Such badly designed products are easy to spot by visual inspection.
Unfortunately, if you go shopping in a supermarket or online, you can find a huge amount of bad products that look like they were well designed, but in reality some of their parts are made from wrong materials, and you discover this only at home, after using them for a few months, or for a few days, or even after a few minutes.
For instance, I have seen devices where pressure-regulating springs were not made of spring steel, but of ordinary steel and they lost their elasticity after a very short time, making the device unusable, water buckets supposedly made of stainless steel that were actually made of chromated steel, which rusted at joints after a few months and a lot of diverse devices where parts that suffer cyclical stresses are not make of a fatigue-resistant material, so they break after a short time of use.
There are countless examples of this kind and all have this problem that you cannot detect visually if the correct materials are used, or not, like you can recognize an inappropriate shape.
userbinator 8 hours ago [-]
IC: With AI getting bigger and more controversial and so on, have you used AI to create any of these designs?
That is an interesting point to bring up, because this type of "almost but not quite right" is exactly what AI seems to naturally create.
Gigachad 7 hours ago [-]
I think the difference is AI images tend to create mush or impossible geometry. The ideas here where a minimal change to the design renders the item entirely unusable takes a fair bit of creativity.
I believe it is actually called: The masochist’s teapot.
I recommend this book to anyone remotely interested in design. Even today it is fantastic.
ChrisMarshallNY 6 hours ago [-]
Reading it was a watershed in my life.
I never look at doors, without evaluating their usability, anymore.
al_borland 6 hours ago [-]
I bought a new door for my house recently. When the salesman asked what type handle/knob I wanted, I had a bit of an internal crisis. The one he said post people got seemed like it would create a Norman door, which I desperately wanted to avoid. I ended up getting a standard knob to avoid being the absolute lunatic who spent 6 hours debating the merits of various door handles, but had I been alone, I would have absolutely done that. I still feel like I made a mistake every time I look at my door.
The book was a gift and a curse.
bluGill 1 hours ago [-]
yeah, the book is something that people hate me having read. I know it wasn't my mistake and I tell them that.
as for door handles, most manufactures use interchangaple knobs so you can buy two and swap. You end up with a useless mechinism (i find you rarely can find a different door that needs the reverse handle)
Funny how some of those ideas are obviously useful, some I even see in stores... and then turns out the selfie stick is an example too, which makes one question the whole categorization.
ChrisMarshallNY 3 hours ago [-]
I like the iPhone Control Center screenshot in there…
cucumber3732842 1 hours ago [-]
I would spend an extra $0.20/lb if my butter came in a stick (though I think the form factor should emulate deodorant and not chapstick) and would shamelessly rock the umbrella tie.
"what if objects were actually designed for a bad user experience, instead of a good one? she recalled in a 2018 TED talk. That was my ‘eureka’ moment."
Or, she stumbled upon some article or the very Wikipedia page about it:
as a designer and innovator, i appriciete this. this gives me ideas really out of box, just to see these. amazing!
i also do this for ui and app logic: go to some Microslop service, they are all like these...sad but true
jrmg 9 hours ago [-]
Now I’m wondering how you could create ‘uncomfortable’ versions of simple command line tools (ls, cat, more etc.) or perhaps shells.
Emacs and/or vi, depending on your inclination, have text editors covered already, of course ;-)
xtiansimon 3 minutes ago [-]
Easier to find uncomfortable websites. Back in the 90s with all the Flash, lots of peeps said these sites made them uncomfortable because they couldn’t figure out how to do anything. Couldn’t figure out the navigation.
I instantly recalled a site from this era and amazeballs it’s still there! Superbad.com All hail!
simonask 56 minutes ago [-]
The lowest-key example of this is tools that enforce a particular order of arguments, or where the order of arguments carries semantic meaning. It's the worst. Please don't make me put the file name last, or first. You don't know which part of the command I'm tweaking.
II2II 7 hours ago [-]
Well, bash offers vi and Emacs as editing modes. We're already covered on that front. Many of the parameters for ls are cryptic, making it awkward to use for anything other than routine tasks without referencing the man page. more is so limited that many people choose to use a program used to concatenation files (cat) as a file viewer. Those who don't want to reach for their mouse to use their terminal's scrollbar buffer will use less, since it does more than more. Don't bother parsing that last sentence with bison, unless you have a yacc to shave.
TimByte 2 hours ago [-]
This is a fun idea
anonymous344 7 hours ago [-]
jus used new ubuntu
instead of ifconfig (weird name)
it had ip
couldnt figure from the help how to get actually show the ip
so linux is already there
lelanthran 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah, Linux has been trending to incomprehensible commands.
In terms of usability, moving to FreeBSD from Linux is quite a positive experience. Pity that hardware and software support is limited on the BSDs.
al_borland 6 hours ago [-]
Feed all command output through AI to summarize the results instead of actually giving the results.
Results from ls would be a few sentences explaining the types of files in the directory. Add a -l on there and it will give you a general overview of the permissions and size of the files. Ex. “These are rather large files that are primarily, but not exclusively, limited to root.”
Results from cat would give a summary of the file. You’d get the same results, with some degree of randomness from more and less as well.
Using any command with sudo would provide the same type of results, but in all caps.
Trying to pipe commands together would be a slop multiplier.
bsjshshsb 5 hours ago [-]
Use an agent for all CLI work.
eszed 8 hours ago [-]
What's wrong about the glasses? I've been staring at them and trying to figure out why they're unworkable, as opposed to just a quirky pair of specs.
jaden 8 hours ago [-]
The sharp angle of the bridge would dig into your nose.
8 hours ago [-]
parallel 8 hours ago [-]
Pointy bit on the bridge of the nose.
starmole 8 hours ago [-]
the sharp point on the bridge is going to hurt your snout.
anonymous344 7 hours ago [-]
you don't have glasses ever, i guess?
camillomiller 4 hours ago [-]
The glasses would be great for pool playing, as they would sit higher on your line of sight :)
qy-mj 1 hours ago [-]
What kinds of terrible product designs have you seen?
TimByte 2 hours ago [-]
This is such a great reminder that "good design" is mostly invisible until it breaks
imp0cat 5 hours ago [-]
The funny thing is that the toothbrush would actually come in handy for cleaning stuff other than teeth.
For example, the inner water tank of a robotic vacuum.
keithnz 10 hours ago [-]
given the title, so may software developers must be living in bliss! /s
rajesh_me291091 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
abstractspoon 4 hours ago [-]
All seems very contrived. Not what I would call creative
Rendered at 11:53:21 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Unfortunately, if you go shopping in a supermarket or online, you can find a huge amount of bad products that look like they were well designed, but in reality some of their parts are made from wrong materials, and you discover this only at home, after using them for a few months, or for a few days, or even after a few minutes.
For instance, I have seen devices where pressure-regulating springs were not made of spring steel, but of ordinary steel and they lost their elasticity after a very short time, making the device unusable, water buckets supposedly made of stainless steel that were actually made of chromated steel, which rusted at joints after a few months and a lot of diverse devices where parts that suffer cyclical stresses are not make of a fatigue-resistant material, so they break after a short time of use.
There are countless examples of this kind and all have this problem that you cannot detect visually if the correct materials are used, or not, like you can recognize an inappropriate shape.
That is an interesting point to bring up, because this type of "almost but not quite right" is exactly what AI seems to naturally create.
I recommend this book to anyone remotely interested in design. Even today it is fantastic.
I never look at doors, without evaluating their usability, anymore.
The book was a gift and a curse.
as for door handles, most manufactures use interchangaple knobs so you can buy two and swap. You end up with a useless mechinism (i find you rarely can find a different door that needs the reverse handle)
Or, she stumbled upon some article or the very Wikipedia page about it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chind%C5%8Dgu
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=theuncomfortable.com
on the bottom (both) WHY?
i also do this for ui and app logic: go to some Microslop service, they are all like these...sad but true
Emacs and/or vi, depending on your inclination, have text editors covered already, of course ;-)
I instantly recalled a site from this era and amazeballs it’s still there! Superbad.com All hail!
so linux is already there
In terms of usability, moving to FreeBSD from Linux is quite a positive experience. Pity that hardware and software support is limited on the BSDs.
Results from ls would be a few sentences explaining the types of files in the directory. Add a -l on there and it will give you a general overview of the permissions and size of the files. Ex. “These are rather large files that are primarily, but not exclusively, limited to root.”
Results from cat would give a summary of the file. You’d get the same results, with some degree of randomness from more and less as well.
Using any command with sudo would provide the same type of results, but in all caps.
Trying to pipe commands together would be a slop multiplier.
For example, the inner water tank of a robotic vacuum.