I hate lousy functional design

SimonAH

Why is it apparently OK to market a coffee pot that dribbles all over the counter top if you attempt to pour at a rate of more than one molecule of coffee a minute? The technique for acquiring a cup of coffee in my office is;

1) Remove pitcher from the hotplate on the filter machine.
2) Fill cup
3) Mop down surface
4) Add milk and sugar if required and stir.

For pity’s sake! How hard is it to test your sodding design at prototype?

Have you ever used one of those spun stainless steel teapots or milk jugs in a café that didn’t do the same damn thing?

Have you got a similar bugbear?

mickbrown

The supposedly peel back film on the top of packs of bacon.

In fact, most food packaging gets right on my chebs.

soundninjauk

We have a bin at the kitchen here at work. It's one of those ones where you press down on a pedal with your foot to open the lid at the top. Except the pedal is recessed and the top is larger than the bottom, so whenever you press down on the pedal, instead of the lid opening, the whole bin tips towards you threatening to pour its contents over your trousers. You then have to use your hand to open the lid anyway.

WTF where they thinking? Did they not test it? Did they not look at the millions of similar designs and wonder why they all worked better?

<sigh>

CiB

I was given a wine cooler in the shape of a mini-fridge as a gift once. It was too small to take a bottle of wine.

Or the DAB alarm radio that had fixed brightness display and flooded the room with blue light all day & all night.

Gussio

It's a poor workman.......

dhope

CiB wrote:

I was given a wine cooler in the shape of a mini-fridge as a gift once. It was too small to take a bottle of wine.

Or the DAB alarm radio that had fixed brightness display and flooded the room with blue light all day & all night.

My DAB senses the light in the room and dims. But it doesn't dim all the way so the thing still glows enough that I end up putting something else in front of it :roll:

mudcovered

SimonAH wrote:

Why is it apparently OK to market a coffee pot that dribbles all over the counter top if you attempt to pour at a rate of more than one molecule of coffee a minute?

For pity’s sake! How hard is it to test your sodding design at prototype?

I quite often encounter kettle and jug designs like that and find it just as frustrating. Seems to be a fairly common design flaw. :evil: Like you I can't believe anybody competent would have let the design out of the door. Its the increasing triumph of form over function.

Mike

UndercoverElephant

dhope wrote:

CiB wrote:

I was given a wine cooler in the shape of a mini-fridge as a gift once. It was too small to take a bottle of wine.

Or the DAB alarm radio that had fixed brightness display and flooded the room with blue light all day & all night.

My DAB senses the light in the room and dims. But it doesn't dim all the way so the thing still glows enough that I end up putting something else in front of it :roll:

My Pure Tempus was just like CiB described... Until I went to my local lighting company, pretended to be in the industry and got a sample book of lighting gels free gratis. Five minutes with some scissors and some UHU later it now has a perfectly fitting ND3 set of sunglasses which cut out just enough light from the display so I can see it in daylight and am not blinded during the night.

Mr Plum

'Resealable' bags of food, generally any that are 'resealable' with a cheap sticker (apart from the Cathedral City cheese bags), but particularly pasta. Useless.

suzyb

Toasters that aren't big enough for a slice of bread :roll:

rjsterry

SimonAH wrote:

Why is it apparently OK to market a coffee pot that dribbles all over the counter top if you attempt to pour at a rate of more than one molecule of coffee a minute? The technique for acquiring a cup of coffee in my office is;

1) Remove pitcher from the hotplate on the filter machine.
2) Fill cup
3) Mop down surface
4) Add milk and sugar if required and stir.

For pity’s sake! How hard is it to test your sodding design at prototype?

Have you ever used one of those spun stainless steel teapots or milk jugs in a café that didn’t do the same damn thing?

Have you got a similar bugbear?

You need to 'pour with confidence'; timid pouring is what leads to dribbling. That said, some spouts are impossible to pour from without dribbling (speaking as the owner of a good 5 or 6 teapots :oops:).

KeimanP

I've learnt that on my coffee pot that if you open the lid (out of the way of the flow) and poor confidently it works fine. If you use it as you think it should be intended more coffee would end up on the side than in the mug!

CyclingBantam

Bags of Pasta. You can never open them without the top of the bag ripping in a way you don't want it to. Useless and gets right on my wick.

cee

dishwashers which you can't fit dinner plates into...

ok...you CAN fit them in...just not in the racks...and only two at a time...and not at the same time as anything else in the lower shelf....

Why?

cee

BenBlyth wrote:

Bags of Pasta. You can never open them without the top of the bag ripping in a way you don't want it to. Useless and gets right on my wick.

and if that wasn't bad enough...

bags of cat litter. WTF is with that stupid easy open string thing...that actually makes it more difficult to open?

I usually just wallop the top off with a pair of scissors.

deptfordmarmoset

BenBlyth wrote:

Bags of Pasta. You can never open them without the top of the bag ripping in a way you don't want it to. Useless and gets right on my wick.

Oh yes, I've confetti'd my kitchen floor many times with that one...

Kieran_Burns

rjsterry wrote:

SimonAH wrote:

Why is it apparently OK to market a coffee pot that dribbles all over the counter top if you attempt to pour at a rate of more than one molecule of coffee a minute? The technique for acquiring a cup of coffee in my office is;

1) Remove pitcher from the hotplate on the filter machine.
2) Fill cup
3) Mop down surface
4) Add milk and sugar if required and stir.

For pity’s sake! How hard is it to test your sodding design at prototype?

Have you ever used one of those spun stainless steel teapots or milk jugs in a café that didn’t do the same damn thing?

Have you got a similar bugbear?

You need to 'pour with confidence'; timid pouring is what leads to dribbling. That said, some spouts are impossible to pour from without dribbling (speaking as the owner of a good 5 or 6 teapots :oops:).

Oh yes. Pour with confidence he says. Except the bloody steaming hot water simply carries on up the other side, taking the coffee / sugar with it and arcing over the kitchen surface.

You end up with clean dribbles on one side or a hot coffee you can only lick up on the other, with this teeny tiny window of non spill hidden in the middle.

snailracer

Surely, anyone who rides a high-zoot road bike will appreciate that it doesn't matter how much a teapot leaks, as long as it brews 0.36% faster.

cjcp

The foil cover seal thingy on bottles of milk which greets you when you unscrew the cap.

And find that the bit of foil you grip to tear off the foil cover is still attached to the cap, meaning you need to pierce the cover manually. Seriously winds me up.

CiB

dhope wrote:

My DAB senses the light in the room and dims.

See I got halfway through that sentence and was thinking 'DAB senses? I've heard of Spidey senses but this is a new one'. And then there was no verb to follow and it fell into place.

Poor design. There used to be a digger attachment that farmers could buy to fit on the back of a tractor. It's main - only - failure was that it could tilt back so far that it could kill the old boy farmer sitting on the back of the tractor using the thing in accordance with the operator instructions. Not good that.

lae

I'm an industrial designer and I have a series of notebooks full of poor designs that I've spotted through the years. Bikes are full of them.

Don't get me started on the cabins and toilets on Pendolino trains...

UndercoverElephant

lae wrote:

I'm an industrial designer and I have a series of notebooks full of poor designs.

Your portfolio?