge is electrically powered, too – no need for ice delivery! :wink:

On a related note, I nominate those TV remote controls with literally dozens of tiny buttons, all around the same size, and labeled with cryptic abbreviations. Sometimes it’s not even clear which miniscule nub is the power button! As if we needed another reason to give up on broadcast television…

One of my earliest jobs was in a chemical factory, and one of their products was liquid bleach. They sold it in gallon plastic jugs in a 4 pack in a 'milk crate’. The oval holes to stick ones fingers through to carry the crates were cast into the crates. Not normally a problem until one considers the need to wear gloves to protect ones hands, that made the fingers too thick to go through the hole while still wearing the gloves. that also meant that the person carrying the crate of chemical was hauling around 40 pounds on their unprotected fingertips. If they had increased the diameter of the carry hole, then the poor guys could manage to wear their gloves while handling product.

I’ll give my standard answer like in all of this kind of threads: the worst product design ever is the CD jewel case. It basically only consists of predetermined breaking points. I have about 2000 CDs and at least half of the cases are broken somewhere, though I handle my CDs carefully. There have been better alternatives to the jewel case for decades, but still most CDs are sold in that shit case. Good thing I don’t buy CDs anymore.

Same for our iMac; another stupid design by Apple. Even more annoying is that Apple doesn’t give a shit.

Does software count? If it does, I just stumbled across one a couple days ago.

I have some old (2002) CAD files in DGN (Bentley MicroStation) format that I needed to open and view for a current project. I haven’t had a full version of that CAD program for years, so I went to the Bentley site to download their “free” DGN viewer. It was a terribly intrusive process. I had to create an “account,” verify my e-mail, and register the installation before the viewer would open. The installation process installed at least four different programs and services on my laptop. But that wasn’t the real problem.

When I finally got it installed, I started it. The first screen is vaguely similar to MS Office…do I want to open an existing file or start a new one? I selected to open an existing one and browsed to one of my old DGN files. Nope…the viewer will not open an older “V7 DGN” file unless you set an option switch in the app under “File.” The problem is that you can’t get to “File” and the settings until you open a DGN file. I don’t have any DGN files newer than V7, so can not get to the options…forever, I guess.

I tried getting to some settings from the opening screen for at least 10 minutes without success. I guess I could go to their forum to see if there’s anything that can be done, but I just flipped my laptop the bird and uninstalled every bit of their software I could.

TL;DR: Software won’t open old files without changing settings. Can’t change settings until you open a file. I have no new files that I can open.