Skip to main content

Bad Design: My New Excuse For Everything

Bad design tends to be my excuse now for everything that I can’t figure out. It’s true, really, that if it’s not obvious how to use something, then the product is probably poorly designed. The best example of this that I can think of is my combined oven and stove. The apartment I live in has quite an old oven/stove appliance, and I want to take you through why it fails the user miserably.

To begin, I’ll set the scene. I’m in my apartment with my three other roommates, and we’re all in the kitchen making dinner. It’s a small kitchen, so imagine a bit of chaos. I preheat the oven to 400 degrees. That part seems simple. I just hit “Bake” and then push the buttons with numbers. What’s confusing is that once I hit “Start,” there is no feedback indicating that the oven has been started. There’s no light and there’s no switch. To make it worse, it doesn’t even show me the current temperature that the oven is at, so I can’t check to see how much it has heated up. The only signifier to show me that the oven is on is a little beeping noise that goes off one time when the oven has reached 400 degrees. Now remember that I’m in my kitchen with three other girls, and as luck has it, the microwave beeps and the sink starts running and plates scrape against each other all at the same moment when the oven beeps. So at this point, the only way I can see if the oven is hot is if I open the door and stick my hand inside. Not the safest solution, if you ask me.

On top of the oven is the stove. The actual burners are arranged in two perfect columns and two perfect rows to fit four total burners. The knobs, however, are placed in one row with four separate columns. In my mind, the knobs farthest from me should be the ones to control the burners farthest from me. So the top right burner should coordinate with the knob farthest on the right. That is not the case. I can’t even count how many times I’ve sat waiting for water to boil for far too long before noticing that it’s not even warm.

I promise I’m not stupid. The real problem here is that this oven/stove set lacks important things: signifiers and feedback. A signifier is an indication to the user about how to perform a task. Feedback is a response from the product that tells the user that a task has been completed. In the oven and stove example, the oven lacks feedback. There is no light or visual cue to tell me that it’s getting hot or that it’s ready. For the stove, there is no clear signifier to tell me which knob controls which burner. These seemingly small design errors are what ultimately fail the user. And in the case of an oven and stove, the consequences are potentially quite dangerous.

Many times, the reason we as users tend to make mistakes while using a product is not to the fault of our own. Instead, like in the stove scenario, we make these mistakes because the product invites them. Not all poorly designed products are as obvious as the stove, but bad design is out there more than we think.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Think “Experience Architecture”

At the beginning of this class, we were assigned readings and videos about airports in order to conceptualize the main theme of the course, experience architecture. Experience architecture is the design of spaces (architecture) for users (experience), such as an airport. In de Botton's work, "A Week at the Airport," de Botton addresses a doubt about experience architecture that sheds light on the scope in which the concept applies. "Standing before costly objects of technological beauty, we may be tempted to reject the possibility of awe, for fear that we could grow stupid through admiration...[and] yet to refuse to be awed at all might in the end be merely another kind of foolishness. In a world full of a chaos and irregularity, the terminal seemed a worthy and intriguing refuge of elegance and logic." (de Botton, 2009, p. 3-4). Simply put, experience architecture is design that is meant for the experience of the user. De Botton communicates this through an exp...
Post a Comment
Read more

Is Experience Architecture The Future of Professional Writing?

As a team of Professional Writing students, our mission is to discover how the Professional Writing major is evolving and share how and why experience architecture is making its way to the forefront of the field . It is our hope that readers of this blog — whether they might be current students, past students, prospective students, or professors — learn the ins-and-outs of the major and begin to see how the worlds of writing and design intertwine.  Professional Writing is currently a fairly popular major among universities, but one of the most interesting things about the field is that it’s always evolving. So what is the Professional Writing major anyway? When it comes to a major like this one, there isn’t a set plan of study among universities. In fact, the course requirements and the definition itself differ from school to school. Because of its natural diversity and constant evolution, Professional Writing doesn’t exactly have a clear future. If design and usability are becomin...
Post a Comment
Read more

Proposed Plan for Socially Distanced User Study of Wix.com

Plan for User Study: www.Wix.com I. Introduction Although a usability test is unlikely in this socially-distanced and pandemic-filled world, if I were to do one, this post describes how I would see myself doing it as well as a basic overview of my plan of study, had this been an option. II. Identifying Users 1. The users of this site align most with the age group of 20-35. This demographic uses Wix primarily for educational purpose and small business website platforms. 2. Users in this case will work through website creation, as that is the main function of the site. III. Target Identification of Problems Below are the main heuristics and an associated question to further explore the content of the site as I plan a User Study. A. Engagement Are the screen and workplace too crowded, and are they layered to maximize engagement? Is the site   nested too deeply with helpful tools to be useful? B. Error Tolerance Does the Help Desk analysis show enough specific problem de...
Post a Comment
Read more