Design

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:

1. Insert correct way, feel resistance, remove USB cable
2. Insert wrong way, feel resistance, remove USB cable
3. 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
   1. 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:

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

The iMac came with a keyboard and a mouse. This is the mouse (and I am far from the first to highlight its shortcomings):

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.