The Museum of Bad Design - your favorite exhibits.

In My Humble Opinion
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Here at the Museum of Bad Design we celebrate all manner of bad design - industrial design, website design, process design, coding kludges, more…

This museum defines “bad design” as “form which inhibits function” (allowing that different valid interpretations may exist). You can see an easily understandable example of Bad Design in the entrance way, a display dedicated to car touchscreens which show the message “do not use while driving” only after you shift to “Drive” and start the car in a forward direction.

Come here, to one of my favorite exhibits, the fluorescent light bulb and ballast. Here is how I imagine this one got created…

“Boss, I have an idea!”

“What is it, son, tell me!”

“I have a great idea for a light bulb. It will take the world by storm!”

“Go on…”

“It will use fluorescent gas. But the genius of my design? It will be a thin glass tube where, to replace it, you have to grab it with both hands and apply enough rotational torque to (un)install it, which is EXACTLY what you don’t want to do with thin glass tubes! And we can make these things long enough so that, at times, it takes two people doing this in unison! And the fixtures? So damned ugly they will become symbolic of both Corporate and Communist oppression!”

“That’s a bold statement. Tell me more. Convince me.”

“So, the connector will be these two little metal pins on each end of the light, see? And what you do is you… push this through this cheap piece of easily-snapped molded plastic… and then rotate it like… this! Dammit! Something is catching it somewhere. Anyway… look closer.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“Exactly! Do you turn this glass tube one way… or the other? Instructions are for sissies, boss. One way leads to a removed bulb, the other may lead to broken glass as too much torque is applied by frustrated homeowners.”

"Wow. Forcing homeowners and secretaries to hold thin glass tubes in their hands, applying equal torque to spin the thing just to plug it in an ugly fixture?

"And you don’t even want to take the forty more minutes required to figure out a better solution, one which won’t result in busted bulbs, bizarre ceiling lighting attachments, crap-assed connectors, and a bulb-changing system with a non-zero probability of getting shards of glass everywhere whenever it needs changing?

"I mean…

“Shit, this is why I hired you, man! I knew you had talent!” :claps on back:

“Boss, thanks!”

“Hey, got another design issue for you… do you know what a ‘remote control’ for a ‘VCR’ is?”

“Er, no.”

“Perfect! You’re leading the team!”

All right, so tell us about your favorite Exhibits in the Museum of Bad Design.

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At one time in my career I designed and maintained IVR (phone menu) systems, so the one which required me to enter my 11-digit account number and 6-digit PIN before it told me that the office was closed sticks in my craw.

Then there’s the (maybe) apocryphal IRS menu: “If you are using a rotary phone, press 1.”

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Curators are still struggling with the decision as to whether IVR issues are software or process fuckeries. However, our IVR wing is quite extensive.

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OMG, I’m glad it’s just not me with the fluorescent tubes. Literally last weekend my replacements for the garage fixture arrived and of course I instantly shattered the one trying to install it! Back to no light, but now shards of glass to pick out of the concrete. :mad:

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“Error 43-01”

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Any touch screen interface installed in a moving vehicle.

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Might be worth doing a YouTube search for the stand-up routine on “The George Foreman Grill”.

Lots of things are badly designed. Forks with flexible tines. The wood burning set I got for Christmas one year (they still make those)? Much computer software, especially medical programs from the 1980s, still in use thirty years later in some places. Light bulbs are up there, though.

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I had this lovely vintage mid-century modern light fixture. To change the bulb you had to unscrew the thing holding the bottom cover, install the new lights, and then screw the thing holding the bottom fixture back on. Only…the screws were on the inside. To get it back on you could tape the screw into one place and then twirl the fixture…okay that didn’t work. Get a long pair of pliers to hold the screw…nope, there’s not enough room and it has to bend, and pliers don’t really bend that way. Maybe tongs? Nope, they don’t bend either and they’re not quite long enough anyway. Maybe some duct tape? Somewhere? Finally got it, don’t remember how, and put out word: Do not use this lamp, it’s too hard to replace the damn bulbs.

That was the first place I put those spiral compact fluorescent bulbs when they came out. We could use our light again! It lasted till we moved. Let the next homeowner deal with it. Yeah, the one who was so impressed that this great mid-century fixture was STILL THERE.

Like this (scroll down a bit)

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I nominate the battery installation of the Dodge Journey.

I was at my friends’ place, when they needed to boost it. We opened the hood. The battery terminals were there, yes, but there was no battery! The terminals were connected to thick cables that led somewhere down inside the car.

We connected the jumper cables and boosted the car. But where was the battery? I dug out the manual. After a bit of searching, all was revealed. To access the battery on a Dodge Journey, you must:

  1. Park the car.
  2. Turn the front wheels hard to one side*, as far as they will go.
  3. Go into the wheel well. Behind the wheel, you will find an access panel in the wall of the wheel well.
  4. Open this panel. The battery is within.

This isn’t as bad as the (possibly mythical) car where you had to lift out the engine to change the spark plugs, but still…

*I don’t remember which side to turn the wheels to.

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We had a slide scanner at work used to make computer images of old projector slides. It used a pea-sized incandescent bulb to illuminate the slide for scanning.

Eventually the bulb burned out. It’s then when we discovered it was soldered into place and could not be replaced. Instead of having to replace a 50-cent bulb, you had to replace the entire $100 device.

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Bad design for sure, but a soldering iron costs less than $100 (ok, not that much less for a good one, but indispensable if you have to tinker with electronics)

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In user interface design :

  • Too much skeuomorphism : From Microsoft Bob to 76 Synthesizer, taking a real-life object and trying to extend the imitation/metaphor a bit too far.

The reaction to skeuomorphism led to minimalist design, which yields:

  • Flat design with poor affordance. Modern applications (Web, mobile or desktop) have rectangles for text input and rectangles as buttons, and text output that may be clickable or not, and some objects (text or graphics) that are supposed to be dragged around, and the user is supposed to figure out what’s what by reading the text or guessing which colour means what.

  • Low-contrast text. Some sites show everything in shy shades of grey, making it all look like a yogurt commercial. Is this little bit of text grayed out (disabled), or just not selected yet, or am I just seeing it from a weird angle that makes it seem paler than the rest? The only way to find out is to try pressing/clicking on it. And who cares about those without 20/20 eyesight on perfect screens? See Contrast Rebellion.

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I compliment you on your good taste in leaving the fixture behind and also the devious evil you exhibit in that act has its charm as well. The lights shown in your link were imho ugly as hell one and all.

My poor design submission, the alcoves for my washer and dryer. Yes, this bit of architectural genius is that there is a cabinet above each appliance. The appliances are placed flanking the door to the garage from the kitchen, with that wall on one side and a short wall on the other side leaving an alcove just wide enough to fit the machine. Now the washer isn’t too difficult to hook up to the water and drain and power, those are all up high enough to reach. The dryer, on the otherhand, requires a bit of stretching and limbering up as it has to be moved close enough for the vent duct to be connected yet leave enough room for a largish/medium sized adult to fit behind it to hook the duct up because drier vents are at the bottom of the machine, thus not accessible by merely reaching over the top. It takes some small ability of a contortionist to crawl over the machine and then hunker down and hook every thing up and crawl back out without bruising breaking impaling something.

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All of the above, but I think brain-dead/tone-deaf design is the main culprit. A few of the rules I learned, but seem to be lost on a depressing number of designers:[ul]
[li]Put the most commonly used options first.[/li][li]Get the caller where they wanted to go — or if you can’t, say so — as soon as possible.[/li][li]Use destination/option (“For sales, press 1” rather than “Press 1 for sales”) since a surprising number of callers will forget the option by the time they’ve digested the destination.[/li][/ul]

The 1976 or thereabouts Chevy Monza, which was basically a “sportified” Vega and offered a V8 (which didn’t really fit in the engine compartment) as an option. I happened across a technical bulletin on the subject, and while it was “only” one plug, changing it required not only jacking the engine off its mountings, but also using a special wrench with several swivel joints.

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Windows 8. Do I even need to explain this one? It may not have been as bug-ridden or crash-prone as previous versions but it was still very disappointing as a new release because the interface was just so awful, awful, awful.

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While not about design per se, this seems to me to be relevant to the topic:If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.

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Seats in (most all) cars. Specifically the gap between them and center console. Especially now that phones are skinny and slick.

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The Ferdinand/Elefant. Let’s take an engine that wasn’t good enough for the Tiger and use for an even heavier vehicle! What could go wrong?

There are a few tanks require the engine to be taken out to do some routine maintenance.

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The most maddening thing at the moment is bluetooth “autoplay” on Apple devices. Whenever your phone connects to your car, or whenever a hands-free phone call ends, it automatically finds and starts playing whatever audio you were last listening to. And this feature cannot be disabled. People have been complaining about if for years, but Apple won’t put a setting in to allow you to disable it. It think it will take somebody to sue them for the distraction causing an accident when music starts blasting uncommanded just as you’re reversing out of a tight parking space.

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A place to have fun,while wondering at the genius of the human race. Wi
With visual evidence: