A Series: Compilation of Failed Design #2

@wherenicc
Sep 4, 2018 · 4 min read

Ever since reading the book I have really come across a huge number of bad designs but I had to narrow them down to just these few.

Menus

Who is with me on this that some menus are just absolute trash and they just bombard you with information, tons of colours, graphics and insufficient white space to let me know the different between one food type from another. Or even different font sizes.

Here are some examples of bad menu designs:

This first menu is the menu at beriwell, katong.

If you were to look closely, you would realise that there are at least 5 different headers on this one poster alone. Things that they are known for: Superswirls.

Yet it has the same font weight and hierachy level as smoothies on the other end. Are we as users supposed to know which one is more important and where to look? Take me through a journey of all the possible choices but do not confuse me.

I have been there almost 10 times? each time I look at the menu from where I am standing, I give up. I just ask “can I get the mix acai thing”

Jewel coffee near asia square

So this next menu, I have a huge strife with is because of the usage of marker pens to write your menus with little to no spacing in between. It makes it hard for me to:

  1. Read
  2. Understand
This next one is the menu at harvest, katong.

The great thing about this menu is that it has great hierachy and nicely spread out but the ingredients of the fruit juice (would u have known that before reading all the contents?), are in a very small font within a poster like item that is decorated with fruits. (poster-ception?) I am sure a better representation of the ingredients used could have been done or is it necessary to use such detailed images of fruits to let users know what types of fruits you are using.

Yet another Car Display Screen

This is a Hyundai (I just don’t know what is the model)

This is the default state where I want to pair my phone’s bluetooth to the car’s stereo to play my own songs.

It goes Call History as the main header,

  1. History
  2. Cont…
  3. Setup

I guess by process of elimination and great deduction, you would land on “Contacts”. As the great steve krug said “Don’t make me think”

Perhaps a better solution to this would have been 2 rows and 2 columns? Giving each option more space for all of its text to be shown so that the user does not need to THINK about what the text could be.

Ergonomics of a Lighter

A lighter with a weird shape

This is basically a lighter that I found at one of my relative’s place and I had to use to light up a cake.

I struggled with this one because I was not sure how to justify how or why it made me think and feel like it was not a great design.

They could have been attributed by the following:

  1. As I am holding it up and am trying to activate the light (the position in which flames actually came out in the gif), the area where my thumb was fine because the curve in the lighter told me that is where it should be/go.
  2. My Index finger lays awkwardly together with my other fingers on the same plane with no slight dent etc to facilitate the placement of my fingers.
  3. So my immediate thoughts were that it should go the other way, so I tried it and as shown in the gif, it did not light up.

So I guess it isn’t as fair to put this in the failed designs segment but rather just more room for improvement kind of product because it is more or less easy to understand.

I shall end off this article by showing the last bad design feature for this series:

This should just not exist

See you guys till next time :)

@wherenicc

Written by

I think I found what I like to do… So here are just some articles charting my growth in my understanding of UX. Peace

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