I used win 1/2.0 in a computer exhibit…talk about slow and fugly…
If ms hadn’t switched to the pretty pictures with that mouse(i remember when mice were optional and a salesman told me not to bother cause it wasn’t used for anything ) doohickey I think we’d be using ms-dos 10
My contribution is a process one.
I dunno how this is organised where all you guys are, but round here, once a year in spring when Daylight Saving comes on (and we all lose an hour of sleep), the State Government has decided that this is the absolute best time for the second term of school to commence. Because clearly, you’d hate for the shift to occur in the middle of the holidays, when there are legions of under-eighteens who won’t care because they don’t have to get up for anything - we need to make the two events coincide just to make it extra challenging.
Term dates and DST-change dates shift around from year to year - but the pairing together always happens.
Likewise at the other side of the year, it’s crucial to make sure that the clocks change back - giving you your extra hour - on the *first *day of school holidays, when you don’t get any good out of it.
There’s some busy bee in the Education Department making sure this works right every year…
Not the least amusing thing in that thread is the way ads for the new (?) GoT game are laced imperceptibly through the ‘crappy design’ posts. That may not have been the positive advertising they were looking for!
Busses on my local route used to have a small receptacle by the exit door which was just the perfect thing to put your used bus ticket into when leaving the bus. They even painted “Used Tickets” on it as a hint to passengers. Strangely though, it never got used. Perhaps if they had placed it where the opened door didn’t completely block access to it :smack:?
The fast food kiosks that are increasingly popular…
One in four times the thing is out of paper, so I don’t get a receipt–no proof I ever paid, no way to know my number when it is called. That’s flaky hardware and inattentiveness of the staff, but not necessarily bad design.
However…when it works correctly, I still have to go to the counter to ask for my cup even though I paid at the kiosk–a design flaw in their system. This is bad design.
What is the advantage to the customer if by design they still have to spend five minutes trying to get the attention of any random worker who passes close to the register?
I nominate… the ubiquitous optical disc, and all of its variants (CD, CD-ROM, DVD, Blu-ray, etc.).
The surface of the disc contains microscopic pits & lands to represent digital data. It is completely exposed and extremely vulnerable to damage via scratches and even fingerprints. Stupid, stupid, stupid! The disc should be contained in an integrated protective casing, similar to how a 3.5" floppy is designed.
Sometime in 1987, a man was hired at McDonald’s, so he could earn some $ while working for his business degree in Podunk U.
He was a good employee, dedicated, came in to work on time, really, the perfect candidate for advancement through the McDonald’s system. So he did.
Tragically, however, this man was put in charge of employee training and development. And he, over the next 30 years, trained tens of thousands of people… many of whom went to have successful careers in other fast food restaurants than McD’s… to put the slippery change ON TOP of the bills and receipt to drive-through customers.
This exhibit… of a woman looking over her car window at the 2 quarters and 3 pennies that just rolled off her hand… is a testament to his ingenuity. Not did he just come up with a bad way to do something that people had been doing successfully since 1974, he then put himself into position where his bad process could spread over the industry! Zero cost and millions lost!
In my youth I had an MG Midget. The spark-plugs needed to be changed very often, and one of them was almost impossible to reach. Every time I’d change the plugs, three would be replaced in 5 minutes, then I’d spend an hour on the fourth.
One time I wasn’t in the mood to scrape up my knuckles, so I took the car to a mechanic to have the spark plugs changed. Fine. But the next time I changed them myself, I discovered the mechanic had not bothered changing the hard to reach plug. I had 3 Autolite and one filthy Champion.:mad:
And yet it outlasted the 3.5" floppy.
And vinyl records seem to be hanging in there somehow. You scratch them with a needle every time you use them.
I assume the “stupid, stupid…” is your editorial comment; the CD data surface is not “completely exposed” to damage. A modern CD/DVD, etc. is relatively impervious to fingerprints and minor scratches, due to (1) the optical characteristics (the data surface is not the physical outside surface, which is out of focus to the reading head) and (2) the multiple error correction schemes (Reed-Solomon Cross-Interleaved Coding, and others). While a protective casing is a good idea, the original CD design took into consideration these factors, and was able to minimize them to a significant degree.
…in contrast to a vinyl LP, subject to serious degradation from fingerprints, dust and scratches.
There was a team on Shark Tank that proposed a narrow cushion thing specifically designed to go between the car seat and center console just to prevent things like cell phones, car keys and whatever from dropping down and getting lost. (A couple of years ago, my mother dropped her keyfob down there and couldn’t find it. So she drove to my brother’s house, where he crawled around until he located it in the crevasse under the seat.)
Whoever devised the utility company’s phone prompt system deserves honorable mention.
Press 5 if you wish to throw up your proverbial hands in despair at your apparent inability to select a button which will enable you to speak to a real human being…
I’d like to give a shout-out to the designers and developers of our corporate travel portal. Last time I had to book a flight it went something like this:
Enter your dates and departure and destination airports. Search for available flights.
Look through the search results and select your round trip.
Portal tells you that the flight you selected is invalid because the cost is over the corporate allowance.
Only then do you have access to another tab that shows which flights are actually within the allowance, and which are not. (Why not show that screen right off the bat?)
Select another round trip from the very limited group of flights that are within budget. (Usually with a 5:30 or 6 am departure time.)
Portal will not allow you to book the round trip. You have to go to a different tab and book each one-way flight separately. Meaning you have to jot down the flight # from the round-trip tab, then scroll through a huge list of flights on the one-way tab until you find your flight. Book it. Repeat as needed.
And don’t even get me started on filling out the expense report online when you get back. :mad:
Front axle fork on the Jeep XJ needs a mention. It slides a locking collar over the two halves of the axle to lock it for 4-wheel drive (don’t get me started on that mis-nomer). It’s activated by a vacuum motor. On an off-road vehicle. Little plastic vacuum lines, down on the front axle.
I bought the Jeep used, and tore them off the first time I took the thing off-road.
So now its locked, permenantly, like it should be. Vacuum lines all shit-canned.
This is a bad design, but I believe that this is a feature of the car, not of Apple, and it’s not something Apple can easily fix.
When a phone is connected to your car’s bluetooth, the car is the one driving the interface. The car tells the phone to play or pause or whatever. When the phone gets a message from the car that says “play whatever”, there’s no real way for the phone to know that it’s because the car is being dumb, and not because the driver of the car, say, pushed the play button on the controls. Apple can’t fix the car’s software sucking.
Arguably, this is the design working as intended. Phone trees are inhumane design (in the sense that they’re not designed for human users’ well-being), but they’re doing exactly what they’re designed to do: reduce the payroll of employees who answer the phone and talk to customers.
We moved into a condo last summer and two of the appliances are driving us mad.
A stove whose oven controls are front mounted touch buttons. If you have something in the oven and something on a back burner and you lean to stir whatever is on the back burner, you are liable to turn off the oven. It has happened a number of times.
A fridge with several flaws. One it a retractible shelf that allows you to put a tall bottle on the shelf below. Unfortunately, it is all too prone to retract with the least push and spill everything on it onto the floor. If only it could be locked in the unretracted position. The second problem is that even with the fridge temp set to 43 (really too high), there are a couple places in back that are below freezing.
I’ve come across quite a few train platforms out in the sticks of Europe that are contextually impossible to tell which side of the platform you should be on to catch a particular direction of train. Panicked dash down the under stair to the opposite platform ensues…
My LG stove has an unfortunately common feature: the dials turn from off, to high, to low. That is, when you first turn the dial, the burner roars to life at high heat, which you immediately reduce…then when you go to turn it off you instinctively turn the flame lower and lower until…it hits the stop and an almost invisible flame remains.
My wife and I have left burners on multiple times because of this stupid design. To shut the valve, you must turn it in the hotter direction.
I imagine the reason is to have a big burst of gas for the auto ignition feature, but it still sucks.
Considering I’ve owned two of the damn things I can say with a certain pride --------- the 1958 Edsel.
Classically bad thinking can be a thing of future beauty.