Stupidest product design you’ve experienced

In My Humble Opinion
1181

Minor stupidity, but still irritating:

My horse gets a supplement in his feed every morning. The product itself is a dense, clumping powder the consistency of damp flour, more or less. Not something you can easily pour out in small amounts. The dose is scooped out with a smallish plastic scoop, about a tablespoonful, that is provided.

The container is about 8 inches tall, but only 3 inches across. I don’t have huge hands nor do I have very long fingers. When I’ve worked my way through half the container, getting the damned stuff out without scratching the hell out of my hand on the plastic rim is a giant PITA.

Hrmpf.

1182

Vitamin E and Selenium? Sounds like what I had to give my gf’s horse each morning mixed in with his breakfast while she was away.

1183

What kind of wierdo drinks beer with pants on?

1184

Not for appearances sake, surely :joy:

1185

well, it may impress some of the fine women of Belize …

1186

I’d be more impressed if it was a woman doing it, not watching it. They do make ladies’ beer opener belts, don’t they?

1187

I have one that’s like that, and it’s a Sharp Carousel brand-- I make Jimmy Dean Breakfast Bowls now and then with it, and the directions say to first cook for 2 min., so I press the 2 on the panel, and it does just that. It then says to remove the film, stir, replace the film, and cook for another minute, so I do it, press 1 on the panel, and it does just that.

Basically, if the instructions for making a particular food were that simple so that all I had to do was press those buttons, it’d make my life a lot easier.

1188

iPhone:

Daily Wake Up Alarm - Giant Yellow Snooze Button, small gray stop button

Timer - Giant Yellow Stop Button, small gray repeat button

As a user of the Wake Up Alarm, I’m trained to hit the little gray button on the bottom to turn off the alarm, which means whenever I use a timer, it always repeats.

1189

The backspace and enter buttons of the on-screen keyboards for NYT Wordle and the version of Wordle en Español that I use next are reversed. Really frustrating, every morning.

1190

All this talk of beer bottles and belt buckles reminds me of when my brother got a summer job at the RC Cola bottling plant back around 1980. One day, one of his coworkers showed him how to open a pop bottle with his belt buckle. Except my brother did it wrong, broke the neck off the bottle, then gashed his forearm open on the jagged glass. He had to be taken to the ER to get his arm sewn back up. :astonished:

1191

Also reversed between NYT Wordle and Quordle. I hit the wrong one with some frequency.

1192

One stupid design issue that I encounter from time to time has to do not with the product itself, but with branding.

Businesses/shops/restaurants in Western countries adopt legal names that are written in the Latin alphabet (with diacritics as necessary). That way they get their business name registered, get into directories etc. - I often search for a specific business name in Google Maps.

Then, they have some hypointelligent graphic designer put their brand (which, remember, consists of a sequence of letters in the Latin alphabet) in a graphic form that cannot be reliably decoded as a sequence of Latin letters.

They simply cannot seem to realise that customers will need to look at the name and (1) talk about it to others or (2) write it down or (3) search for the name.

One example, that I encountered a few days ago at the front of a midrange fancy restaurant in Stuttgart, Germany:

[Album] imgur.com

(please click on the picture to see it uncropped)

Looking at that form of the name, I would not been able to pronounce the restaurant’s name, and I would not have been able to search in a map app on how to get there.

My first hypothesis was that the first two letters were Greek or Cyrillic (the two glyphs exist in both scripts), and the last two Latin, which would have made the restaurant name read PLLO - that does not make sense, even in Swabia.

I could not let that riddle go unresolved, and bearded the bar keeper in his den. He answered that, of course, the establishment’s name was MALO.

In a similar vein, when I first encountered the chain Toys “Я” Us, I assumed for some time it was pronounced Toys Ya Us, and was puzzled by that choice of name (I have since learned that the legal name is in fact Toys “R” Us, which makes sense as you probably cannot register a business in the US with a Cyrillic letter in the name) .

A few years ago we dined in a nice restaurant in a side street in Strasbourg, but I could not find it again two days later because I had not seen what it’s name was - its name was so skillfully obfuscated on the front that I had no idea how to render it into letters, and I had not thought to ask. I had the credit card debit record but that only named the proprietor.

1193

I’m also often frustrated by bizarre font choices. I think designers think they’re working within the design space of Latin letters without realizing that the world is a much bigger place than that.

Another example: ΛΟ, which I playfully pronounce as LO, is used by the Australian Open.

1194

Oh yes. My Android is the same. Whatever app it is. Stupid, stupid, stupid. You’re woke up and go to take a shower only to find out it’s beeping at you to wake up because you hit the huge snooze button.

I’ve never used a snooze button in my life. Well not on purpose.

1195

Stylized Latin letters are just that, no matter how much some may resemble letters from other alphabets. A capital “A” without the horizontal bar doesn’t make it an Λ, sorry. A backward R is simply that.

I’m against faux Crillic and other mimicry typefaces because they look stupid and lazy. That upper-case pi Π for an “M”!? That’s extra double stupid.

1196

I agree with this. Sometimes the chosen font is some sort of scripted one, and hard to read especially if I’m driving or walking past.

1197

That first one, I can understand having a problem with - I would have thought it was NALO. But Toys “Я” Us ? I don’t know where/when you first encountered the name but I don’t see how it would be confusing to an English speaker in the US or really anyone who is accustomed to Latin letters - if you saw the backwards R , you must have seen the logo and I don’t know how you would interpret that as a Cyrillic letter rather than a representation of a child’s writing in which one letter was written backwards.

1198

This. There’s a business not far from me that has a three-character logo rendered in a dark-colored, Gothic script font. And the characters are mounted so they stand off from the building casting a shadow onto it further obfuscating the design.

I still don’t know whether the name is letters, numbers, or a combination that I see but can’t process as I drive by at 45 mph.

1199

There’s a rocket surgeon near me who opened a one-off pizza joint. Couple tables, mostly take out. Decent if unremarkable pizza.

His clever name for his soon to be world-beating eatery?

PZZA

Written in such a way the absence of the “i” is almost indiscernable.

Plus of course anyone correctly Googling for [pzza] will have their input auto-corrected to [pizza] and thereby search for every one of his competitors first.

Oops.

1200

Unsearchable business names are another mistake.