This Should Be Easy

Good design, bad design. It's everywhere, especially on this blog.

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The sink is way too close to the tap, plenty of spillage here as I can attest.

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Why TNT chose to show percentages in one column and shooting in the other for the FG and FT stats is beyond me. Apple's and oranges.

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When reading this, you're trying to figure out whether the games are every other day, and showing June 1st without the day completely throws of anyone reading the schedule.

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This handle can't be used by a left-handed person.

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I don’t think you want to be touching other mixing sticks when taking one out for yourself.

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Video: Jonas Valanciunas vs Lakers (How did he not play in 4Q/OT?)

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A grocery bag that basically begs you to open it by licking your fingers first. Solution: Make one side shorter than the other so separating them to open the bag is easy.

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You can't have barriers such a lids in public washrooms if you want people to put the paper towels in the trash. Nobody wants to come close to touching anything in this setting. A better solution might be a foot-pedal, an open bin, or a vacuum-operated device.

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The new guide by Rogers cable wants to tell us how much time remains on the show we're trying to watch. Nice idea, except the execution lacks a consideration for how human's process information. Displaying "77 minutes left" makes the user perform a minutes-to-hours calculation in their head, because that's the more natural way of thinking about TV time. If that read, "1 hour and 17 minutes left", it would be a lot better because then the user wouldn't have to think, let alone do math when they're likely to be zoned out sitting in front of the TV!

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Can you tell which Aisle # you're in?

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Unless you're adding a really valuable feature that makes the lives of the people using the system very easy, it's never good to deviate from the norm when designing interfaces.

In this case, just ask for the damn password at the same time as the "Login Name".  When you do click on the Where do I enter my password? link, you get to a page which shows you this:

We have changed the way you log in to Online Banking to better safeguard the privacy and security of your personal information. You'll now be prompted for your login name and password on 2 different screens. This will help confirm your identity before you enter your password.

Whatever.

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I found this a little funny.  Canada Post provides parcel tracking capability online, but that hasn't stopped customers from calling the phone lines looking for the "latest" information which somehow didn't make it online.

Annoyed by calls to customer service staff that simply read the information available online, the website added a sentence to the tracker:

Our telephone agents have access to the same information presented here.

I'd probably bold the hell out of that.

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This is a product by a company called Fossil.  It's supposed to make your wallet thinner by getting rid of the the excess material that usually accompanies regular wallets.  It's somewhere between a money clip and a full blown wallet, as on the other side there's a clip for cash as well.

I've inserted thee regular sized cards in the three slots provided, and this normal use of the product has bubbled up the glaring flaw in its design.  The card in the middle is completely inaccessible and shielded by the card in the front!

Ergonomically, it's already quite tedious to remove the top-most card, as you have to pinch the card just right to get out (or slide it out with your thumb, but that's hard to do when you have the card partially blocked), but the design is exponentially bad when it comes to the middle slot.

How would you fix this? To start, cascade the slots, even if it means the overall height of the product is slightly larger.  To make retrieval easier, the cards might be able to be grabbed using their corner only, so perhaps the back leather in the slots should be smaller in fall short of the card corners.  

Sliding the card out with your thumb or grabbing them on each side is the most simplistic (and problematic) way of solving this design problem.  A correct approach would take into account the shape of the card, and even frequency of use for the cards, amongst other things.

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I could never quite tell if this was a perforated edge or not. All I know is that tearing it along that line didn't do anything and only stretched the plastic. Scissors were needed in the end.

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If you ever find yourself in a room with no electrical outlets, but does have a light bulb, and want to utilize the light bulb as an electrical outlet, this is the device for you.

Take the light bulb out, attach this little nifty thing to where the bulb used to be, and now you have room to put a light bulb (the bottom part) and you have a two-hole socket.

If this little gadget stopped right there, it would've done its job.  Unfortunately, it tried to do more than it was supposed to, and added a chain to turn the bulb on and off.  Nice idea, except that the way it's designed results in the chain actually touching the bulb if you put it on!

This costs about $5.