with David L. Jones
The EEVblog is an off-the-cuff video blog and Podcast of interest to anyone involved in electronics design. Electronics professionals, hobbyists, hackers, and makers will find something of interest here. Presented in Dave's unique non-scripted overly enthusiastic style!
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EEVblog #28 – Product design drives me NUTS!
Posted on September 1st, 2009 53 commentsDave goes nuts over dodgy product design decisions in Canon DV camcorders, Fluke multimeters, Timex watches, Princeton Tec LED lights, and PVR’s.
And how cool would it be to design farting gnomes?
53 responses to “EEVblog #28 – Product design drives me NUTS!”
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Hey Dave!
This post really hits home for me. There are so many badly designed products around us that it’s truly incredible.
I wish all the product engineers / designers were as caring and insightful like you are and companies were more willing to hear your voice. That would make our life so much easier…
Speaking of bad products I have some examples on my mind.
The LEDs of one of my old TP-Link router were so strong that it was quite a challenge to sleep in the same room when ocassionally opening my eyes. A stranger might have thought that there’s some wild disco party going on in the house.
The other example is my lemon squisher. It’s only a piece of plastic but they have managed to screw it up. It has some protruding pin-like parts arranged in a circle that are meant to withhold the lemon seeds falling into the juice, but in practice they don’t do a very good job. On the other hand they make cleaning this tool a nightmare.
I’m sure I could find dozens of such examples by time (primarily software usability wise), but your examples are already perfect ones, especially the bike flasher. I can feel your pain.
I love your blog, keep it up!
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Speaking about usability, you could make your blog a little more search engine friendly by using SEO friendly URLs.
You can set it up in WordPress under Settings > Permalinks > Common settings > Day and name
Your old, numbered URLs should also be usable after the change, so your old links won’t be inaccessible.
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Thanks for the tip László
Done. The links do loo much better now, and the old ones still seem to work.
Nice!
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Well, holy crap, is there a lot of venting to do here.
I think I’ll confine my ire to a single item, that causes massive frustration ever single time I interact with it: My Motorola V3x mobile telephone.
I’m a software engineer by trade, and like messing around with industrial and electronic design, and I love gear that’s beautifully engineered. As such, the gunmetal V3x was the only phone to get a few years back: everything else looked really massive, clunky and ugly. The V3x looks like it’s from some strange future where TRON has started to leak through.
Holy crap, though, does the software on it bite! The entire interface is *massively* slow for things as basic as responding to button presses. The menu system is terribly designed: way too many levels, poor naming, no putting commonly used items higher up in the menu tree. But my real hatred and confusion is reserved for the SMS composition screen.
When composing an SMS, not only is the response to keypresses crazy-slow, it gets progressively slower as your message gets longer. Noticeably slower. I can only imagine the bloatastic string handling library that’s being used is traversing the entire string from start to finish to add a new character to the end of the SMS string. Or something of that ilk! Absolutely batshit crazy!
Surely a big name phone company like Motorola must do scads of user acceptance testing prior to product release. How did this get through? The mind boggles.
Rant ends now.
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I deliberately left out mention of my Nokia E71 phone, otherwise I would have blown a gasket!
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Do you happen to have the verizon Motorola V3? I have suffered with a Verizon V3 for the past two years and at last getting rid of it. It seems Verizon loaded there own bloated software onto the phone. The low battery alarm you can’t turn off without turning your ringer off, the slow menu’s, mine needs recharged every night….
I have seen other people with the normal Motorola V3 with Motorola software and its WAY faster then mine. Its crazy they can end a call and start typing a new number to call! They don’t have to give the phone some time to think about the fact you ended the call before doing anything else with the phone.
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The Motorola Razr has one of the worst interface designs I’ve ever had the displeasure of using. The calculator application is found undre the settings menu!
My current phone (a Nokia) won’t display the time when it is in silent mode… very frustrating.
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I have a 26 inch LCD monitor, KDS brand, and they menu doesn’t work unless there is video going to the screen. The only way to get video to the screen is to restart the computer, or let the computer timeout the monitor and then move the mouse to send the wake up command. Sometimes I feel like putting my fist through it!
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While im on the subject of the rant, anyone know if its possible to update firmware in an LCD monitor? maybe theres a fix.
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Spsven September 1st, 2009 at 18:15
It’s easy, all of this mobile phones which just have a trap key to make you get connected to the gprs(thus getting charged) when you don’t want. The “trap keys” are usually in the middle of other useful keys and/or share the functionality sometimes with others. Not to talk about the options in the menu which are trap too.
I literally have ripped off one key of my Sony-Ericsson k610i only because of this.
Annoying… Make me hate some brands…
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Richard September 1st, 2009 at 18:33
great blog.
Do you or anyone know if its possible to update the firmware in timex watches? Would love to reprogram my timex ironman digital watch.
thanks
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Not on regular Timex watches, but the Timex Ironman USB Datalink watch allows updating as well as uploading user programs of course. A very cool watch!
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Richard September 2nd, 2009 at 01:38
Have you ever seen inside a timex watch? Would it have some kind of microcontroller in it and would this be preprogrammed or programmed during building?
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Brian Hoskins September 1st, 2009 at 18:40
I have a Sharp XL-DV50 which is a 5-disc, DVD Micro System.
I get really frustrated whenever I want to change discs because you have to wait for the draw to close and for it to finish loading up a disc before the software will allow you to choose a *different* disc using the buttons on the front of the machine!!! It wouldn’t be so bad but Sharp have employed a rather ingenious, but unfortunately slow, disc loading mechanism. So it takes ages for it to load up the disc you don’t want, and then you have to wait a second time for it to juggle around and load the disc you *do* want!
Why isn’t the system designed to respond to the disc number buttons straight away?? It’s just a software thing – easily solved!!!
Brian
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My pet peves are:
Overpowered LEDs – I read a study once that linked eye damage to blue LEDs because the human eye is less sensitive to blues (but the lumen output is the same), so you are less prone to looking away from a superbright blue LED compared to a superbright red LED.
Multi-function displays – If designed right, they are great (eg: TI-8X calculators), but some products do have bad MFDs. Either confusing menu trees, dead-end options, unclear button functions, or just too many settings can end up making the entire endeavor a pain.
My ham radio (FT-857) uses a MFD, and for the most part its pretty good, especially for its size, however in the programming menu, there are dozens of settings, making it hard to navigate between them by a small rotary encoder. While I’m young and able to adapt, alot of the old hams out there have a love-hate relationship with this radio because of the MFD.
Battery chargers – I’ve taken apart a few things to see how the charging circuit was designed, and most of the cheap items out there use terribly unsafe charging circuits, with no cutout or temperature sensor (for NiCd/NiMH). More than a few times I’ve gotten items given to me with dead batteries but still functional, and dead due to the charging circuit. To be fair, alot of products (cellphones and laptops) have good charging circuits, but all the cheap crap out there usually ends up frying batteries.
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signal7 September 13th, 2009 at 00:06
Ditto on the bad battery charger circuits. Black & Decker’s cordless power tools come with the worst charging circuits I’ve ever seen. In fact, I just redesigned and built a much better replacement this past month!
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DavidDLC September 2nd, 2009 at 02:20
Microsoft is a big one for me.
Are you sure you want to do this ? And then again Are you sure ?
Well too many examples to post.
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signal7 September 13th, 2009 at 00:07
…and what about that random number generator they call a progress bar?
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Andrew September 2nd, 2009 at 03:47
I have lost patience with bad design.
I regularly rip out caps lock keys from keyboards. I don’t care that the keyboards look broken afterward. They are working better without, so are less broken. Repeat after me: Caps lock keys need to die – and caps lock keyboard designers with them.
I have drilled out annoying LEDs through front plates a few times when it was impossible or would have caused too much damage to disassemble the devices and desolder the LEDs.
I have desoldered the blindingly bright blue LED on the front panel of my HD media player, using my hot air rework station. Why the would anyone put such an LED on a front panel of a media player that needs to face towards the viewers, because the IR receiver is also at the front panel?
I have used wire cutters to get rid of annoying beepers. Why the does every little gadget beep, beep, and beep?
And, maybe the most important, I have brought heaps of stuff back where I bought it, insisting on a full refund and telling them where they could stick their junk.
Ah, and there are the promises of firmware updates. Feature X is missing or broken, but the manufacturer promises to fix it with some firmware update. Lies, big, stinking lies. There is an almost 100% chance the firmware update with that feature will never come.
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Mark H. September 2nd, 2009 at 04:19
I have a Princeton Tec LED headlamp and they must have learned their lesson from that bike light, because it has 4 modes, but if it’s on for over a minute, the next button press is always off. You don’t need to cycle through the modes.
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Yes, the famous Princeton Tec EOS headlamp does not do this. I believe the EOS came first, so it’s just poor design choice on the bike lamp.
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I disagree with your gripe about the Fluke meter. I’d personally much rather the on/off be something solid like it is than a soft button as you’re suggesting. I use a meter in my toolbox, and if it had a softkey, it would likely get turned on while jostled in my box.
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Oh, and for the obligatory gripe:
My Motorola Razr V3 phone, which works fairly well in most cases, has the button on the side of the unit which changes ring modes whenever I put it in my pocket.
I’ve missed calls because the next option after ‘Vibrate & Ring’ is ‘Silent’. Duh. Loudest option for my loud pickup truck, right to the silent treatment.
Love the blog, keep it up.
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Lucassiglo21 September 2nd, 2009 at 07:40
i have a crap chinese meter with auto-off functionality, it’s a good idea, because you can forget it turned on.the thing is that it turns off after approximately 7 minutes after you turned it on, even if you are using it, it will turn off.
my home theatre has a vfd 16 segment display where it shows the mode, etc, the thing is that if the message is too long it scrolls from left to right until the last character is in the left, then it stays there, you can only see the last character!, it’s stupid!
and the remote control of that HT has a numeric keypad that is not used in any mode, that’s a waste of keys!. -
One of the things that bugs me about the Fluke 87-V is the fact that it defaults to to AC current readings instead of DC. The 87 and 87-III did not do this. My coworkers hate the 87-V for this reason alone and refuse to give up their old one’s because they have to push one more button!
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Jonathan S September 3rd, 2009 at 10:59
Ha! I have the same multimeter (Fluke 87 series V) and I can’t tell you how many times I get 0 volts on the meter and I have get confused for a minute before I remember that it defaults to AC rather than DC.
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Brodieman September 2nd, 2009 at 23:12
Haha – great post!!!!
I have a HUUUUUUUUUGE list of gripes, but at the moment the biggest is with my Nokia N97 – the accelerometre is “not very good” an thinks that I am in portrait mode when in landscape – vice versa.
Seeing it is possibly the last of the S60 in the range (after seeing the new N900 running another OS) they may have tried to squeeze too much out of this device as some menus are too slow- the wifi scanning menu is buried under settings > connectivity and if u are quick “no options” flashes on the screen (yes I am running latest firmware).On another note – I see a few jaycar items (choke a chook etc) – these are great fun and a lot of these ‘gadget’ type devices I take great pleasure in reusing for other purposes – rigged a ultrasonic door timer to run off a reed switch and time how many times the lolly jar at home was opened by the kids when no one was looking.
My OTHER huge gripe lately is with FLIR, I have a F2000 series pod that I am retrofitting with a RedOne and a few other cams – PROPIERTY CONNECTORS BUG ME!!!!! I’ve had to do a huge hack and slash on some expensive cabling internally just to ghetto rig a different camera into it – to the point of using a PSOne LCD and tapping of a camera IR remote an patching controls through to the camera in the pod JUST because there are subtle differences in software controls for a camera – I cannot code a universal 1sec boot control system when the software isnt compatble (ended up running from the video out on camera to PSOne LCD, rigging IR remote buttons to control board and mounted the whole board in a spare place within the helicopter – then I had to run an IR repeater to the camera within the pod using above sad hacked connectors). Sure there are easier ways, but meh – gets the job done and end client loves simplicity.
Keep up the good work Dave!
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Oscilloscopes running Windows. ‘Nuff said.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
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Yeah, for the calculator, I think they have put such buttons for marketing reasons… People don’t look what do the keyboard, they look how many keys there are! The ° key is for students I think, where that key is important!
For the PVR, the thing to know is that the blue red green yellow keys are “standards”. They are present on any PVR device, so I think people involved in the conception of such a product MUST do that the same way that others do… But you are right, this is totally non-sense, and horrible to use!
Leds, YEAH, I love leds… But I HATE them !!! Count how many leds you have watching your TV.
I have 17 leds right now that blink !! Horrible stuff ! (4 for the PC Engines ALIX, but that’s my fault, it’s back is in front of me… bad use
, some others boxes that says they are “powered on”… Don’t care they are powered on, i know that, i use it! Could be a led at the rear, to avoid anoying people with that… But i think people like flashy products with lot of leds and other annoying stuff An other thing i don’t understand, Why nowadays products use IR for remote control ?! Bottle on the table ? Remote not working. Hand on the emitter? Remote not working. Door to protect all electronic stuff? Remote not working!
Thanks again for your blog
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Donrata September 3rd, 2009 at 13:32
I have a chinese LED bike light which I thought had the same problem, but one day I accidentally pushed the button for 2 seconds or so and it turned off, then I pushed again and it turned back on in the same mode it was before. Here the problem was they didn’t print that on the one-paged user manual.
Anyway try it, it may work with yours also. -
Bryan Laird September 3rd, 2009 at 21:40
I thought I would throw my hat in on this one. For possibly bad design specifically because you talk about Design meetings and comitees. A while back I was tasked with testing out a piece of equipment. The device had “redundant” gigabit uplinks for it’s main connection to the network. Here comes the crazy part.
When the LED was “GREEN” it meant the link was “down”. Amber meant that the link was “up and good”. While conversing with one of our Lucent 5e switch managers he said and I quote “In this world ever advancing technology there was one certainty, green was good, red or a variation of was bad, and now they’ve ruined it”
We asked about it later and their “logic” was that on some switches when you have a device connected it lights up with an amber light. Mind you most of these devices have no light to indicate nothing connected.
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I have a Fujitsu-Siemens laptop that clearly shows that blue high-power LEDs have come down in price faster than taste has gone up.
The Laptop has something like 10 very high powered blue LEDs that actually color my ceiling blue when it’s on.
There is an ON LED, right below the display!!! Why would anyone be in any doubt that the machine is on when there is this huge screen that lights up?
The on LED is duplicated on the outside of the machine where it will sit and blink harshly like an ambulance when the machine is suspended.
The worst part, however, is that there is a LED that *BLINKS* when the machine is using the bluetooth or wifi radio!!! WHY?
FSC screwed up the ACPI so the touch pad stops working after resume, but downgrading to the older BIOS fixed that.
It’s otherwise a nice machine, but the LED issue eventually drove me to tape over the LEDs and pass the laptop on to my girlfriend.
My new laptop is a Toshiba which is superbly designed in comparison, the leds are small (less than 1mm visible), dimm and placed so they are hidden by my arm when using the laptop.
FSC needs to beat their designers severely for that design turd!
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I’ve got the cheapest phone Verizon sells with a full QWERTY keyboard, and it has a locking function when you slide the keyboard shut. Nice, right? Except to unlock it, you just have to hit the big middle button on the front twice… so it basically stays locked only as long as you don’t bounce the phone around (or sit on it) more than once. Can’t find a “stay locked unless I slide open the keyboard” setting anywhere. Grr.
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Oh wait, I somehow forgot my biggest recent product design annoyance: inkjet printers with ink cartridges that have built-in timed obsolescence (HP), or printers that won’t print without non-empty color cartridges installed (Epson).
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My pet peeve are usb devices that only use the power from the port. Nearly all of these devices will be a much better product if they just plugged into a wall (ie novelty products: minifridge, vacuums, toy fans). If your going to make a usb device, at least use the data ports and throw in a flash drive into the device.
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One of the most hilariously bad design decisions I’ve seen came in the form of a cheap webcam. This particular model has 6 bright red LEDs embedded into its transparent body. When its plugged in and being used, they’re all off.
When it’s plugged in and idle, they flash like crazy, drawing an absurd amount attention to a device that is doing absolutely nothing.
The only way to stop the disco-mania is to unplug the cam from the USB port.
Here’s my guess as to how this design decision cam about:
Engineer 1: Sir, we just discovered that leaving the new webcam prototype idle for more than 30 seconds causes it to emit cancer rays!
Engineer 2: Hmmm.. Can we just annoy people into unplugging it?
Engineer 1: Are bright red LEDs still cheap?
Engineer 2: Gentlemen, we may have just saved the world….
And as an aside, how awesome would it be put “Designed a farting gnome” or your resume?
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When I call my telephone provider, I get an endless automatic menu:
- If you want to do this, and this, and this, and that… please press one.
- If you want to do that, and that, or that, please press two.
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- and so on.
When I get to the number eight then I realise I need a previous number which now I’m not sure which it is. So I have to make it repeat the menu. After selecting my option, then I get another submenu to have the same the problem. Or even worse, I realise I have to go one level up, because I got the wrong route. A nightmare. Not taking into account those annoying promotions that waste like 3 minutes of your time before the menu starts.
This is more software related that electronics, but still a user interface.
Solution: simplify, just give two options, two or three levels each, maximum. No promotions. If I call my operator, I want help quickly, I could even change the provider just because that annoying helpdesk. -
Somehow you missed the part of the Timex watch that really bugs me. I had never really thought about it being slow. The thing that bothers me is the timer. I don’t use it a whole lot but when I do it goes ok… I change to the right mode hit the middle button to start timing and the number start going. Then I am ready to stop it… Without thinking I cheerfully hit the middle button that I started it with, now instead of stopping the time the watch does some strange splitting thing… I have never ever wanted to split my time, I guess if I was running around a track or something… How many people really use the watch for laps? Why not stick the “split” key on the side and move the stop function to the middle so you can have a normal start/stop key?
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I use the split function a bit, but yeah, it’s not really a primary function for most people.
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Ray Jones September 5th, 2009 at 07:20
Oh the good old Digicrystal PVR.
I have the same model.
As soon as you started to hold the remote up I knew what you were going to say.HOWEVER, of all the (newer!) PVR’s I have since played with, this has still been the most intuitive one to use!!!!
Where do they they get these clowns from that design the user interfaces today????A mate of mine had a Supernet version, which actually had a proper remote for the recording functions.
It died, got another of the “same” model, and BINGO, it now used the digicrystal method to access the PVR functions!!!!
The clincher though was the remote for the old PVR actually works with the new recorder!!!
I still want to pry this remote from his hands to see if it may work with the Digicrystal, and if so determine the IR codes used to directly access the PVR functions!!As for mobile phones, I grabbed my old Nokia 5110 the other day and was stunned how quick and easy it was to use. LARGE positive action buttons, good clear LCD display for sunshine conditions.
Where did they all go wrong?Oh and on the subject of dead PVR’s, I’ve already resurrected mine twice – good old dead electros in the PSU.
Told my mate above to check his caps out – wadda you know – his old PVR also burst back into life – this was after his replacement one also went belly up with the same problem.
It doesn’t stop their either – new electros have fixed many a piece of consumer gear in my household.
Now that where a lot of real dodgy internal design lives, filling up landfill in 99% of cases.-
High ESR electros are on my list to talk about. My Digicrystal had them too!
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Since everyone is commenting on the bad, here’s a good one: The Casio G-shock I have emits a slightly higher tone when it hits the time screen (after cycling through chrono, alarm etc.) which is something so simple, costs nothing but is useful as hell. The bad: it devotes 1/5 of the display to where the time signal comes from (updates time automatically from atomic clock). 1. why the hell would anyone what to know such a thing especially since it is present in all the menus and 2. There are only 5 different places! US, UK, Germany, and 2 in Japan, I think it is obvious to anyone with half a brain a cursory knowledge of geography…
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My phone has a really bad design flaw.
If the battery is dead and you plug in the charger, the display turns on to tell you it’s charging.
Then there’s a button you can press to turn the phone on, when you press that button the phone doesn’t respond for about 5 seconds, then it turns on and you can enter your pincode, or use the same button to dial the emergency number.
Now if you’re not familiar with how the phone works, you plug in the charger, the display turns on, you press the button to turn on the phone, you wait a couple seconds then think “hey it doesn’t do anything, maybe I didn’t press the button right”, so you press the button again.
Then when it finally goes to the screen where you can enter your pincode, it remembered the second button press and it starts dialing the emergency number!
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anonymous September 9th, 2009 at 09:14
That’s why I prefer these products with the fruit on it. Ever looked on their laptops? Just one LED, that is on in standby mode. That’s perfect design.
I absolutely hate my cheap USB hub, having this eye-burning bright blue LED in it. You can use these things as runway lightning system.
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Dave,
You’re not the only one who notices these things. I have a “full size” (as big as the old 70’s and 80’s VCRs) media PC case that’s actually used as a media PC under my TV. The power button has a ring around it with a BLINDINGLY bright blue LED. It’s really annoying to try an watch TV with it on. So I did the sensible thing and unplugged the light from the MLB.
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threepointone September 11th, 2009 at 17:38
I TOTALLY agree with the blue light thing. I’ve replaced my (useful) blue indicator lights on my computer with green ones and a fairly large resistor to keep the brightness levels at something reasonable.
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signal7 September 13th, 2009 at 00:30
Electronics devices that have an LED to tell me it’s in standby mode. Really. An LED to tell me it’s *OFF*! Think of the irony.
Modern calculators. Look at a Casio FX-8000G and then look at the modern replacement. The contrast of the LCD is significantly worse and they removed a lot of buttons from the calculator so that you now have to navigate menu hell just to do the same thing. In this case newer is NOT better.
Dish Network DVR’s that insist on turning off at least once per week even after you’ve disabled the auto-off timer. I guess they never considered that you might have a TiVO that works better and that you might just want to use the d*mn thing as a dual tuner converter box.
Blue LED solution: White or black gaffer’s tape. White is translucent enough that you can still tell that the LED is on. Black is totally opaque.
Great post, Dave. The comments here are pure gold.
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Fluke force you to think about your meter range every time you turn on the meter. Fluke run statistics on causes of meter failure and I’ll bet they chose this to reduce incidence of blown meters.
Also, the switch starts with harder to damage ranges and works around to more sensitive functions, in case someone has the meter already connected to a circuit when they turn it on.
Its stressful running all the gadgest in the home – tuning the TV or VCR, maintaining PCs. Its simpler to leave stuff off!
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Lionel October 15th, 2009 at 01:38
Hi Dave. You know me as Bob Larter from Usenet. I love your blog – it’s the best thing I’ve seen come out of the electronics newsgroups in years – keep up the good work! ;^)
As for crappy product design, I could rant for hours.
There’s the Phillips stereo that defaults to CD on startup, & won’t let you switch inputs until it’s read the index track on the CD (or has has failed to find a CD, which is even slower).
Or the whiz-bang NatPan microwave that selects the grill heat settings from hottest to coldest, which is the opposite to every other function.
Then there’s the other microwave that, when powered up, goes into set-time mode, but doesn’t say so, so you have to fake it out by hitting buttons randomly before it’ll let you cook something.
Man, I could go on forever about this stuff. -
Hi Dave
How about the TI-36x Solar calculator. This low end scientific calculator has the pie function key as a third function operation when it should have been a major key!!
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László Monda September 1st, 2009 at 12:04