Bad design is <i>everywhere</i>...<p>My old microwave oven had one control, a dial. Just put the food in and turn it. The whole dial represented 12 minutes, so just estimate how far to turn it. My new microwave has 22 buttons. I forget which is which. I have to turn on the lights and get my glasses.<p>The previous owner installed vertical blinds on the double hung windows. Think about that. Impossible to have open windows without endless noise and movement.<p>An office where I work is near an airport. They have a key card system that beeps with a successful swipe. So you can't hear the beep when an airplane is passing overhead (every 5 minutes) and have to wait until it's gone to get into the building.<p>Another office has "gone green" and installed motion sensors everywhere to turn off lights not being used. Good luck finishing up in the restroom if you've been sitting too long.<p>Some of my software asks "Save before exit?" <i>whether I've changed anything or not</i>. I got so tired of trying to remember if I had updated or only viewed, I just click "Yes" every time. Pointless.<p>Every time the garbage truck drops the dumpster back down next door, 3 car alarms go off. No one ever responds, because they assume that it's a false alarm. Not that big a deal until the garbage truck shows up at 4:00 a.m. on Saturday.<p>My TV remote has 33 buttons. So they're so small, you have to stop and look at it to hit "Mute" or "Last Channel", the only 2 buttons I ever use. Who designed this thing, a munchkin?<p>The airports in Orlando, Philadelphia, San Jose, and Miami put the restaurants (not counting junk food) <i>outside</i> of security. So you have to wonder, "Do I have enough time to eat and then get through the line?" (Pittsburgh, Tampa, and Chicago Midway did it right.)<p>The trunk release and gas cap release levers in my car are next to each other but not visible. It's hard to pull one without the other. Seems like my gas cap door is always open.<p>A theater we went to the other night only had aisles on the sides with 50 seats in between. Do your really want that great seat in the center knowing you may have to climb over 25 people if you need the restroom before the movie is over?<p>Intersections that gridlock because of traffic from the next light. Too many to mention.<p>Microsoft Windows.
Read the following Scott Adams blog quotes:<p>"I can't get past the fact that it's sitting there wasting energy while its only function is to confuse me up to three dozen times per day."<p>"Lately I have been wondering whether online reviews should remain legal."<p>"I can't help seeing world affairs as essentially a bunch of middle managers sitting around a rectangular table coming up with clever ways to convince the masses that turds are diamonds."<p>"Humans are obsessed with their weight. I think a big part of that obsession is the simple fact that weight is easy to measure."<p>"What the world needs is software that makes it easy for senior citizens to use e-mail."<p>Now imagine them being read by an angry Andy Rooney.<p>I'm just putting that out there.
I have one UI pet peeve: mousing over large screens.<p>I look at it this way: when the Apple Macintosh made the mouse popular in 1984, it was with a 9 inch, 512x324 resolution display. I got started computing on a 17 inch, 640x480 resolution display, so not that much larger in terms of usable screen real estate. Now, I have two 22 inch, 1680x1050 resolution displays, one turned vertically. For comparison, I made this image
<a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/thOvKDvamA7iCeQLCdyGIw?authkey=Gv1sRgCJqd-72OjOqvxAE&feat=directlink" rel="nofollow">http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/thOvKDvamA7iCeQLCdyGIw?...</a><p>The red box in the middle is the old Macintosh display. It looks roughly 5 inches across the diagonal. Mousing interfaces haven't changed in any significant way in the last 30 years, but displays have grown astronomically in that time. If arguments against the mouse over text interfaces were contentious back-in-the-day, it's even worse now. My wrists can't take this anymore.
A lot of people seem to think using light switches for anything is a good idea. Popular sins off the top of my head:<p>- Light switch used as apartment doorbell. Mine sits right beside the hall lightswitch.<p>- Light switch used as door opener. Of course put right beside one of the hall's light switches.<p>- Light switch used as control for the office-wide motorized blinds. Of course put right inbetween the other proper light switches used for controlling light.
> Were the switches ordered the way I thought they should be, and that was my memory trick, or were they ordered the opposite of how I would have done it, and THAT was my memory trick.<p>I'm glad I'm not the only one that uses this "opposite of normal logic" trick in order to remember how things work sometimes.
As a counter anecdote, I have installed USB 3G mobile connection things.<p>A few years ago, the software was so fussy that we broke a Windows install past our ability to fix it merely by installing in the wrong order. After install it needed to be run as an administrator then as a user, then configured with custom profiles choosing which kinds of devices you might have. It was a mess.<p>Today I had to install the latest version and wasn't looking forward to it. Plugged the device in, it appeared as a USB stick with an installer. Ran the installer, ran the program - on first launch it quietly detected and installed some drivers and presented with a 'connect' button which ... worked.<p>I wish there was some standard way I could give feedback to the development team for their excellent work and to the company management for encouraging (or at least, permitting and subsequently getting out of the way of) such improvement and customer focus.
I wonder if Adams has ever read Donald A. Norman's classic <i>The Design of Everyday Things.</i> He'd probably love it; this kind of critique is exactly what the book explores so well.
My personal peeve is door handles.<p>You know what I mean, you come to a door and you don't know if you should push or pull. It happens to me almost everyday at work when I'm deep in thought.<p>"The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman, nicely sums up a lot of design problems. Even tho the book was written in 1990 or earlier, we're still facing many of the same design problems.<p>Everything2 sums up the book nicely:
<a href="http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=140365" rel="nofollow">http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=140365</a>
My personal UI peeve is alarm clocks. When I want the sound to stop, I hit the off button as often as I hit snooze, often because the snooze button is smallish and stiff, and I still have to hunt for it amidst the other buttons.<p>What I'd like:<p>When the alarm is going off, <i>any</i> button should snooze. A later "off" button press (ie, a minute or so) should be what turns off the alarm. This way, a literal "whack" would silence the alarm, without fear of falling asleep after turning it off.