Bad Design

[Mobbd]

Vent your spleen here about bad design. Any kind of design: product design, urban planning, web design, graphic design, packaging, anything.

This "numpad" on my Acer laptop drives me dotty. You see that little icon in the top-right? Well, it turns the trackpad into a "numpad". There's little point in this existing at all since numbers are also part of the regular keyboard. Maybe it serves people in financial/accounting jobs well? But it causes problems all the time when I accidentally brush the "on" button and activate the numbers when really I just want to carry on navigating like normal. It's a real shitter.



And then there's this sort of thing: "Look Left/Right" road markings for pedestrians. We all look both ways by default, right? That's the Green Cross Code! So by overriding this rule and making us look in only one direction, it risks death. Either because a car is coming the wrong way for some reason or because we've inadvertently read the upside-down "Look Left/Right" text on the opposite side of the road when our gaze has happened to rest there. And it just sucks to override a good habit of looking both ways. Dangerous, surely.



And while we're at it, I don't love these new-fangled pelican crossing designs. Maybe they're cheaper or something? It feels more natural to look ahead after pressing the button, not to stand there gawping at the same device that houses the button. It's often easy to miss that the green walk symbol has appeared.

[Icehaven]

And while we're at it, I don't love these new-fangled pelican crossing designs. Maybe they're cheaper or something? It feels more natural to look ahead after pressing the button, not to stand there gawping at the same device that houses the button. It's often easy to miss that the green walk symbol has appeared.

I'm sure I read that these are deliberately placed to make you look in the direction that the traffic is coming from, so you'll see if a car doesn't stop as opposed to looking straight ahead. That might be bollocks though and doesn't account for when traffic is coming from both directions, unless they put them on both sides then? I'll try and see if it checks out on my way home as I have to cross about 10 of them.

[Sebastian Cobb]

[Neville Chamberlain]

One of my best dad jokes is to assume the posture of the waiting person (red) when waiting and then, when it turns green, jump 90 degrees and assume the posture of the green person - without actually crossing the road!!!

My son loves it (he's 27).

[Sebastian Cobb]

Rover thinking it was a good idea to place their cars ECU's in the plenum chamber.

[shoulders]

Any food packaging with a plastic peel off label that disintegrates into shards under pressure of a normal, entirely logical movement of the fingers.

[Mobbd]

Any food packaging with a plastic peel off label that disintegrates into shards under pressure of a normal, entirely logical movement of the fingers.

Ah God, yes, that's a good one.

[Mobbd]

Non-touch sensor taps in public toilets that aren't immediately obvious how to operate or just don't work or keep stopping the flow because the sensor doesn't line up with where human hands naturally go.

[Milo]

The human foreskin.

[Icehaven]

Any food packaging with a plastic peel off label that disintegrates into shards under pressure of a normal, entirely logical movement of the fingers.

Ditto for labels you have peel to see the cooking instructions but they tear and turn to papery slush as you do so because they've got wet, which being as they're on a refrigerated product wasn't exactly unpredictable was it?

[Icehaven]

Non-touch sensor taps in public toilets that aren't immediately obvious how to operate or just don't work or keep stopping the flow because the sensor doesn't line up with where human hands naturally go.

The hand driers in Birmingham New st. station toilets are completely invisible and the only indication they exist are small signs under the mirrors which say PLACE HANDS HERE with an arrow pointing down, with no mention of why you should do this or that that's the driers or anything. I mean you can work it out but it seems needlessly cryptic.

[BlodwynPig]

The hand driers in Birmingham New st. station toilets are completely invisible and the only indication they exist are small signs under the mirrors which say PLACE HANDS HERE with an arrow pointing down, with no mention of why you should do this or that that's the driers or anything. I mean you can work it out but it seems needlessly cryptic.

Ended up looking like a right tit crouched over the sink pulling my ass cheeks apart like the sign indicated

[hamfist]

Bathroom design shop, in a German speaking town.

[buttgammon]

Anyone who has ever worked with sellotape knows the fury of spending precious minutes finding the end of a new tape only for it to break immediately once you start using it. There has to be a better way.

[QDRPHNC]

I'm not saying its not bad design, because it is, but people go nuts about this one when the answer is of course just to plug your mouse in overnight.

My nomination is any bluetooth device that does this massive DOODLE-A-DOOT noise when you turn it on. Like, the light is on, I know you're on. My old Sony receiver doesn't go HELLO I AM ON.

[touchingcloth]

Vent your spleen here about bad design. Any kind of design: product design, urban planning, web design, graphic design, packaging, anything.

This "numpad" on my Acer laptop drives me dotty. You see that little icon in the top-right? Well, it turns the trackpad into a "numpad". There's little point in this existing at all since numbers are also part of the regular keyboard. Maybe it serves people in financial/accounting jobs well? But it causes problems all the time when I accidentally brush the "on" button and activate the numbers when really I just want to carry on navigating like normal. It's a real shitter.

I used to have an HP laptop with a similar thing which would enable/disable the trackpad. It was one of those laptops with a stupid little clitoral nubbin above the spacebar which could be used instead of a trackpad, but as a trackpad user the inclusion of a touch sensitive thing to disable it struck me as a bananas decision.

And then there's this sort of thing: "Look Left/Right" road markings for pedestrians. We all look both ways by default, right? That's the Green Cross Code! So by overriding this rule and making us look in only one direction, it risks death. Either because a car is coming the wrong way for some reason or because we've inadvertently read the upside-down "Look Left/Right" text on the opposite side of the road when our gaze has happened to rest there. And it just sucks to override a good habit of looking both ways. Dangerous, surely.

These things always remind me of a video clip I used to have on a Nirvana VHS where the band were in the UK and they were riffing on the "look right" instruction as if it were a suggestion that one's appearance should be correct, and Dave Grohl proceeded to march across the road fixing his hair and with his head pointed firmly towards the left.

And while we're at it, I don't love these new-fangled pelican crossing designs. Maybe they're cheaper or something? It feels more natural to look ahead after pressing the button, not to stand there gawping at the same device that houses the button. It's often easy to miss that the green walk symbol has appeared.

They're called puffin rather than pelican crossings when they're like that. I don't like that you can't see the light change back to red while you're crossing with them. In Europe it's quite common to see the green signal paired with a clicking for visually impaired people that gets faster and faster the closer the signal gets to changing back to red - do UK crossings have that sort of thing?

I'll have to take a photo the next time I'm out, but the pedestrian crossings here have got ludicrously designed buttons - they're tiny, and mounted in plain metal boxes on plain metal posts and so even without any visual impairments it's very easy to miss the fact that there's a button there at all.

[touchingcloth]

I'm saying its not bad design, because it is, but people go nuts about this one when the answer is of course just to plug your mouse in overnight.

I dislike things which are charged with a cable that haven't been designed to be chargeable and usable at the same time. It's actually a lot more common for that sort of thing in my experience, when it seems like it would be harder to design something that stops the power from going to the device as well as the battery at the same time - anyone know why this is?

[Utter Shit]

Only tangentially related but it's so funny I thought it was worth posting here.

Engineers competing to make the least user-friendly interface:

https://twitter.com/volodarik/status/1657755496852475906?s=20

[Zetetic]

Anyone who has ever worked with sellotape knows the fury of spending precious minutes finding the end of a new tape only for it to break immediately once you start using it. There has to be a better way.

Tape dispensers seem ludicrously over-design and unnecessary, but are actually kind of good.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I'm not saying its not bad design, because it is, but people go nuts about this one when the answer is of course just to plug your mouse in overnight.

That's not helpful when you've forgot.

Nightly charging is also excessive, my current mouse lasts months on a single USB rechargeable AA battery.

[QDRPHNC]

That's not helpful when you've forgot.

Nightly charging is also excessive, my current mouse lasts months on a single USB rechargeable AA battery.

Not every night, when it needs it. I would say I charge my magic mouse and keyboard about once a month or so. Apple tend to be pretty thoughtful about these things, so I would assume there is some sort of reason for it, but I agree it's not ideal.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

The trigger buttons on the Playstation 4 controller are very easy to nudge when it's resting on a surface, which it most likely will be if you're watching a video. They also make videos fastforward and rewind. It's pretty much inevitable that you'll be watching a video and skip through a load of it because the controller got moved a little bit.

And then there's this sort of thing: "Look Left/Right" road markings for

This one is particularly bad because it says look left, but points to the right.

In Europe it's quite common to see the green signal paired with a clicking for visually impaired people that gets faster and faster the closer the signal gets to changing back to red - do UK crossings have that sort of thing?

UK ones have these

I dislike things which are charged with a cable that haven't been designed to be chargeable and usable at the same time. It's actually a lot more common for that sort of thing in my experience, when it seems like it would be harder to design something that stops the power from going to the device as well as the battery at the same time - anyone know why this is?

My cordless vacuum cleaner does this and also doesn't give you any indication of how much battery life it has. Many is the time I've gone to do a bit of cleaning, only for it to conk out, leaving me to wait an hour for it to charge back up.

On the subject of charging wires (and coming full circle back to PS4 controllers) USB Micro was purest cack.

[Milo]

The hand driers in Birmingham New st. station toilets are completely invisible and the only indication they exist are small signs under the mirrors which say PLACE HANDS HERE with an arrow pointing down, with no mention of why you should do this or that that's the driers or anything. I mean you can work it out but it seems needlessly cryptic.

Sounds like something out of Saw.

[touchingcloth]

UK ones have these

Yeah, the clicking is useful because you can still hear it after you've started crossing. I think the spindles on UK ones are to tell people stood at the crossing that it has changed to green, not that it is nearly about to change back to red.

[Beagle 2]

I'm so glad someone else reads "look left" upside down and looks the wrong way. I do this all the fucking time and assumed it was unique to my own special brand of dribbling idiocy.

[Blumf]

I dislike things which are charged with a cable that haven't been designed to be chargeable and usable at the same time.

That last generation of feature phones all seemed to put the charge port on any side except the bottom. I've got a Nokia 3310 where the port is on the top. Before that I had a Sony Elm, where the (old school Sony Ericsson chunky connector) was on the side. Makes using the phone whilst charging a PITA.

However, pretty much all earlier generation phones (and present day Smartphones) had the port correctly placed on the bottom. So why did they fuck it up recently?

[Old Thrashbarg]

One of my favourite ever days at work was because of this. We'd started working from home a couple of days a week and, having previously just been provided with a desktop machine in the office, it was not ideal to have to switch between a desktop in the office and then a different machine at home. So the company agreed to replace our desktops with MacBooks. The first few of us to get them were allowed to choose our own perihperals. A few of us went for keyboard and trackpad, one went for keyboard and mouse.

A couple of weeks after they arrived and a day when we were all in the office, the mouse ran out of charge. The owner of it can't have previously looked at where the charging port was because he was confused and looking around for it. Eventually he spotted it underneath. Much laughter for the rest of us as he had to charge it whilst being forced to use the inbuilt trackpad on the machine for a couple of hours.

No-one who subsequently ordered a MacBook chose the mouse and when it came time for him to get a new machine he also switched over to an external trackpad.

[Senior Baiano]

The hand driers in Birmingham New st. station toilets are completely invisible and the only indication they exist are small signs under the mirrors which say PLACE HANDS HERE with an arrow pointing down, with no mention of why you should do this or that that's the driers or anything. I mean you can work it out but it seems needlessly cryptic.

[Blumf]

Oh yeah, pedestrian crossings. The council have installed a load round here that have a secret config where, after two days of not being used, assume a fault with the button and go into a permanent pressed mode so the crossing sets off ever 2 minutes. Major PITA for traffic, but also for anybody who's unfortunate enough to live by one, and have the damn thing bleeping all night and not know why.

[Norton Canes]

UK ones have these