Archive for the 'Bad design' Category

A pure waste of time

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 30, 2008
in Bad design
. 2 Comments

Just got off the phone at a teleconference meeting hosted by some service in the USA. I was impressed by the logic of the automated system, which went something like this:

“Welcome to the ___ teleconference system. Please enter your passcode”.
<I did>
“The number you entered is <bla bla bla… all 9 digits read slowly>.
Please press one if this is the correct passcode, or two to re-enter the code”.

What on earth could make them think this is a good idea? Why not just test the number and only if it is incorrect ask for it again?!…

An uncommunicative printer

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 25, 2008
in Bad design
. 0 Comments

We got this new HP LaserJet M5035 multifunction printer/copier at my workplace that is very sophisticated and capable. It has a high res touch screen that it uses to accept our commands and to tell us what’s going on.

So today it had a fault and advised me to cycle its power, which I did. The printer then went into a boot sequence, complete with whirring sounds and flashing lights, that took long minutes… very long minutes. :-(

And all through it, its wonderful display screen showed an HP logo growing larger and smaller, larger and smaller… endlessly. Very neat, but didn’t it occur to the designers of this machine that the user would much prefer a simple text message like “Machine warming up… should be ready in X minutes“?

Sluggish response in our Home Electronics

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 23, 2008
in Bad design
. 2 Comments

The Sony Mini-stereo on my desk has excellent sound, which is the main thing I suppose; but it has some annoying misfeatures. Take this one: what do you think happens when you hit the “Open CD Tray” button? If you said “The CD tray opens”, think again. Eventually it does, but first, the display switches to say “OPEN” and this word blinks a few times. Then, after 2-3 seconds of deliberation, the tray opens - making the display totally redundant (we can see that the tray is opening, Can’t we?!)

Sony mini-stereo display

Or take what happens when you hit the power off button. The same display now says “STANDBY”, and blinks this unsolicited information for maybe 6 seconds - then changes to “- - : - - “, its standby indication. So why didn’t it make this switch instantly? It isn’t as if it had to shut down a nuclear reactor core…

This behavior, where our electronic creations take their time before obeying, is seen in many devices around the house. I’d much rather have them do as they’re told and shut down (and up!) instantly.

Mazda 3 evolution, take 1: Sometimes they listen!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 20, 2008
in Bad design, Good design and Improvement
. 2 Comments

Recently I replaced my old Mazda 3 with the new model. The two are practically identical - why mess with a good thing? it’s a fine car! - but there are some minor differences, and I’ll be blogging them now and then… they afford us a peek into the design team’s thinking processes.

Here is the trunk door on the previous model. The problem is, it is not spring loaded; to open it you had to press the lock button and then claw it open by trying to pry up the bottom edge, which is a tight fit to the bumper below it (on most cars the door at least has some depression, perhaps for the license plate, where you can grasp it; this door is smooth and lacks any such grab point).

Old Mazda 3 trunk door

Quite annoying, and a lovely bit of poor usability. In fact, I saw one of these cars on the road whose enterprising owner had screwed a handle - from a kitchen drawer, by the looks of it - onto this door!

So here is the same door on the new model. Same door - one key difference: now there is a depression in the bumper to allow you to grasp the door.

New Mazda 3 trunk door

People must have been complaining - and the design team at Mazda had been listening. Better late than never!

Mini, Maxi, Silly

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 18, 2008
in Bad design
. 0 Comments

As a conscientious techie I do what many car owners don’t: I chCoolant reservoireck the oil and other fluids in our cars once a month, rain or shine. But our latest car, the 2007 Renault Clio, seems determined to foil this good intention.

It used to be simple: A fluid would either have a straight dipstick with marks for Max and Min, or a clear reservoir with lines marking these two limit levels. The new Clio, however, abuses these age old concepts.

Renault Clio 2007 Engine compartmentRenault Clio 2007 Brake fluid reservoir

Like most modern cars its engine compartment is as densely packed with systems as an animal’s belly is with entrails; and the clear reservoirs for coolant and brake fluid are so positioned that there is no way on earth you can see all the level lines without either a dentist’s mirror or X-Ray vision. You can see the Maxi lines, but the Minis are hopelessly hidden (see photos).

As Obelix would’ve said: Ils sont fous, ces ingenieurs!

Renault Clio 2007 coolant reservoir

Fit, misfit and unfit

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 11, 2008
in Bad design
. 0 Comments

Our kitchen light fixture started to char its plastic housing, so we went and bought a new China-made one, equipped with two concentric fluorescent lamps like its predecessor. It was only later, after much climbing ladders and drilling holes overhead, that the problem appeared: try as we might, fitting the two lamps seemed impossible to do. Then it became clear that it actually was impossible!

Googie lamp

The fixture had three equidistant radial arms to place the lamps on, and these each had metal protrusions to locate the neon rings in position. The problem was, no matter how we pushed and bent, the smaller ring would simply not fit - its diameter was wrong. Note that the two lamps came in the same fitted cardboard box with the fixture, right from the manufacturer!

At first we were so upset we decided to replace the contraption; but it then struck me that as it hangs there with off-center skewed rings it does have a retro charm reminiscent of the Googie style (think Jetsons or retro Sci Fi ray gun designs). So for now, the lamp stays. Still it does boggle the mind that they’d sell a lamp that can’t be assembled, as if by design.

Aesthetics and Design: Boeing’s LAR rule saves the day

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on May 21, 2008
in Bad design and Design principles
. 0 Comments

Passing through an airport I bought the book “Boeing 777: the technological marvel” by Norris and Wagner. This gives many fascinating insights into the novel design methodologies that went into the 777, my favorite jetliner. It also introduced me to one of the ugliest airplane designs ever to disgrace a designer’s sketchpad.

Boeing 767X - the Hunchback of Mukilteo

The Boeing folks were looking to build a plane larger than a 767 and smaller than a 747; one idea they tried was to graft half the cabin of a 757 on the rear half of the larger 767. You can see how endearing the result looks; in fact it earned the nickname “Hunchback of Mukilteo”, after a town near the Boeing facility.

There were many reasons why this version never proceeded off the drawing board, not least among them the disgusted derision of potential customers. But what I like best is that a key reason, according to the book, is that the design failed Boeing’s “LAR rule” - which stands for “Looks About Right”. If that is indeed their guideline, they are a smart company indeed: good design has an ineffable elegance to it, and no engineer should be forced to build something that offends their aesthetic sense.

Worth a thousand words?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on May 12, 2008
in Bad design and Odds and Ends
. 2 Comments

Greg Bear’s hyper-imaginative Sci Fi novel “Eon” brings its protagonists to a parallel reality whose highly advanced post-humans use Picting to communicate; that is, they project in mid-air sequences of holographic icons to convey their thoughts.

This may work for post-humans… but can become a problem when mere mortals try it with excessive zeal. I refer to the increasingly common practice of using pictures and icons in signage and instruction manuals, even when written text would be far better. The notion that pictures are easier to grasp works fine for signs like “left turn” on a road, or “Danger - High Voltage” on a transformer, which are reasonably self-explanatory. And they are invaluable in instruction manuals when they illustrate some technical complexity explained in the text. The problem begins when those manuals start conveying complex concepts like “Don’t drop this camera on a hard floor”, which they might do by showing a person weeping as the camera smashes to pieces… Konica manual extract

Take this picture, from a Konica camera manual. Can you decipher its meaning? Fortunately the text on the same page explains: it means “The battery should be replaced when the flash takes more than eight seconds to charge”. That’s 15 words, and they are far better than the picture. And from the same manual (this time without a Rosetta stone in the text), the “Don’ts” in this mosaic:

Konica manual extract

The Thermometer I can get, and maybe the “Don’t take a screwdriver to this camera” (or is it, “Don’t stick a screwdriver in the lens?)… but the one in the center eludes me (”Don’t take photos on windy days”??) and the one to its right is a total mystery (”Beware radiation emanating from TV sets and refrigerators”? Or is that a Microwave oven? And since when do fridges emit anything?)

But no manual beats the one we have for our Electrolux dishwasher, which has a pull-out card that starts with exhorting its own virtues (top row, which merely illustrates one word, “RTFM”); then goes on to totally confuse us (is this filter cleanup due daily? Weekly? Daily, but only during the first week of each month?)

Electrolux dishwasher instructions

And then it shows this masterly rendition of “Help the environment by only using as much detergent as needed”:

Electrolux dishwasher instructions

Sometimes, I guess, a word (wisely selected) is worth a thousand pictures!

Car parts designed to smash up!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 30, 2008
in Bad design
. 2 Comments

Last year we traded in our old Clio, and got the latest model. Nice car, as before, and it looks like the design engineers at Renault have been busy thinking of ways to improve it. Like the side molding on the doors: the new car has a turn indicator lamp right inside it!

Renault Clio

Now, though they’re often touted as “decorative trim”, these moldings have a practical function: they are essentially protective bumpers that absorb the usual nicks and scratches that the side of a car suffers all too often. To put a fragile light fixture in one, where it is guaranteed to break at the first scrape with a tree or a passing car, makes about as much sense as sticking your head out the open car window on the freeway. Of course, once it gets smashed, you can sell the customer a replacement part…

Renault Clio side trim before and after damage

So there, it happened to us! The Clio got hit lightly by another car, and behold… the turn light was shattered, the rest of the molding was fine, and the authorized garage insisted they can only replace both as one piece - not just the lamp, but the entire strip, made more expensive because it contains a lamp. One look at the photo can convince you that the two are actually separate pieces - note the different color of the plastic.

But hey, business is business!

Emergent misfeatures: more than meets the eye

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 28, 2008
in Bad design
. 0 Comments

Any wise consumer checks the specification of the purchased item in the store, in order to know what he’s getting. Unfortunately, this does not guarantee a happy deal…

One day we decided to go buy a new TV set. We went to the store and selected a top notch Sony, with impressive specs. We took it home, set it up, put the resident teenagers in front of it… and they expressed major discontent!

It’s not that the picture was bad (it was crisp and vibrant), or that the sound was poor (it was excellent), or that the set failed to live up to the impressive specs on the box. The problem was that when you used the remote to channel-surf, instead of the Zap-Zap-Zap of the old TV, this one went Zapppp…… Zapppp……Zappppp… you see, the TV needed a whole second to blank the screen and bring up the next channel, making rapid switching an impossibility. You’d think a second is no big deal, but I had to agree with the kids: it completely obliterated the user experience of the surf.

Now, this is one thing I could never have foreseen. The feature list on the box did not say, “Optimized for a crummy channel surfing experience”; and having never had a TV that needed to think about obeying the remote, I never thought to check this in the store. It was an undocumented feature in the design - an emergent misfeature, if you will - that the buyer would only find out at home.

Here’s another: we have a Sharp microwave oven that has the useful habit of beeping once when the time is up. Cool. It has the slightly less useful feature of beeping again a minute later if you didn’t notice the first beep. Okay. And then it has the maddeningly stupid feature of beeping three times every minute thereafter, never relenting until you give it your attention. Hey, stupid oven, I heard you, but I’m busy right now - keep the food inside and shut up!

Again, this is an undocumented feature - one no salesman would tell and no buyer would ask, but one that delivers a major annoyance once you get the thing home. These examples showcase how the imagination of a bad designer in inventing misfeatures transcends the buyer’s ability to foresee them…

Come on, designers, have a heart!