Nathan Zeldes blogs on everyday product design
Here is a box containing some medicine. As the law requires, it has the lot number and expiration date clearly marked. Well, OK, not clearly… in fact, the information is barely visible at all. The law, one can guess, says nothing about the information having to be Legible.
It’s not like making the text visible is so difficult… as the next photo proves.
Remember those gloves with utterly superfluous instructions? Here is a new contender for “most unnecessary instructions”.
This package of sunflower seeds, from the USA, bears the directive:
Eating instructions: crack open shells, discard shells, enjoy the seeds!
Nice try, Frito-Lay, but - Uh-oh! - you might still get sued by someone: you forgot to 
tell them to chew before swallowing the seeds!
Actually, this one is so silly that I really can’t make up my mind whether they did it because of the usual rampant CYA, or whether someone at Frito has a sense of humor and is taking a jab at the trend of assuming we consumers are idiots. Any opinion?
Every commercial piece of software we use comes with an End User License Agreement (EULA), which we all merrily accept without reading. After all, who has time to read a rambling document of barely decipherable legalese that we can’t do anything about anyway? Sometime I do glance through them, and my blood pressure shoots up (the part I like best is where it says “Some states do not allow the exclusion of [bla bla], so the above exclusion may not apply to you”, which essentially says “we will abuse you all the way, but if your state prohibits this we will abuse you a little less”). 
So, I sometimes remember fondly the old (1980’s) Borland No-Nonsense License, which said:
You must treat this software just like a book …
…By saying “just like a book,” Borland means, for example, that this software may be used by any number of people, and may be freely moved from one computer location to another, so long as there is no possibility of it being used at one location while it’s being used at another or on a computer network by more than one user at one location. Just like a book can’t be read by two different people in two different places at the same time, neither can the software be used by two different people in two different places at the same time. [you can find the full text here].
Sensible, isn’t it? And fair, too. An agreement decent people might freely enter, and have respect for (check the sentiment expressed here). Our world needs more of this sort of thing!
Incidentally, the distinction between the Borland style and the one prevalent today - what I call People language vs. Lawyer language - is what inspired my own legal blurb on Possibly Interesting.
Map making is an ancient art, and a great deal of ingenuity has gone over the years into how you can draw the spherical surface of the Earth on a flat piece of paper in a way that still makes sense. That’s where all those map projections like Mercator’s come into play. More recently, to my dismay, I see in the media a much less sensible practice: drawing flat pieces of terrain onto a sphere.
Consider this scan from an article in New Scientist, my favorite science magazine. Note the map at the right. Note how it takes you a disorienting moment to put it in context! At first glance, this is a sphere, hence it must be the earth; but what bizarre continent is it showing? Or is this some archaic proto-continent, long obliterated by continental drift?
Of course after a second you register that it is Spain; but if so, what is it doing stretched across an entire hemisphere? You might explain the circle as simply a picture frame - nobody said a map must be rectangular - but if so, why the shading in and below the circle, clearly denoting a three-dimensional sphere?
The explanation is simple, and has to do with the ease and irresistible allure of doing special effects in Photoshop and its ilk, along with the paucity of common sense in the users of such tools. The map insert should have been left flat-shaded; the conflicting 3D cues (and the circle itself, for that matter) add only confusion.
Nor is this an isolated example; we see a lot of this sort of thing going around. Yuck!
Adding clear instructions is part of good product design, right?
So: I went to get a flu shot (I still get the flu each winter, but maybe I’d be getting it twice without this?) As the nurse prepared her syringe, I noticed a cardboard box of disposable vinyl gloves on her table. On the side of this box was a printed statement, which I copied verbatim:
“Intended use: A medical glove is worn on the hand of health care and similar personnel to prevent contamination between health care personnel and the patient’s body, fluids, or environment. This glove also serves for non-medical purpose usage”.
I was so relieved that the manufacturer had had the foresight to instruct the nurse in these enlightening facts. Who knows, without this instruction she might have assumed the gloves had to be stuffed up my nose or something?
Clear instructions are good. Superfluous ones are silly. I don’t trust silly vendors…
Everyone’s had their laughs with instruction manuals written in Engrish; indeed, they can get quite hilarious. What bugs me, though, is the fact that these are seen not only in low quality products from second-rate or nameless producers. I can understand how a product that costs a couple of bucks would not have a manual written to the editorial standards of the Britannica… but what about leading vendors that produce expensive, top-quality consumer products?
I mean, look at the note below, which came as an insert in the instruction manual of my Lenovo Thinkpad docking station. That’s from the vendor IBM passed its notebook business to. And they tell us their product is “for use only”? And “not portable device”?
These are serious people, heaven knows. They make incredibly sophisticated machines that I’m proud to use. They have a company that is the fourth largest personal computer maker in the world, with 19,000 employees - so can’t they hire one single English speaker among them, to proof read their manual copy? Or do it remotely with someone living in the West, who’d get the copy in the mail and edit out the more blatant errors in a matter of hours? (Make me an offer, Lenovo guys!)
Worth a thousand words?
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…
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:
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?)
And then it shows this masterly rendition of “Help the environment by only using as much detergent as needed”:
Sometimes, I guess, a word (wisely selected) is worth a thousand pictures!