Bad User Interface Choices & Other Design Failures By So-Called Experts
Why are so many things so poorly designed?
By David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
We’ve been conditioned to believe that professionals can be relied on to do a good job. We instinctively assume that the “experts” know what they’re doing, but time and again our hopes of competence are dashed.
Remember the experts who drilled the wrong type of holes in the steel supports of the two-billion dollar San Francisco Transit center causing two of the massive beams to crack only six weeks after the building opened for business?
How about the engineers who designed the San Francisco fifty-eight story Millennium Tower that has already sunk 17 inches and tilted fourteen inches out of true because they didn’t dig the foundation deep enough?
The Vietnam War, the second Iraq War and the subsequent disastrous post-war U.S. administration of Iraq come to mind as gigantic, stupid, hapless blunders by people whom we foolishly trusted to do a competent job because they were experts.
Whenever I hear, “Trust me, I’m an expert” I want to run away and hide.
I once heard someone define the word “expert” this way:
“X is an unknown quantity and a spurt is a drip under pressure.”
Beyond the boundless screw-ups by government bureaucrats and politicians, I’m constantly saddened to find that private industry is just as bad, although the scale of their disasters is usually smaller.
In the pharmaceutical world, you might want to read up on the Viox mess.
Vioxx (Rofecoxib) on Wikipedia
The lies that were told about the alleged non-addictive nature of Oxycontin are now well known.
And how about Boeing and their massive, disastrous screw up with the design and certification of the 737 MAX?
What about Flint, Michigan’s water supply and the antics of the hapless EPA executives?
Focusing on some far, far smaller examples of bad design, let me start with the Ford Motor Company and its Fusion Hybrid User Interface mess.
Really Stupid Ford Fusion User Interface
A friend of mine rented a Fusion Hybrid only to be thoroughly defeated by the car’s UI.
He got into the Fusion and pressed the button labeled “Start Engine.”
Nothing happened.
He put his foot on the brake and tried again.
Nothing happened.
He fastened his seat belt and pressed the Start Engine button again.
Nothing happened.
After several more minutes of fruitless experimentation, he pulled the owner’s manual from the glove box and on page 144 he found the answer.
The Start Engine button does NOT start the engine, silly goose. No, it internally and silently closes a switch. While nothing appears to happen when you think you’re starting the engine, deep inside the vehicle’s electronics it has silently gone from power-off mode to power-on mode.
To pull away from the curb, this is what you have to do:
- 1) Fasten your seat belt
- 2) Press the Start Engine button
- 3) Realize that something has silently happened
- 4) Put your foot on the brake
- 5) Twist the shift dial from Park to Drive or Reverse
- 6) Press on the accelerator and the car will, totally silently, begin to move.
Leave out any of those steps and you ain’t going nowhere.
How could anyone with even the most elementary knowledge of User Interface design principles have labeled a button “Start Engine” when pressing it doesn’t start the engine?
Here what Ford should have done:
- First, the button should not have been labeled “Start Engine” because it doesn’t start the engine. It should have been labeled “Power On/Off.”
- Second, when the car detected someone was sitting in the driver’s seat with the key-fob, it should have illuminated the Power On/Off text on the button in red.
- Third, if the seat belt was not fastened, the info screen should have flashed the message:
“Please Fasten Your Seat Belt”
- Fourth, when the Power button was pressed the car should have made some kind of a noise mimicking an engine stating and the Power On/Off text on the button should have changed from red to green.
- Fifth, the info screen should have flashed the message:
“Depress The Brake, Then Shift Out Of Park”
or
“Shift Out Of Park”
Unfortunately, the Ford engineers were too clueless to do any of that and my friend spent five or ten frustrating minutes trying to figure out why repeatedly pressing the Start Engine button didn’t start the engine!
I find it amazing and disappointing that Ford would do such an unbelievably bad job at designing something as basic as the UI for turning on the vehicle and backing out of a parking space.
But, there it is.
Sony Should Know How To Build Consumer Electronics Interfaces But Apparently Doesn’t
I bought a Sony MP3 player and copied a bunch of songs to it. I got ready to go for a walk, inserted the earbuds and pressed the Play/Pause button.
Did the Sony play any music? Sadly, no. Instead it displayed the following text:
“On HOLD. Cancel HOLD function by pressing and holding the OPTION button.”
I then had to press and hold the OPTION button for about three seconds. At the end of that time a message flashed: “Creating Library”
Another second later the screen showed the title of a song and the two vertical lines of the Pause icon. Next, I had to press the Play/Pause button a second time. Then, finally, music began to play.
So, instead of simply pressing the Play button, the sequence to hear music was: press button one, press and hold button two for three seconds, then press button one again.
And, if I paused the music for only a couple of minutes while I paid the clerk at the CVS, the thing shut itself off and I had to repeat the entire, “press button one, press and hold button two, then press button one again” process.
This is a solid-state device. There are no parts that need to be warmed up. There is absolutely no reason why I should not be able to press button one and immediately hear music and press button one again to pause music and ten minutes or ten hours later press button one again for the music to resume where it left off.
How incredibly stupid do the Sony engineers have to be to think they’ve designed anything but a crap UI? But that’s what they did. Sony, for heaven’s sake!
It Took Detroit 70 Years To Figure Out How To Keep People From Losing Their Gas Caps
Back to the auto industry for a moment. Ford started producing Model Ts in October of 1908. I remember buying my first brand new car in 1977, a gap of 69 years, but one thing hadn’t changed in all that time. Like the Model T, my new car’s gas cap was not tethered to the vehicle.
For that 69 years and beyond, tens or even hundreds of thousands of gas caps were lost because people drove away from the pump with them sitting on the hood or the roof or the trunk or the pump.
Google can’t tell me when auto makers first figured out that it they should connect one end of a little cable to the car and the other end to the gas cap, but it was later than 1977.
How obvious is that? You would think it wouldn’t, shouldn’t, take seventy years and tens of thousands of lost gas caps for somebody in Detroit to say, “Gee, maybe if we tethered the gas caps to the car with a little cord, people wouldn’t lose them anymore.”
But apparently that was just too difficult a concept for the geniuses in Detroit to figure out over the course of seventy years.
Products That Don’t Work Well
Everywhere I look I see products that don’t work nearly as well as they could.
Toasters
Take toasters. There are no really good toasters.
Firstly, they’re made with glowing wires when they should be made with flat panels treated to emit infra-red light when electrically heated so that you will get an even toasting.
Secondly, they should have LEDs that emit light from the IR to the UV bands and sensors that read the LED light reflected from the untoasted bread to get a baseline of the bread’s untoasted color.
As the bread is heated the sensors would compare its darkening color to the untoasted color and halt the process when the color of the bread has reached the user’s desired degree of doneness.
But, of course, nobody builds toasters like that.
Coffee Makers
Then there are coffee makers. Clearly, a small electric pump should continuously pass the coffee through the grounds and then through a very narrow gap between two transparent plates where its optical density, inductance, and conductance would be constantly monitored until the user’s selected degree of strength on a scale of 1–10 was achieved, at which point it would be dispensed.
And the ground coffee would be put into a container with a plunger on the bottom which moved higher or lower depending on the desired strength of the coffee and the desired volume of liquid.
So, if you wanted eight cups of very strong coffee the plunger would lower the necessary amount so that the larger space in the bin would hold the exact amount of grounds necessary to get you the quantity and the strength of coffee that you asked for.
But does anyone build a coffee maker like that? Of course not. You just put in a fixed amount of grounds which the water passes through once and hope for the best. A terrible, terrible design.
Blenders
Blenders, also almost universally poorly designed. How many times have you put chopped fruit and some yogurt in your blender only to have the blades whir around and turn the bottom layer to soup and leave the top layer untouched? Then you pick the thing up and try to shake it like a bar tender making a martini in the vain hope that, somehow, the blades will “catch” and you’ll end up with a proper smoothie.
The jar design is universally wrong. Krups figured out the right geometry to completely blend food products, but they used it in their coffee grinder rather than a blender.
Take a look at a Krups coffee grinder and you will see that the container is oval with the round blades in the center. This design thoroughly turns dry food items into a very fine powder in seconds.
Yet, has any manufacturer been smart enough to rip off Krups’ oval design for their blender? No.
Screws
How can an entire industry be this stupid for this long? Ordinary screw drivers that fit into a simple slot are a terrible design. They are always, always, slipping out of the slot. How many times have you stabbed yourself when the screwdriver slipped out of the slot and into your pinkie? Go on, raise your bandaged hands.
Then somebody, a Mr. Henry Phillips of Portland, Oregon, invented the Phillips screw driver. Almost as bad. The cone-shaped depression in the screw head and the pointy end of the screw driver almost guarantee two things:
- When you’re twisting hard, the cone-shaped hole and pointed tip make it almost certain that the driver WILL pop out, and
- If you’re pressing down hard and the driver pops out, it will go through your flesh like a spear
Obviously, a screw head should have two slots in the shape of a plus sign and the screw driver should have a matching plus-sign shape, a “plus-driver.”
A plus-driver will not slide out like a slotted screw driver nor will it pop up and out like a Phillips screw driver. Obvious! Yet, can I go into my local Ace or Home Depot and buy a plus-driver screw driver and a handful of plus-head screws? No!
So obvious.
Golf Putters
And golf putters are all designed wrong. There are three basic flaws in all putters. In their current design they cause an internal conflict in the golfer’s head between his logical brain that tells him/her to move the putter in a certain way and his instinctive, intuitive brain that tells him/her to move the putter in a different way. This subconscious conflict causes tiny muscle conflicts that often send the ball slightly off trajectory.
I have a fantasy that some day I will pull $10K out of a CD and pay a machine shop to build a proper putter, but then I’d have to spend a couple of hundred thousand to get design patents all over the world and then I’d have to try to sell it to clueless golf club manufacturers and the whole thing depresses me and I give up the notion in hopeless despair.
Golf Green Mapping
While I’m on the topic of golf, why hasn’t someone built a little hand-held device that projects two tiny laser beams at the green and measures their reflections with two sensors so that it can build a 3D topo map of the green?
Since it knows the diameter and weight of the golf ball and the force of gravity, it could easily calculate three lines from the ball to the cup. One is the slow line where the ball just reaches the cup. The second is the medium line where the ball will go no more than one foot beyond the cup and the last is the fast line where the ball will go at least two feet beyond the cup.
Since it knows the distance to the cup it can roughly calculate the level of force needed to get the ball to the cup, displayed as a number from 1 to 50.
The player waves the thing at the green, it shows him the blue, yellow and red track lines on the screen, he picks the one he likes based on how hard he wants to hit the ball, and if he follows his chosen line and properly translates the force number into his swing, the ball will go into the cup.
What’s so hard about that?
What Bad Designs Have You Seen?
I have to stop now. I’m getting frustrated again with all the things that aren’t designed right.
I bet you’ve run into some inefficient, unintuitive user interfaces and/or designs too, right? Especially from big companies that you would think would know better and would do better, but they don’t.
Tell me about them.
Maybe I’ll get another column out of it.
–David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
