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Poorly designed objects
Bruce Charlton asks:
What is the worst designed everyday object?
Bruce Charlton answers:
My vote would go to the standard, hard plastic, hinged CD case.
Its functionality is terrible at best, and it breaks way too easily;
especially the hinge - upon which functionality depends. And I have
hundreds of them!
That was my answer too. I am also frustrated by the prevalence of non-sharp knives, although perhaps this is best for the children. Do you all have other answers?
Posted by Tyler Cowen on November 29, 2006 at 07:48 AM in Science | Permalink
Comments
The standard headphones that come with IPods. Terrible sound quality and absolutely no sound proofing, so everyone on the train/bus/tram has their quiet reading time invaded.
Posted by: Tom at Nov 29, 2006 8:00:14 AM
american rulers. paper coffee cups with seems that leak. keyboard-mouse computer input (except for those with three arms). the list is long.
If I could add a more holistic problem - items are not designed for their entire lifecycle, although we are starting to see some more of it. Clothes are worn, obviously, but they are also washed and stored, and inventoried. Food packaging is generally optimized for sale, not storage (an overall look at integrating storable items with their containers, and container's containers, etc. might prove very helpful) and certainly not disposal.
Posted by: theCoach at Nov 29, 2006 8:49:48 AM
My vote goes for doors with ambiguous hinges and handles that necessitate "push" or "pull" instructions. Doors can and should be designed so as to not require conscious thought to operate them.
Oh, http://www.jewelboxing.com/ is a better designed CD case. Too bad they're not more common.
Posted by: Aaron at Nov 29, 2006 9:20:18 AM
Contactless stored-value cards - not very ergonomic at all, although this might surprise each and every Londoner that uses an Oyster Card [1]. Although it seems logical to make a contactless stored-value smart card the same form factor as a credit card, how on earth are you actually supposed to use it? Obviously it's not such a crucial problem that any Londoner actually stops and wonders what to do with it - we all just whip it out of our pockets or bags, tap it on the Oyster reader and go through the gate. But hang on, how are we holding it as we tap it? By the edge? In the foldover plastic holder that it comes in? Our fingers straddling the long length dimension, or perhaps the shorter width dimension? This isn't ergonomic. Do some of us grip one corner? That's precarious too. I grip the remaining flappy part of the hinge formed by the plastic holder, sometimes, or cup it in my hand to clasp all sides. Of course, holding it with my hand above, Oyster underneath, to tap on top of the reader, it can sometimes drop out of my grip.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oyster_card
Posted by: Ian Tindale at Nov 29, 2006 9:22:21 AM
Oh, I was going to submit the obviously correct answer, but then Aaron had already posted that.
Doors that need written instructions are so head and shoulders above (below?) everything else in this world, it's not even funny.
Posted by: Micke at Nov 29, 2006 9:43:59 AM
The tightly-seamed, clear plastic (blister?) packages in which everything seems to be displayed and sold. Everything even slightly valuable, that is. You know what I mean. Memory cards come in them, as do children's toys and disposable razors. They are designed to make theft difficult, without any consideration of the difficulty they impose on the legitimate end user.
There must be a better way to make those packages.
Posted by: carpundit at Nov 29, 2006 9:47:37 AM
While I certainly don't wear them myself, men's suits are poorly designed. The pants wear much more quickly than the jacket, so you're left with orphaned jackets, in good shape but unwearable because the pants are worn out.
I am *so* happy to work in a "business casual" environment!
Posted by: Peter at Nov 29, 2006 9:54:02 AM
I'm not very happy with lamps - the kind where you have to reach up underneath the shade to turn it on
and off. It's especially difficult when you're in bed and have to reach over and turn it on/off.
The ones in hotels with the switch on the bottom are sure cool - wish they had those at Sears or Costco.
Posted by: mike at Nov 29, 2006 10:15:50 AM
DC power adapters. These would be trivial to standardize, but nobody bothers. Half of them don't fit correctly onto power strips, and the more unusual designs (Z-series Samsung phones, eg) are usually flimsy and breakable under normal use.
Posted by: Grant Gould at Nov 29, 2006 10:21:45 AM
Standard towel bars.
Most bathtubs, lamps, and toasters.
Pretty much everything ever marketed as storage for spices.
Universal remotes (there are a few extremely expensive exceptions whose design is only "innocuous" rather than "atrocious")
The napkin dispensers at Wendy's.
Posted by: Dave at Nov 29, 2006 10:27:49 AM
My pet peeve isn't the worst-designed object, but an egregious example of modern design making something worse.
I don't get the recent cameras that use LCD displays rather than traditional viewfinders. I really don't get why people seem to love them so much. They force you to hold your hand and wrist in an unnatural position. Try this experiment: first, hold your hand near your face, as you would for a traditional camera. Now extend your hand outwards. You'll see that the natural position of your hand and wrist is not the same as what modern cameras force upon you. The result is that it's almost impossible to use one-handed: the user must extent BOTH hands to grip the camera with thumb and forefinger from both hands.
It's certainly useful to be able to see the camera's view from a distance, so that you can get shots while holding it high above a crowd, for example. But the correct way to accomplish this would be through a pistol-type grip. THAT is the position that your hand and wrist wants to be in when extended.
BTW, to theCoach: what's the objection to American rulers? I thought that all rulers are pretty much the same.
Posted by: CWuestefeld at Nov 29, 2006 10:34:39 AM
The napkin dispensers at Wendy's.
Napkin dispensers at Wendy's and many other fast food places are deliberately designed to make it difficult to take napkins from them. Paper napkins may not be especially costly, but restaurants nevertheless try to keep consumption as low as possible.
In Manhattan, where I work, delis and other food places practically treat napkins as a controlled substance, often eschewing dispensers in favor of keeping the napkins safely behind the counter and doling them out very grudginly.
Posted by: Peter at Nov 29, 2006 10:49:41 AM
My vote is for unsmoothed edges on objects, specifically the paper towel dispenser at my workplace. I'm always getting cut by it. The tiny pull handle doesn't have any clearance between it and the channel cut in the face of the dispenser, which would be fine, except that Fort James left the edges of the channel jagged.
Posted by: Andrew at Nov 29, 2006 11:08:27 AM
Interesting link:
In Praise of Good Design - by Don Norman
http://www.jnd.org/GoodDesign.html
Posted by: Chris Masse at Nov 29, 2006 11:09:04 AM
The pull-down towel dispenser used by huge amounts of companies in their bathrooms. The metal one that you have to reach up into and grab a fistful of towels to avoid getting none.
Posted by: Sebastian Holsclaw at Nov 29, 2006 11:18:34 AM
I don't get the recent cameras that use LCD displays rather than traditional viewfinders.
Besides the other flaws, the lack of a viewfinder reduces picture quality. Holding a camera to your eye, and using the viewfinder, makes your grip much more steady, reducing camera shake that produces blurred pictures.
An additional gripe with cameras is that they all seem to be designed on the assumption that the photographer will use his right eye to look throught the viewfinder. If, like me, you use your left eye, the controls and your nose are awkwardly positioned.
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov at Nov 29, 2006 11:34:16 AM
I'm an amateur landscape photographer, and I am in the distinct minority, but I find using the live LCD infinitely preferable for composition than being forced to stick the camera on my face. This is very true when I am composing a landscape image with the camera 1 foot above the ground, and also makes taking pictures of my kids and dogs at eye level a snap, since I am not forced into a painful crouch. Most SLR owners tend to take wonderful pictures of the tops of their children's heads instead. . .
The issue with motion blur is minor with a big camera, especially one that does not have a flapping mirror to induce shake, and it is usually easy enough to brace your elbow against a table, wall etc. for added stability.
For this reason I use the Sony R1 camera in preference to any of the dSLRs.
I can't wait until live LCD composition becomes available on more interchangable lens cameras. . .
Posted by: Matthew Cromer at Nov 29, 2006 12:20:45 PM
I think the paper towel/napkin dispensers shouldn't count as poor design. They are deliberately designed to minimize dispensation, and they work for this, so what's the problem? I prefer to gripe about the air-dryers -- do those get anybody's hands dry enough?
Everyday objects.. how about American paper currency, which comes in only one size for denominations spanning two orders of magnitude?
Posted by: neil at Nov 29, 2006 12:22:33 PM
How about sinks with the faucets so short your hands bump the front of the sink while you wash them. Maybe for people who wash their clothes in the sink this is handy.
Posted by: Noumenon at Nov 29, 2006 12:23:59 PM
The faucets (insanely common in the UK) where scalding hot and freezing cold water come out of separate taps only.
AC to DC power transformers were mentioned already.
The S-Video connector is a prime example of a entirely stupid connector (difficult to figure out which orientation to insert it, extremely easy to break off a pin and ruin it, especially if inserting in the wrong direction) but luckily is being superceded. Actually a lot of connectors and such are much better than they used to be. The Molex power connectors inside computers used to be possible to insert backwards, frying drives by sending voltage down data paths. Similarly, the IDE cable attachments used to be able to be inserted either way, making it inoperable if it wasn't consistent at both ends.
Posted by: John Thacker at Nov 29, 2006 12:32:20 PM
Also, any automatic faucet where the sensor is placed at a particularly bad location, so that it's impossible to keep the water running while washing one's hands.
Of course, automatic toilets that flush when you lean forward and don't flush when you stand up are awful too.
Posted by: John Thacker at Nov 29, 2006 12:33:26 PM
Scissors. My son's teacher recently showed me the scissors the schools supplies for special needs children and they have three holes in the grip rather than the traditional two. My first thought was "Where can I get a pair of these?"
Posted by: Ted Craig at Nov 29, 2006 12:49:02 PM
Furniture with sharp corners at knee height.
Perhaps the biggest improvement in design I've seen in recent years, ironically mandated by the government, is the LATCH system for installing carseats. This took installing a carseat properly from being almost impossible (many carseat/car combinations just couldn't be made to work, and the ones that could usually required a big man struggling with the stupid thing for ten minutes or so to get it in) to being pretty easy.
Posted by: albatross at Nov 29, 2006 12:50:00 PM
Car alarms! Can't they be designed to go off only if a car is broken into?
Posted by: Bill Stepp at Nov 29, 2006 1:03:16 PM
> I find using the live LCD infinitely preferable
There's no question that this is useful. My objection is that the "handle's" form is incorrect for this usage. It should be a pistol grip.
> paper towel/napkin dispensers shouldn't count as poor design.
> They are deliberately designed to minimize dispensation
I think they're a dismal failure at this. It's fairly difficult to get just, say, 2 of them, so I wind up grabbing a handful and wasting a bunch.
Another design problem occurs as a result of catering to speakers of other languages. For example, I hate product manuals that have pages divided in half, with one side being English and the other Spanish. I don't object to providing the Spanish documentation, I just wish it had its own section. The value of the documentation is diminished when I can't see as much of it on a single page.
Similarly, back in the days of OS/2, booting your PC with a floppy in the drive yielded a message that looked something like
SYS!00077
SYS!02044
This was supposed to indicate that there was a non-bootable floppy in the drive. But in their zeal to avoid offending the 2% of their customers that wouldn't understand English, they alienated 100% of the users. I saw an internal communication asking about this, and the engineer challenged the questioner to provide a universal message in the tiny space available. The reply was:
+-+--+\
| |__| \
| O |
|. |
+------+
Which I think was a great compromise, but it was ignored.
Posted by: CWuestefeld at Nov 29, 2006 1:04:04 PM
