It is a well-established fact that I love donuts. I love all kinds of donuts, too–glazed, cake, jelly, pretty much any donut is good (except maple donuts. Maple and donuts just don’t work together for me. It’s like combining peanut butter and chocolate, but instead of peanut butter you use plaster and instead of chocolate you use motor oil).
However, this donut is wrong.
No, not the decadent but possibly decent Chocolate Cheesecake Donut on the left. I’m talking about the one on the right.
The Angel Cream Donut.
Tip: If your product is using the words “angel cream” you are very likely doing it wrong. The only thing that visually distinguishes this donut from a Boston Cream (mmm, Boston Cream…) is the white icing drizzled across the top. You know, the angel cream. Or maybe the angel cream is inside the donut and it is meant to simulate a pureed form of angel, whipped and blended into a horrifying but richly smooth cream-like substance.
I don’t know. I don’t want to know. The fact that the sign is handwritten suggests this could be a rogue donut named by capricious staff. More likely the official Angel Cream Donut signs haven’t arrived at the store yet because the person who is printing them keeps looking at the sample and going, “Ew!” and never prints anything.
The Dragon Naturally Speaking site has a Solutions section at the bottom of the site that seems to suggest that physicians are not people:
Then again, it does separate business and people, which makes sense, as people are not businesses.
The real problem, of course, is using “people” because no matter which version of Dragon Naturally Speaking is chosen, it’s a pretty safe assumption that it will be used by people rather than cats, robots or giant carnivorous plants.
The solution would be to replace “people” with something that more accurately reflects the product:
Speech recognition — for individuals
Speech recognition — for business
Speech recognition — for medical use
Note that I also changed “physicians” to “medical use” since you kind of need to be in medicine to be a physician and this better aligns with “business” being the other non-individual choice. Note also that the link for Speech recognition – for people actually leads to a page offering Dragon Professional Individual so I’m wondering why I even have to suggest this change in the first place.
Finally, note that there is no way to easily see a list of features to differentiate the many flavors of Dragon Naturally Speaking. What makes Home different than Premium, other than the latter costing $100 more? Premium obviously does more, but to find out what you have to read through a lot of material on the site, where a simple side-by-side comparison of features between versions, like this page showing the differences between Art Rage Lite and Art Rage 5 easily demonstrates what is or isn’t included.
The revised version of Staples’ iOS app lists products but no longer lets you know if a product is available both in-store and online or online-only. This matters when you use the app, find a product, then go to a store and are told, “lol, naw, we only have that online!”
To insure they are not wasting a trip to the store, a customer is forced to call ahead to check for stock, an inconvenience the app should eliminate, not create. This is bad design.
Best Buy’s app, on the other hand, not only tells you if a product is available in-store, it will provide a handy list of storers near you that have it in-stock. That’s good design.
Why am I picking on delicious jam, especially when I have just had a slice of homemade bread lovingly covered with said delicious jam?
Because Smucker’s has made their strawberry and raspberry jam jar designs so similar that it is easy to grab the wrong one, especially if stores shelve them beside each other, which they tend to do (this is also bad design on the part of stores like Save-On-Foods that do this, placing like-colored jams next to each other on a shelf, which is logical enough, but makes it more difficult to tell at a glance that you are looking at different products).
Photographic evidence:
Note that the color difference in the labels is more subtle when you are actually looking at the jars in-person, anticipating their fruity goodness.
Smucker’s has gone with a standard design here, no doubt to reduce costs and provide uniformity, usually considered desirable for a brand. McDonald’s hasn’t messed around with the look of its Golden Arches for a reason.
However, the similarity extends well beyond what is needed for branding and into the sort of obsessive manipulation that is explained in horrifying detail in books like Brandwashed. The logo and typefaces are the same. That’s fine and expected, and Smucker’s certainly can’t be held culpable for both fruits ending in “berry.” But look at the placement of the fruit. Each jar has six pieces of fruit arrayed identically. Further, the size of the raspberries has been boosted to match the strawberries.
Here are some typical strawberries:
And some raspberries:
Raspberries are cute and small. Strawberries are cute and bigger. Strawberries are bigger than raspberries.
Unless they are on a Smucker’s label, then they have been made equals in the world of fruit.
What this means is it’s easy to grab the wrong jar if you’re distracted, in a hurry or if some other evil shopper has mixed the two types of jams together on the shelf.
It could be solved by simply making the picture on each label distinctive while keeping everything else about the label identical. The most obvious fix would be to scale the raspberries to be a bit smaller then slap more of them on the label to compensate. Make it a veritable cornucopia of raspberries. Have them in a cornucopia. Something.
There are, broadly speaking, two types of shirts: with buttons and without buttons.
Putting on a shirt without buttons is easy, you just pull the shirt over your head, stick your arms in the sleeves and you’re done. This can be complicated by having a huge head and the shirt having a tiny neck but it is generally trouble-free.
Putting on a shirt with buttons is not much more difficult, especially if you’re not falling-down-the-stairs drunk. You stick your arms in the sleeves, then button the shirt to the desired level (or sometimes not at all depending on taste/whim/current state of alcohol consumption).
But there is a subcategory of shirts with buttons that is, you guessed it…bad design.
This is a shirt with buttons on the back instead of the front:
Observe how your elbows bend. They bend forward. This is because your hands are made to be used in front of your body. Now imagine you are buttoning up the shirt above. Your hands are twisted around into an awkward position. They are bending the wrong way. It is difficult, perhaps even painful.
Why would someone design a shirt with buttons on the back? To have a clean, button-free look on the front. But there is a solution for this already. It’s called not putting buttons on the shirt.
But what if the buttons are somehow deemed essential to the design? Put them on the front! But what if the designer finds buttons to be hideous and gross? They’re just as hideous and gross on the back, plus they look stupid there. But if the designer absolutely must have buttons and insists that they are ugly, just include a giraffe tie with every shirt to help hide them. Who doesn’t like giraffes?
As soothsayers and Nostradamus wannabes attempt to divine Apple’s product schedule for everything (except the iPhone), let’s pick on the company again for a design that is both ugly and awkward.
This is the Apple iPhone 6/6s Smart Battery Case:
Image courtesy Apple
Or as I call it, “Is that a deck of cards in your case or are you just glad to see me?”
Why it’s ugly: it looks like the case has a large rectangular growth attached to it. I suspect very few would describe this appearance as visually appealing.
Why it’s awkward: Pick up your smartphone right now (if you don’t have one, use your vivid imagination instead) and hold it as you normally would. If you’re like most people, you’ll be gripping at least three fingers along the bottom side edge of the phone. Note in the photo that this would put your fingers right on top of the bulge where the battery pack meets the regular part of the case. Awkward.
This is a surprisingly ugly product from Apple, which usually gets at least the aesthetics right.
Compare this to the Anker Ultra Slim Extended Battery Case for the iPhone 6/6s:
Sure, the phone is a bit longer as a result but the design actually keeps in mind that people don’t want a lumpy, misshapen phone. It also costs about $80 less than Apple’s battery case while offering 75-90% of the equivalent battery extension.
If you’ve used a USB device over the last twenty years, the following may seem familiar to you:
When it was introduced, the USB port was a major improvement over other means of connecting devices to computers, such as serial and parallel ports. It was smaller, faster and offered support for a much broader array of peripherals.
It did share one aspect with serial and parallel ports, though: it was not reversible. That is, you could only insert a USB cable one way. The right way. Which way was the right way? Looking again at the animation above you might logically think that the right way is the one where the USB symbol is facing up. And you’d be correct–sometimes. Because there was no standard for how ports were oriented. The front-facing ports on my PC, in fact, require the label-side to be facing down. You can tell which way is the right way by examining the port closely but you need to be quite close and most ports are on the back of the computer or are otherwise not easy to eyeball. You could throw out your back trying to figure out how to insert a $10 flash drive.
But even if you know which way is the right way there is something subtly terrible about the way USB plugs works that makes it feel like it’s not going in correctly even when it is. This leads to the triple attempt:
Insert correct way, feel resistance, remove USB cable
Insert wrong way, feel resistance, remove USB cable
Insert correct way again, feel resistance, determine that this is either the actual correct way or you’ve gone mad, decide it is correct and wiggle/push until the USB cable is finally and firmly plugged in
Have a stiff drink at the thought of having to go through this every time you connect a USB device
The newest USB standard, USB-C, is fully reversible. There is the correct way and the other correct way to insert a USB-C cable. I suppose you could try to insert a USB-C cable sideways and that would be incorrect but you would in fact need to be mad or have had too many stiff drinks to think this might work.
Why did the USB spec go through multiple revisions over the course of 20+ years before some clever person said, “Let’s make it reversible”? I do not know. But at least this bad design is now a better one.
See also: every other non-reversible cable in the history of the world.
UPDATE March 30, 2019: The 2019 model of the XPS 13 finally puts the webcam at the top of the screen. The Verge’s review.
In 2015 Dell introduced the XPS 13, a laptop that had such narrow bezels along the sides and top of the display that the 13 inch device was closer in form factor to an 11 inch laptop. This is good design.
However, a side effect is that the bezel along the top of the display, which normally hosts the webcam, no longer had room for such a device. Rather than skip the webcam entirely, Dell moved it to the lower left corner of the display. This has led to what many have dubbed the nosecam. Peter Bright reviewed the original model on Ars Technica and included this photo of the view the webcam provides:
The webcam that lets you check for ceiling cat
This is one of those “how did this go to production?” things. Except with the refreshed model that came out this year, still featuring the same webcam, this has become a “How did this survive to a second generation?” thing.
Three possible solutions come to mind:
Remove the webcam entirely. If someone wants both a Dell XPS 13 and a webcam, they can buy the webcam separately and clip it to the top of the display, like we did in the olden days with our coal-fired laptops.
Reduce the rather large bottom bezel and expand the top bezel, keeping the total height the same but providing the room needed for proper webcam placement. Obviously I don’t know how difficult the engineering for this would be and perhaps the fact that Dell hasn’t moved the webcam means it is difficult, but even if it is, there’s still option #1.
Put the webcam in a recessed slot on the top of the display. You could press a button/say the magic word and it would pop up, ready to reveal all the embarrassing personal effects in the background you forgot to clear out of sight before launching Skype. There is at least one laptop that uses this design now, though it is possible the XPS 13’s display may be too thin to accommodate this design. Again, there’s still option #1.
In a way it’s too easy to pick on Apple. The company has been around for 40 years and in that time it helped usher in the personal computer, redefined what a PC could be with the Macintosh in 1984 and then went on a long trek into the wilderness, almost going bankrupt before getting a lift up from Microsoft, of all companies. And then Steve Jobs came back and in the next 14 years he served as CEO Apple went from nearly folding up to a company that was generating tens of billions of dollars in revenue. All of these products were created with Jobs back at the helm: iPod, iTunes, iMac, iPhone, and iPad.
They really liked the lowercase “i.”
During this time in particular, Apple’s reputation became cemented as a company that makes premium products and the term “Apple tax” got bandied about. You paid more for an Apple device, but you got something high quality in return.
Well, mostly.
The other thing Apple gained a reputation for–and why it is really such a juicy target for bad design–are the examples of form over function. I highlighted one already with the weirdly round original iMac mouse.
Next up is another aspect of the iMac, but one that concerns the current design, namely the arrangement of the ports.
Observe below the ports available on the 27 inch iMac:
They are neatly arranged. This is good.
They are all on the back of the computer. This is bad.
The front of the iMac is very clean. The display is flush with the unibody aluminum design, with a small Apple logo being the only embellishment.
When you look at the front of a typical PC case you’ll notice a couple of things. The first is that it is usually not as sexy or clean as an iMac, though some can look pretty nice. The other thing you will notice is the front of the case (sometimes the side) will usually include line in/line out jacks and a couple of USB ports. This makes it easy to plug or unplug a headset (something you may not want to always have connected to the computer) and more importantly, it gives easy access to USB ports. While some USB devices are unlikely to get unplugged often or at all (USB mice and keyboards, for example), others will rarely remain plugged in, like a USB flash drive. Insert flash drive, copy/save the data needed, remove the flash drive.
On most PCs this is easy. On the iMac it is always a nuisance because a) the USB ports are out of sight on the back and b) the iMac only pivots up and down on its hinge, not side to side, which would at least make it easier to turn to access the ports on the back.
This is bad design and worse, it’s bad design deliberately chosen to keep the front of the iMac clean-looking, the very definition of form over function.
I actually think Apple may revisit this decision but probably not before a complete redesign of the iMac happens and that doesn’t seem likely to happen soon.
(iMac owners can help alleviate the issue by using USB hubs that sit garishly out front.)
Windows 8 is an easy target because so many of its design choices were sub-optimal for desktop computers and were even kind of iffy on tablets, which is what the Windows team was bizarrely designing the OS for back in 2012. It is telling that Windows 10 either undid all of Windows 8’s new features or reworked them, often dramatically.
Here’s one example: Closing a Modern app.
Modern (or as they are often referred to before Microsoft changed the name, Metro) apps are programs specific to the Windows Store, introduced with Windows 8. These apps could run on Windows 8 and Windows RT, the ill-fated version of Windows that ran on ARM processors. They were always full screen and as such felt very tablet-oriented. They lacked the usual minimize/maximize/close buttons in the top right corner so it was perhaps not surprising that some people didn’t know how to close these programs.
Microsoft wanted these to be treated like iOS apps in that you generally would never need to close them. Windows would manage memory and shift apps around as needed. But if an app misbehaved or you suddenly decided you really hated the weather app and wanted to kill it–how would you close it?
By moving the cursor to the top of the screen until it changes from a pointer to a grabby hand, then, while holding the left button down, using the hand to drag the app off the bottom of the screen.
If that sounds a bit awkward, it was even worse when you actually attempted the task, especially on large monitors with a lot of real estate to cover as you worked the app down to the bottom of the screen and the dark oblivion that awaited it. If you flinched and released the mouse button early you had to start over.
This is bad design.
Windows 8.1 modified this by having a title bar appear when you moved the mouse to the top of the screen. This title bar had the expected controls in the top right corner, including the coveted close button.
Windows 10 changes Modern apps more significantly, allowing them to run in regular windows that can be minimized, closed and moved around like any other window. If a Windows 10 device is running in tablet mode (new to Win10) Modern apps automatically switch to full screen mode and behave as they do in 8.1. This is one of many examples of the Windows 10 team both correcting the flaws of Windows 8, while also coming up with new and better ways for the UI to behave.
I’m going to start posting random thoughts on bad design I’ve encountered over the years. Most of these will be tech-oriented but I will occasionally give shout-outs to things like the incredibly heavy and awkward doors on my parents’ 1977 Ford Granada.
In 1998 a recently-returned-to-Apple Steve Jobs ushered in the iMac, a product line that continues successfully to this day. The original iMac was a daring and colorful all-in-one design that did away with a floppy drive (controversial at the time), made an optical drive standard and for the first time included USB ports, allowing Mac owners to use peripherals that worked with the broader PC market.
It was often referred to as a “hockey puck” for obvious reasons. It is, perhaps, the only round mouse to ever go into mass production.
There is a reason for this.
Look at your hand. Is it round? To be certain, look at your other hand (apologies to any one-handed people reading this). You have probably noticed that your hands are not round. When you grip the original iMac mouse, it is an awkward grip, because its shape does not take into account the shape of the human hand. This is bad design.
Apple did learn its lesson, though it took two full years of people madly trying to keep the circular mouse oriented before it got replaced. Here’s the current (insipidly-named) Magic Mouse that ships with iMacs:
See how it approximates the shape of the human hand? Good work, Apple.
Spoiler: We’ll be revisiting Apple mice at some point in the future.
