Examples of bad design

[BrandanM]

I owned a car that had a plastic/nylon tip on the end of the oil dipstick.

After being heated and cooled a few thousand times the tip snapped off approx 3/4 of the way down to the sump when the stick was being re-inserted. You had to regard the dipstick almost as a service item and replace it occasionally before the breakage occured.

Apparently it was a known issue.

 

[150249]

My house has a wall built that stops the door to the basement at a 70° angle. Bit of a squeeze to get to the basement. Admittedly I never use it though.

 

[lyndhurst25]

Worse since the perspex covid screens went up - manned supermarket checkouts where the price display screen is only visible from the from alongside where you pay, rather from at the end where you are loading your bags. Very hard to spot if an item has been scanned through at the wrong price until you get your receipt, which you also seem to have to ask to get one now.

I’ve never had a problem with corned beef can keys though.

 

[43096]

On-train hand dryers. They have no air flow or no warmth, or both. Every single one of them. Would I be right in thinking that when (if?) they get tested on depot, the check is "does a bit of air come out"?

 

[Bletchleyite]

On-train hand dryers. They have no air flow or no warmth, or both. Every single one of them. Would I be right in thinking that when (if?) they get tested on depot, the check is "does a bit of air come out"?

Those Dyson hand dryers where you have to put your hands inside, unless you have a very steady hand you end up touching it which negates the point, and for a bonus point it accumulates water and muck at the bottom. Dyson seem to have abandoned this design now, thankfully, the box shaped and "two pronged" ones are much better.

 

[dakta]

possibly controversial due to the underlying reasons but mcdonalds paper straws vs milkshakes that have a shorter lifespan than the milkshake

 

[dangie]

Stainless steel teapots in cafés......

Scientists spend many hours & £millions developing 'super conductors'.
They already have them in these teapots. The outside of the teapot is hotter than the contents inside....!!

 

[Howardh]

These days plastic knives and forks have been replaced by wooden ones - or at least paper-based ones, that sort of thing. Example from the salad trays in a well-known shop. Nothing wrong with that in theory, but I find they irritate me on touching my tongue, and spoil the food. No idea why, but if they were coated in something biodegradable which makes them feel like plastic it would be much appreciated and stop giving me shivers/goosepimples!!

 

[Peter Mugridge]

Those Dyson hand dryers where you have to put your hands inside, unless you have a very steady hand you end up touching it which negates the point, and for a bonus point it accumulates water and muck at the bottom. Dyson seem to have abandoned this design now, thankfully, the box shaped and "two pronged" ones are much better.

Both designs of these things always cut out before they get your hands dry and you have to trigger them a second time; they need to run about 15 seconds longer than they actually do.

 

[pdeaves]

stop giving me shivers/goosepimples

/splinters!
That's the issue for me.

 

[Mojo]

Or packaging that brags about having a resealable film lid, but it never sticks right again, and the slides of meat/cheese are always arranged so that you have to rip the whole lid off to get to the top slice. If they stacked them the other way you’d have to only unstick part of the lid to begin with and it would stay better sealed.

Similarly, how about those items like coffee beans and pasta, that has something sticky stuck to the back of the packet with the idea that you stick this once you have used part of the bag. I don't think I've ever got them to actually stick back down properly and always resort to using a clothes peg or my own sticky tape.

 

[pdeaves]

Not so much 'bad design' but 'not designed at all'; in my house the bathroom radiator was evidently installed after the airing cupboard door. Guess what, the radiator stops the door from opening! I eventually managed to remove the door, cut it in half and remount it so the top half now opens properly. How difficult is it for the original designers/specifiers/builders to think through what they are doing? I guess for the builders it's 'not my job', just bung in what someone else says.

 

[Bevan Price]

Sealed plastic packaging for consumer goods that is almost impossible to open without a large, strong pair of scissors.

 

[Russel]

New style Coca Cola lids where it is attached to encourage recycling, problem is it makes drinking it more awkward & fastening it back shut is rather awkward.

Oh, so that's intentional? I thought I'd brought a dodgy bottle the last time I brought one, I ripped it off!

possibly controversial due to the underlying reasons but mcdonalds paper straws vs milkshakes that have a shorter lifespan than the milkshake

It's laughable. Costa also supply paper straws with their cold drinks, that come in plastic cups!

 

[tbtc]

Websites that give you thousands of bits of information when all that the vast majority of people are looking for is

A) what are your opening hours
B) what’s your postcode

I’m sure that you were set up because your founders had a shared passion for this product age that you would love to make the world a better place and all of that, but all I really care about is what time you close on a Sunday and how far away you are

It’s the same with food packaging that has large blank spaces on it but the number of minutes required to cook it in the oven/ microwave are hidden away in text so small I need to take my glasses off - put yourself in the shoes of someone going through the freezer trying to find something that’ll be edible in the next fifteen minutes - design seems more important than user experience

Recently I’ve been finishing off Christmas chocolates and notice how many boxes of chocolates have the guide to chocolate on the bottom of the box

YES!

So frustrating, like the designers haven’t considered the experience for ordinary people

 

[calopez]

The on-train washbasins (I forget which units they're in) that disable the tap until you've pressed the soap button, so you can't check that there's actually any water in them. To add insult to in jury, the soap doesn't come out underneath the soap button, as you'd expect, but beside the tap, leaving you standing there thinking there's no soap. And when you've finally worked all that out and still need to wash your hands, the soap button won't work again before the dryer has finished its cycle - which takes ages, but, when you do come to dry your hands, isn't on for long enough...

 

[dangie]

Sell By dates on packaging which is so well hidden that the product is out of date before you find it. Combined with being written in a font which is so small and feint it’s impossible to read when you do actually find it.

 

[Howardh]

Sealed plastic packaging for consumer goods that is almost impossible to open without a large, strong pair of scissors.

Like a pair of scissors inside one that you've bought to open another one with!

 

[edwin_m]

Recently I’ve been finishing off Christmas chocolates and notice how many boxes of chocolates have the guide to chocolate on the bottom of the box.

Indeed - a family member noticed this and put the chocolate tray in the lid and closed the box upside down. Another family member then wondered why it was upside down, flipped it over and opened the lid...

I can perhaps understand why they want to save material by no longer including it as an insert. But why not just print it on the inside of the lid?

 

[Ediswan]

I can perhaps understand why they want to save material by no longer including it as an insert. But why not just print it on the inside of the lid?

That would require double sided printing, which costs more.

 

[SHD]

Hand basins with two separate taps for hot and cold water

Stairs inside Dutch houses that are so steep that no human body, even a Dutch one, can use them comfortably. Although their design most probably derives from cost and land efficiency maximization, which makes them "well-designed" in a Dutch way.

 

[Acey]

Those cardboard clingwrap/foil dispensers that usually fall to bits long before the contents are used up

 

[GusB]

This may seem a bit bizarre to some but when I was out in the garden topping up the bird food the other day, I noticed that the bird seed feeder I recently bought is flawed.

It's essentially a clear plastic cylinder with a lid, a base, a handle for hanging it from a tree, and a hole near the bottom of the cylinder from which the food is dispensed. The hole is located about 3cm above the bottom of the cylinder, meaning that there is always going to be an amount of food that is completely inaccessible. Whoever designed it clearly didn't think this through properly!

 

[DaleCooper]

Bottles of paracetamol, bleach etc. that are so difficult to open that you have to get an adult to help you.

 

[OhNoAPacer]

I know of a control room where the operator had to press a button to acknowledge an alarm. The button was located about 2.5 metres off the ground.
The operator solution was to stand on a chair, this was deemed unsafe by their manager who supplied them with a broom handle.

 

[Mcr Warrior]

Bottles of paracetamol, bleach etc. that are so difficult to open that you have to get an adult to help you.

Erm, isn't that the general idea, in order to try to make them "childproof"?

 

[Bletchleyite]

Erm, isn't that the general idea, in order to try to make them "childproof"?

I always called them "adult proof packs" because adults seem to find them harder than children. I do get that it's more about toddlers though.

 

[SHD]

Any car-driver interface that relies on touchscreens or other pointing/selecting devices to activate settings such as HVAC or rear window demister.

On railway-related matters, I witnessed during in-cab journeys the ergonomics difference between an ICE and a TGV to switch from classical to high speed line current and signaling settings.

On the ICE: fiddling through menus in the human-machine interface
On the TGV: rotating a solid, handily placed button (sélecteur tension) with firm clicketing stops.

I don’t want to sound reactionary, but…

 

[py_megapixel]

There are plenty of complaints I could have about software products - particularly Microsoft - and I'll probably add them to this thread as I think of them.

To start off, how about Microsoft's bizarre lack of feature parity between the business and consumer versions of the OneDrive web interface. I understand some options for products that aren't included in the consumer version of Office 365 are missing, but who thought it was a good idea to remove the "New plain text file" option from the business version?

Thanks Microsoft, I really like having to create a Word document - and thus use up additional storage space, and arrange things onto A4 pages even if I'm never going to print them - for my text which doesn't require any formatting, just because you'd rather I used your proprietary file format.

 

[OhNoAPacer]

Of course bad design is not just something that applies to physical objects but also to things like graphics.
The one example that springs to my mind was the old logo on Harvester restaurants. Alongside the name Harvester was a picture showing a cow a pig and a chicken. Unfortunately the way they had positioned the animals made it look like the pig was sniffing the chickens bottom.