Bad UX Roundup: Juicero Edition

You knew this was coming.

11 min readSep 7, 2017

I know. This is so easy that it’s cheating. But I’m doing it anyway. Why miss a chance to dance on the grave of one of the most hated tech companies since X10?

I’m not sure if anyone has been able to figure out if Juicero is…

a successful scam on investors,
an unsuccessful scam on consumers (though some airheaded bloggers fell for it),
a brilliant work of postmodernist art, and a satire on how out of touch tech yupsters are with reality,
or a genuine attempt at making a useful consumer product.

I’m not going to be figuring out any of that for you. That’s not what this article is about.

Aside from its glaring uselessness — all it does is squeeze packs of mushed fruit that cost more than a bottle of juice, and you can get the same results by hand — the Juicero is a UX nightmare. For all of the NASA-level engineering behind onanistic boasts like “enough force to lift two Teslas”, the actual experience design of the Juicero is unicorn-grade crap.

Juicero is what happens when there is no senior-level designer with the intestinal fortitude to stand up to the upper management and refuse to design garbage. No less than Yves Behar was involved in the industrial design of the alleged appliance, but even he failed to stop the trainwreck. They must have paid him off good.

If someone is determined to make a Juicero, they will make a Juicero, no matter how many voices tell them no. More than anything, this article is a warning to investors to keep a designer of sound mind in your pocket to spot failures in the making such as this. Founder Doug Evans managed to con $120 million from big-name investors including Google, and somehow nobody was around to point out just how massive of a white elephant Juicero was, or if they were around, nobody was listening.

The moral in this story is to listen to your designers. And if your designers ever rubber-stamp something this stupid, toss them on the street like a used Juicero pack.

Now, on to the roundup.

Juicero requires internet connection to work.

I may as well start with the elephant in the room. The Juicero will not juice your juice unless it is connected to the internet. The fucking internet. Am I downloading the juice from the web? Is it flowing through a series of tubes into my glass? Why do I need to be connected to the outside world to accomplish a task that happens completely within my home?

Oh, Jason, you unenlightened, gluten-eating, AC/DC-listening, Ron Paul-voting dinosaur. Your Machine Age notions of private property have no place in 2017. I bet you still believe in unrestricted free speech too. Ugh. Don’t you realize ownership is, like, problematic and stuff? Today, we don’t own; we share. And, what makes you think you can just tell a machine what to do, anyway? It has rights too. Check your privilege, you shitlord.

If that parody seems over-the-top, maybe it shouldn’t. Hear me out.

The Juicero will not juice at all if there is no internet connection. Is Comcast down? No juice for you. Are you in an area with bad cellular reception? No juice for you. Maybe there’s just something wrong with the Juicero’s antenna. No juice for you! Besides constraining the user even in the best of circumstances, Juicero’s mandatory internet connection is one extra thing that can go wrong.

Then there is the fact that, if your juice packet is expired or if there is a recall in effect, the Juicero will not juice the affected packets. We already know that expiration dates are a load of horseshit, set less for quality or safety and more for increasing turnover. The Juicero flat-out prevents users from making their own decisions about their food, as though they are nothing more than overgrown babies.

Juicero and their second CEO, Jeff Dunn, offered a justification for this “feature” that, if disingenuous, confirms that he is a grade-A asshole, and, if sincere, suggests that he pees on the toilet seat. Here it is:

The first closed loop food safety system that allows us to remotely disable Produce Packs if there is, for example, a spinach recall. In these scenarios, we’re able to protect our consumers in real-time.
Consistent pressing of our Produce Packs calibrated by flavor to deliver the best combination of taste and nutrition every time.
Connected data so we can manage a very tight supply chain, because our product is live, raw produce, and has a limited lifespan of about 8 days.

Just how lame these excuses are becomes clear when you realize there are much better solutions to each “problem”.

They could have a warning light on the device indicating that there is a recall in effect, and warn the user that if they drink from a recalled or expired packet, the company is not liable.
They could offer settings and presets on the machine, and indicate which preset to use on the outside of the juice pack.
They could, oh, I don’t know, not get into the God-damned produce business and focus on making appliances like every other appliance company out there. Mass-produce the Juicero-format packs and sell them to third-party companies or even consumers to fill with their own blends.

The problem with my solutions, though, are that they don’t fit in with the “woke af” tech yupster narrative. Theirs is a world of ironic mustaches and unicorns, where twee ukulele music plays to a chorus of millennial whooping, 30-somethings live in a state of perpetual childhood eating artisan peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, and private property is a thing of the past… except of course for the giant tech conglomerates that constitute state-like fiefdoms who own everything. They want docile, infantilized consumers who will gladly forsake the ennoblement of owning property for the convenience, safety, and trendiness of “sharing”, all while being too dense to realize that the corporations are actually avid plutocrats.

People aren’t going to give up owning property overnight, however. There are thousands of years of habit that the companies have to break. Companies like Juicero plan to wean consumers away from ownership by slowing eroding the notion of what it means to own something. You may have paid money for the Juicero. It may sit on your kitchen counter, plugged into your outlet. But you don’t really own it. It won’t do your bidding. It will only operate on its own terms, not yours. That’s how they start you out. You don’t want to find out how they’ll finish you off.

It is vital that Juicero be savaged for this, because this problem goes well beyond one shitty kitchen appliance. There are a lot of products on the market that will not do what you tell them to, but rather what the manufacturer thinks is good for you… or for them. The very fact that there is a “debate” about self-driving cars that would sacrifice the driver in favor of a pedestrian should be terrifying. Whenever a hack journalist declares that self-driving cars will spell an end to car ownership, they are part of the problem. They are complicit with the plutocrats.

Important lessons

Never require internet connectivity for local functionality. EVER.
Respect the concept of private property and ownership.

Juicero does not have its own controls, and relies on your Apple or Android device.

And no, it’s not voice-controlled either.

Ok. So let’s say you’ve got your Juicero, and you’ve got a working internet connection, and a packet of sustainable fair-trade locally-grown kale and açai goop ready to be squeezed by two luxury sedans worth of force. It’s game on, right? Er, not necessarily.

One funny thing about the Juicero is that, for such a high tech device, there is no screen on it. If it requires an internet connection, how are you supposed to pick the wi-fi source? Yeah, about that… it turns out you have to control the Juicero with your mobile phone with, you guessed it, an app.

Hope your phone is handy, or you ain’t juicing shit, buddy. Oh, and it better be an iPhone or Android because they sure aren’t going to produce a Windows app. No OSX app either, so forget about using your MacBook.

This kind of stupidity is the reason that BlackBerry and WebOS flopped and Windows Phones are on life support. The web and the cloud were supposed to be the future of computing, but instead, the native app fad came through and ruined everything. For years, not a day would go by without some epicene hipster releasing an app for something that a website can do just as well without the platform slavery. With all of the new software coming out in app form, the customers just went where all the apps were, which increasingly meant the duopoly of Apple and Google. Even at a time when the app fad is finally dying out, Juicero decided to indulge in one more pointless app.

Important lessons

Hardware should have its own controls built in. Just think how obnoxious it is when TVs have almost no functionality without the remote.
Don’t feed the Apple/Google duopoly.

Guest contribution by Rube Goldberg

Oh, and I should also mention the way in which your phone connects to the Juicero. You’re probably thinking you use Bluetooth to sync the devices, and that’s that. But you’re not thinking the Juicero way! In order to connect your goop squeezer to the internet, you must first select your wi-fi connection and enter a password on the app, then generate a QR code based on that information and have it scanned by the Juicero’s little camera. QR codes? Seriously? What is this, 2011?

Important lessons

If you want to make two devices communicate, use Bluetooth or some other similar protocol.

This meaningless fucking cloud

The Juicero may not have an LED touchscreen but it does have this handy “connection light”. Not only does it light up, but it lights up in four different colors. Unfortunately there are more than four possible things that the Juicero might want to tell you. According to this help page, which I have archived for posterity, a yellow cloud means you can’t connect to the Juicero mothership and a red cloud means you can’t connect to wi-fi. Both of these issues have multiple causes, and the cloud definitely won’t help you narrow down which. Then there is the blue cloud which means that your Juicero has been reset and is no longer on the internet, and a white cloud to let you know everything is peachy (or turnipy? Or berry-y?)

Hoping you can at least get the Juicero to send some useful information to your iPhone to help you troubleshoot? Dream on, bro. Dream on. That app is there for generating QR codes and that’s it.

Unlabeled icons are a usability nightmare. People have a hard time figuring out what they mean, and they usually have to be memorized. Look at these examples from the Juicero app and see if you can figure them all out.

In the case of the cloud light, it’s the same icon in three different colors trying to say eight different things. They spent tens of millions engineering the physical machinery of the device, but couldn’t include multiple indictor lights with distinct icons or — God forbid — actual words?? No, of course not. That would ruin the aesthetics. And these mincing yupsters could never conscience marring their beautiful work of art with something practical. How base. How crass. How… bourgeois.

Important lessons

Avoid unlabeled icons.
Don’t sacrifice functionality for aesthetics.
Don’t make the same icon mean multiple things. Different colors do not count as different icons, especially if the person is colorblind.

There is no audible alert when it’s done making juice.

In the instructional video for the Juicero, the user is advised “wait for the noise to stop” to know that their juice is ready. This means the user must actively listen for the absence of a sound rather than the presence of a new one. Given that humans naturally tune out dull, droning noises and naturally pay attention to sudden loud sounds, this requires much more cognitive energy. The Juicero was marketed to harried parents. In all likelihood, such parents would be operating the Juicero in the midst of several other activities, some of which might be noisy, especially if they involve children. An “all done” sound would be extremely useful.

The sound might be an expensive-sounding chime, or a comfortingly retro analogue “ding”. Either way, it would add needed functionality to the appliance as well as increase its perceived value. Instead, however, all you get is a cheap little beep that goes off when your Juicero scans the QR code to connect to wi-fi. And I do mean cheap. It sounds like a Tiger handheld game from 1992. Game over for Juicero.

Important lessons

Use sounds to communicate vital information to users who are not actively engaging with the interface.
Don’t cut corners.
Use activity-centered design instead of user-centered design.

And there you have it. We already knew that Juicero was more lemon than lemonade, but this article hopefully drove home the fact that no amount of money, not even $120 million, will buy you good design. Perhaps it was inevitable that a product that performs at most 5% of the work of creating juice could only emerge from the kind of person who would insist on making it dependent on an internet connection and controlled by QR codes. Maybe the reason the Juicero avoids good design like Amy Schumer avoids good jokes is because Doug Evans and Jeff Dunn would fire anyone who had the gall to offer up a sensible idea.

But, if not, then I can only hope these lessons resonate with someone in the same way that Amy Schumer’s humor resonates with absolutely no one. Maybe I can prevent the next Juicero. But maybe I don’t actually want that. I had fun writing this, and I’d love to do it again.