Bad Design in Everyday Things

[sukerkin]

ROFL - that resonates so strongly with me, Alfa. I am tempted to start ranting on about the multifarious faults in Microsoft applications but I guesstimate that the heat death of the universe would occur before I was finished .

 

[GT Pro]

Also, those Yoplait Go-Gurt tubes - Nobody honestly wants the hassle of trimming the top with a pair of scissors so most assume one must open the top with their teeth, or hands. Problem is, as soon as you do that it spills everywhere 84.38% of the time.

PS: This thread is actually kind of fun, ranting on about everyday products and all.

 

[daan]

I got a USB extension cable to go between my printer and PC. It has a blue light at each end, for some strange reason. This would be OK but the problem is that it stays lit even when the PC is off, and it annoys by being eye burningly bright when I'm trying to get to sleep at night.

 

[Duke]

Perhaps the resident architects can defend themselves on this one. In many, many apartments (including the two I've lived in), the bedroom is facing the parking lot, the undisputed noisiest part of the unit. I demand answers.

Because the alternative is to have a landlocked bedroom in the middle of the building, with no windows or natural light. There's only so much building perimeter to go around. Otherwise, the world would be made up of long skinny buildings that were two rooms deep with a corridor down the middle. Lot shapes and sizes, plus the volume-to-surface-area ratios, dictate that more square buildings are more efficient... which decreases the amount of exterior wall available for windowed rooms.

Oh my, how could I have forgotten to mention? I absolutely hate CD cases that have the middle part latch on so tightly to the CD that you just have to hope you won’t break the CD as you’re pulling it out.

Here's what I hate on that score: DVD boxes. They have a nice little niche for the DVD, surrounded by a raised area. The raised area has 3 or 4 little notches in it, conveniently placed for you to use your finger tips to grab the DVD by the edges. Yet these notches are FALSE! Inside the notch is a little bit of plastic that makes the perimeter of the DVD niche continuous all the way around, so your fingertips can't grab it.

Why put the freaking notches there, then?!

My gripe... apple sauce containers. All those ridges keep me from getting all the goodness out. Who thought up that idea? "Lets shape if funny so its IMPOSSIBLE to get everything out, so we can torture people!"

The ridges are there to add strength and rigidity to thinner plastic jugs. To be strong enough to survive packing, and shipping, and being loaded on palettes, smooth plastic jugs would need to be much thicker and use much more plastic. Or, they would have to be glass, like they used to be.

I'd say Spanish architects are the worst in the world. How the hell would you be able to live happily in an apartment that's made only of hallways... that's all there is. Three rooms and the rest is hallways...

Actually, the corridor is an important part of European housing tradition, for some reason. It's part of the culture, and the public reacts strongly if it is taken away, particularly in France and Spain. Back in the '30s and '40s, a French modern architect named Le Corbusier designed some small, inexpensive houses to be built for workers. In the new, modern design of the times, there were no corridors - just large, open, airy rooms that adjoined each other directly and with minimal walls between living, dining, and kitchen areas. They also had flat roofs with a patio and roof garden on them.

Immediately after they were built, the people who bought them (because they were all that was affordable) started building a corridor from the front door to the back door and started dividing the open, expansive living areas into lots of little boxy rooms. That's just what they were used to and they couldn't comprehend a house without them. Most of them specifically mentioned the lack of a corridor as a serious problem with the house, even though it actually functioned better without it.

Oh, and they also built little shingled hats and got rid of the roof patios, because everybody knows that a house has a pointy roof.

Finally, pretty much any bit of predictive software ever written. Why won't MS Word allow me to highlight a word, the whole word, and just the word?

In Word, try turning off the inappropriately-named "Smart Cut and Paste" option. That may work. But on the subject of Microsloth, here are two of my design peeves from the "world's most integrated office production suite":

• Why is there no keyboard shortcut or right-click for "Paste Special" in Word? It's a highly important command given the way that Word handles formatted text. There is a right-click for it in Excel... but still no keyboard shortcut. Why are they different?
• Once you do waste the time to grab the mouse, pull down the Edit menu, and select "Paste Special", WHY does it default to pasting everything with full formatting, etc... which is exactly what the regular Paste option already does?!

Most of the time when some software, whether its on my computer, my TV, my phone... tries to predict what I want to do, it gets it wrong. Bring back the good old days when a computer would rarely do what you wanted it to do but would always do what you told it to. Nowadays it does what it likes.

Worse, it does what it thinks I like, and it's almost never correct. I hate do-everything-for-you-self-configuring machines. They rarely get it right, and they are impossible to correct.

 

[Alfaholic]

I agree with the mouse and yoghurt cups, and the CD jewel cases, and I have a couple more!

Toilet paper that rarely tears on the perforations.

Tissues in a tissue box that are packed in an overlapping method so there's always one sticking out of the box. Half the time I get ten tissues instead of one, the other half the time I spend ten minutes trying to dig a tissue out of the box because there isn't one sticking out... I found the old way of just lying the tissues on top of eachother more reliable.

Microsoft Excel and dates *...

The jack on my old 1980 Alfa Romeo. Designed with a single elbow joint and a smooth metal shoe, radiused at the edges, so that it gets spat out from under the car with extreme prejudice once the wheel leaves the ground if you use it on anything less than a super high friction surface. Also, perhaps coincidentally, designed such that it cannot be operated without placing oneself in its firing line...my ankles never forgave me.

Swiss army knives that will snap shut and cut your finger off if you're not really careful

* they probably work fine under US settings

EDIT: Ooh, thanks for the tip Duke. I'll try it! 👍

 

[Diego440]

You're right abut the design, Duke... there was a real estate company here selling lofts, and they were awesome... in 9 out of 10 lofts sold, the owners built walls inside and made infinite hallways.

However, thereis one thing people here love to do and I'll always have a problem with. I noticed it only recently when we were looking for a house to buy. The most common issue with houses/apartments, is a complete lack of bathrooms. The usual thing you'll see in the description is "3 bedrooms, 1 bathroom". "4 bedrooms, 1.5 bathroom"... bastards.

Mebbe they like standing in line to enter a smelly bathroom?

 

[Pupik]

And my new peeve is how many USB thumbdrive manufacturers make the damn things so fat that you have to have two USB ports available to make way for one thumbdrive.

My laptop only accepts one USB device because there's too much overlap between the ports. It's impossible to actually fit any two USB devices unless I use the 4-in-1 hub to go with it.

I hate traffic lights that turn yellow the millisecond there's no other cars behind the last one that waited. You're forced to wait for the next light, so why can't it wait two seconds? Along that theme, why must a minor light be on a timer against the regular motions of a major intersection? It stops you such that you wait for one light, which means you have to wait for another light...by the time you get a green light, the light about 1/8-mile ahead has just turned red. Not only is it thoughtless and wasteful, but it wastes gas and creates a traffic-backup and blocks intersections.

The pointless trend of pens with huge, un-squishy thumb grips which serve no purpose but to strain your hand after writing one sentence, or make it feel like you're writing with a carrot.

Cup holders in cars that are about one-half of an inch deep. What's the point?

Public restroom sinks that pour water from the faucet right up against the wall of the sink, leaving no room for you to wash your hands properly.

Keys that you have insert upside down into a lock, but have no possible way of installing upside down on a key ring.

 

[GilesGuthrie]

Here's what I hate on that score: DVD boxes. They have a nice little niche for the DVD, surrounded by a raised area. The raised area has 3 or 4 little notches in it, conveniently placed for you to use your finger tips to grab the DVD by the edges. Yet these notches are FALSE! Inside the notch is a little bit of plastic that makes the perimeter of the DVD niche continuous all the way around, so your fingertips can't grab it.

Why put the freaking notches there, then?!

I actually used to cut the little bits of falsifying plastic out...

 

[Diego440]

I hate traffic lights that turn yellow the millisecond there's no other cars behind the last one that waited. You're forced to wait for the next light, so why can't it wait two seconds? Along that theme, why must a minor light be on a timer against the regular motions of a major intersection? It stops you such that you wait for one light, which means you have to wait for another light...by the time you get a green light, the light about 1/8-mile ahead has just turned red. Not only is it thoughtless and wasteful, but it wastes gas and creates a traffic-backup and blocks intersections.

We still don't have "smart" streetlights, that give the preference to the lane with most traffic. I've actually done some research into it, by measuring the times of most traffic vs. the length of time the streelight is green... well, it lasts for the same amount of time whether there's little, a lot or no traffic.

The most frustrating part is when you have a long stretch of road with as much as six pedestrian street lights, that work at all times. So you can be coming up on a street light at 4 in the morning, and the pedestrian light will change, and no one is crossing! And they last longer than any other street light.

But they invested in a chronometer that counts down the time left for the pedestrians to cross the street... fr the price of that they could've smarten the freakin' street lights and you wouldn't need them.

 

[Danoff]

I'm gonna have to vote for Mac OSX... and Windows (all of them)... and probably linux too.

Lots of good stuff in each one, but so many times you're saying "what on earth were they thinking?".

I hate do-everything-for-you-self-configuring machines. They rarely get it right, and they are impossible to correct.

Wait.. aren't you a mac user?

 

[Alfaholic]

The pointless trend of pens with huge, un-squishy thumb grips which serve no purpose but to strain your hand after writing one sentence, or make it feel like you're writing with a carrot.

Public restroom sinks that pour water from the faucet right up against the wall of the sink, leaving no room for you to wash your hands properly.

Yeah! Especially the taps. I also hate those taps that have a push button top, and you have to hold the button down to get water, so you can't have both hands under the tap at the same time

Also those blowers that turn on when you put your hands under them. For some reason they have trouble seeing me, so they keep blowing for half a second then switching off. My hands would dry faster if I left them in the sun! Maybe I'm an alien...

 

[DustDriver]

that'll teach you about selling your soul

 

[FoolKiller]

One thing I especially hate is the parallax effect that makes it so difficult to use ATMs. Whose bright idea was it to make it impossible to tell which buttons align with which arrows on the screen? Why must I crouch down just so I know I’m hitting the right button?

Each company has one ATM program, but the machines don't look the exact same from city to city, so it doesn't always line up. It's just a guess, but it would be the best I can come up with.

In my house, before we re-designed it, the architect (who was clearly smoking crack that day), put the designed-to-make-things-cold fridge-freezer right next to the gives-off-rather-a-lot-of-heat oven.

The idea is to go from fridge to stove with the food. Of course thsi only works for the peoepl who cook out of a frozen box. The rest of us, who actually combine and prepare ingredients go fridge, to counter, to stove.

Also, the packaging boxes that electronics goods like memory sticks and various cables come in nowadays. Are they really impossible to open without a pair of newly sharpened industrial scissors, or am I missing some operating instructions somewhere?

Clam shell packaging is one of my worst enemies. And you know it's a waste of money when you return something after opening it and they have to put it in an all new package. I know it is a security thing but I bet you can find something better.

• Why is there no keyboard shortcut or right-click for "Paste Special" in Word? It's a highly important command given the way that Word handles formatted text. There is a right-click for it in Excel... but still no keyboard shortcut. Why are they different?

• 
  I want to know why I can't have the Paste Special on a keyboard shortcut in Excel. I probably Paste Special - Value about 100 times a day. I can expertly surf around my spreadsheets with a keyboard, but when copying values from a database with formulas to just a report format for management I have to stop, grab the mouse, right-click, select Paste Special, select values, and then select OK. Even when there isn't a formula it still takes formating, such as borders, with it if I just paste.

 

[Jondot]

In my house, before we re-designed it, the architect (who was clearly smoking crack that day), put the designed-to-make-things-cold fridge-freezer right next to the gives-off-rather-a-lot-of-heat oven.

Our kitchen is designed like that. No idea why, but we've never really had any issues with it. It's the cupboards on top of them that get stupidly hot, rendering them useless for just about anything.

I have a two-handset cordless telephone system at home. You set the time on one handset, and it syncs across to the other. So why doesn't it do this with the phonebook also?

Exactly! I just gave up completely programming in ours...

We've got a 2 handset DECT system with an answering machine built in. You can play the answerphone messages by phoning yourself from another number and pressing * during the greeting. That's great - companies have been doing it for years, so why can't they build in the facility to check your messages from one of the 2 handsets provided? You must instead go directly to the machine and play it out loud, which I find mildly annoying. What's worse is the fact that the LCD displays on the phones actually have the functionality for displaying that you have a message. If you tilt the screen enough (a la calculator display) you can see a little answering machine tape that's just begging to be used. Why didn't they build it in? And why didn't they build in the speakerphone functionality? The base unit has a speaker so you can hear the messages ffs...

Yeah! Especially the taps. I also hate those taps that have a push button top, and you have to hold the button down to get water, so you can't have both hands under the tap at the same time

Also those blowers that turn on when you put your hands under them. For some reason they have trouble seeing me, so they keep blowing for half a second then switching off. My hands would dry faster if I left them in the sun! Maybe I'm an alien...

Those taps are useless. What I hate especially is when they're stupidly splashy. Because it's a push tap, it essentially has 2 settings: on and off, so you end up getting near covered in water.

Then there are these stupid automatic ones we have around here. It's essentially a metal hole in the wall which automatically dispenses soap, then water, then blow dries. It's great in theory, but the blow dry doesn't last long enough, and so you end up pressing it several times to stop your hands dripping. This, of course, wastes both soap and water, which is ironically what the machines are designed to prevent.

 

[ROAD_DOGG33J]

Computer mice - My wrist probably gets as much wear as the mouse pad.

The temperature control on the central air conditioning - Usually the A/C either turns on way too often or not enough, and it only goes up in whole degrees.

Toilet - Every toilet should wash your buttocks.

Deodorant - They need to make some for sensitive skin.

 

[Duke]

You're right abut the design, Duke... there was a real estate company here selling lofts, and they were awesome... in 9 out of 10 lofts sold, the owners built walls inside and made infinite hallways.

That sucks.

 

[livemusic]

Nothing I can think of right now, but there's lots of posts here witch I can relate to.

 

[Azuremen]

Yes, the T.I calculators seem to have many design faults. But I've suffered worse lately; my rather new TI-89 froze whilst I exited a game and the screen has subsequently been frozen (perpetually displaying the 'busy' sign) for about a week now. Too bad taking the batteries out did nothing, and the current area I'm studying in Mathematics DEPENDS on the calculator.

There is a backup battery in there you will need to remove, and a reset button. That will fix your issue, though it will clear all your apps, etc, on the calculator.

 

[Muzaffar]

Toilet - Every toilet should wash your buttocks.

Wait,didn't they invented that in Japan already?

I have a few complaints too.....

1.The Compact Disc (CD) i mean,it was the best invention after a cassette but for some reason it is more fragile! ( i know what problems the cassettes has, but not as much as this) i mean if you even scratch one thing on the cd, some of the data is gone (either that or your games hang/songs skips/video skip/stuck) If only the CD was invented better.....

2.Coins. It only adds weight in your wallet and yet we are are still forced to use it! Why can't we just use notes for the cents as well?

3.Printer Cartridges. Its good to have one for using your printer, but it dries up too quickly or when i used it, it finishes fast. I mean i know we have those fancy laser printers but can't the small cartridges be just as good? And why is it so expensive?

 

[GilesGuthrie]

One more from me: My Renault Espace has parking sensors on it. Which you can't hear if the stereo is on at anything other than low volume. And Satnav lady is the same: you can set her volume, but why doesn't she just adapt to the level of the stereo?

 

[ROAD_DOGG33J]

Wait,didn't they invented that in Japan already?

It's more of a complaint about ones that don't do it.

 

[Jondot]

One more from me: My Renault Espace has parking sensors on it. Which you can't hear if the stereo is on at anything other than low volume. And Satnav lady is the same: you can set her volume, but why doesn't she just adapt to the level of the stereo?

French electronics. You could end up a lot worse - someone had an issue with their 407 where the satnav thought they were in France, and instructed them to go the wrong way around round-a-bouts. That's always a fun game. Even more bizzarely it was just the screen that did it - the voice told you to take the 2nd exit, while the screen told you to take the 4th.

Incidentally, have you ever been in a French car (or a cheap car, for that matter) with a speed sensitive stereo? For the love of god turn it off before you head onto a motorway - you will be deafened by Terry Wogan.

 

[sukerkin]

I want to know why I can't have the Paste Special on a keyboard shortcut in Excel. I probably Paste Special - Value about 100 times a day. I can expertly surf around my spreadsheets with a keyboard, but when copying values from a database with formulas to just a report format for management I have to stop, grab the mouse, right-click, select Paste Special, select values, and then select OK. Even when there isn't a formula it still takes formating, such as borders, with it if I just paste.

I too have to use Paste Special thousands of times when putting together I/O Schedules in EXCEL. I have become very expert at ALT+E, S, V, ALT+E, S, T and ALT+E, S, W - I suspect all that practice on Daley Thompsons Decathalon in my youth helps immeasureably .

To paste all except borders, use ALT+E, S , X.

 

[V1P3R]

Whoever though it was a good idea to make a 2dr. car without a hatch back style opening should be shot... I can't get anything big in my trunk.

 

[opelgt1969]

Whoever though it was a good idea to make a 2dr. car without a hatch back style opening should be shot... I can't get anything big in my trunk.

Buy a truck!

 

[DuckRacer]

Everything about it.

To be serious, one gripe is the Dodge Magnum's interior:

Why is the dashboard so... "deep" (for a lack of a better word)? It's a PITA to try and clean the whole window.

 

[V1P3R]

Buy a truck!

I don't do trucks... unless I'm moving.

 

[Giancarlo]

And one thing I hate about my truck (ok there are a lot of things I hate) is that there is no way to open the tailgate from the outside of the truck without the key, so this mean when I want to put something in the boot I have to turn the truck off and take the keys out. It's a terrible design.

What about unlocking it before you take the truck somewhere where you have to use the bed?

Capri Sun juice- They had an unusual design (kind of like a pocket or something) with a straw which one end was sharp, so you can puncture the opening. I've never been able to do that without it squirting.

Hold the top of the pouch with your index finger and thumb, then gently push in the straw.

Finally, pretty much any bit of predictive software ever written. Why won't MS Word allow me to highlight a word, the whole word, and just the word? Why does it insist on also highlighting the space at the beginning or the end or both, or perhaps the whole sentence? On this very forum... why, when I am attempting to edit someone's quote, is it so hard to select and delete a lump of text without also deleting the ] defining the start of the quote?

I think you might just need a new mouse, i've never had much of a problem with that.

I got a USB extension cable to go between my printer and PC. It has a blue light at each end, for some strange reason. This would be OK but the problem is that it stays lit even when the PC is off, and it annoys by being eye burningly bright when I'm trying to get to sleep at night.

Tape?

I hate traffic lights that turn yellow the millisecond there's no other cars behind the last one that waited. You're forced to wait for the next light, so why can't it wait two seconds? Along that theme, why must a minor light be on a timer against the regular motions of a major intersection? It stops you such that you wait for one light, which means you have to wait for another light...by the time you get a green light, the light about 1/8-mile ahead has just turned red. Not only is it thoughtless and wasteful, but it wastes gas and creates a traffic-backup and blocks intersections.

I'm pretty sure those kinds of lights are specifically designed to alleviate traffic, because the road intersecting the one you're talking about is probably a main artery or just a really busy road, basically. And about the light being red at the next intersection well that's just bad luck due to timing. You gotta live with it.

Deodorant - They need to make some for sensitive skin.

Stick to powder-like ones, no gels or clear sticks. Works for me.

One more from me: My Renault Espace has parking sensors on it. Which you can't hear if the stereo is on at anything other than low volume. And Satnav lady is the same: you can set her volume, but why doesn't she just adapt to the level of the stereo?

At least for parking - turn off the stereo while you're parking? You're gonna stop soon anyway.

 

[G.T]

I have another one, which has now become rather annoying as they've (I suppose) fixed it.

I bought a £7 belt from Tesco which is "apparently" genuine leather (and smells it too), but a few weeks after I bought it, it started to split and fall apart. After taking it to customer services, they agreed to replace it with another one. About a week later, it started to split again, only this time much worse. I've even put it on the second hole so I don't pull on it so much. It didn't make a darned difference. We managed to get money back on it after some convincing, and received a £10 voucher. Now, just after I had bought a new belt, I happend to check the belts again in Tesco and the same belt now has stitching around the edges, which I suppose will stop it from falling apart so easily.

Why the hell didn't the manufacturer recognise this splitting fault in the first place...?

 

[Gil]

I'll START with Chevrolets.
Who was the idiot that put the battery UNDER the wiper washer tank? (Chevy Lumina)
It makes it difficult to hook jumper cables to! Yes they provide "remote" terminals, but it you own a decent set of cables they are a ****-hair too wide to fit into the recess.
It makes it nearly impossible to change a battery yourself without blocking off a whole day to do it in.
If you farm out the job, even the damn dealer forgets to hook the hoses back on the washer tank. This necessitates another trip to the fixer man to get it fixed. Trust me, the drive from Colorado Springs to Kansas City sucks. It COMPLETELY sucks without washers.
What ass-clown decided to put the fusebox under the hood, AND make it completely inaccessable by running a support strut over the top of it? (same car)
This one is self explanatory, but let me say that you have to remove the support strut to change a damn fuse! Not hard, but fuses NEVER blow when you have your toolbox with you. And 30 minutes to replace a fuse if ridiculous.

On to the minivan, though some of these are universal.
Why design an engine installation that requires the vehicle be taken to the dealer, for the engine to be pulled out of the vehicle to get at the Spark Plugs on the back side of the engine?
Why design a headlight instalation that requires near complete dis-assembly of the front fascia to change a friggin' bulb?
Why is it that you can get the jack OUT of its cubby, but it will not go back in without a bunch of swearing and the help of the service manager (who has become like family, for all the time you spend with him fixing things you should be able to fix at home)?
For the record, I can change all the bulbs in my Camry in about 15 minutes.
For the Venture, I have to make an appointment and I MIGHT get my van back the same day, but usually it's a next day thing, and I'm without my van.

Thanks be that both of these vehicles are otherwise pretty problem free.