Are there any common household items or products that you think are designed incredibly poorly?
Are there any common household items or products that you think are designed incredibly poorly?
For example, I'm incredibly confused about how you're supposedly to measure liquid laundry detergent with the cap. At least the kind that I have sits on it's side, so if you measure it with the cap it just leaks everywhere and makes a mess.
Or at my parents house they have a bag of captain crunch berries that has a new design, where instead of zipping along the top of the bag like normal, it has a zipper in the front slightly beneath the top. That way when you poor it you can't see what you're doing cuz the bag is in the way. Like what the heck who's idea was that?
I have this drive if you look at the image you can see that the rear panel has a little semi circular nib of plastic at the bottom. It serves no purpose, but what it does do is make it nearly impossible to plug the DC connector in. You can't quite tell from the image but it's perfectly placed so that you can't fit the requisite number of fingers needed to securely hold the plug and push it in to the cavity where the inputs of the panel are located. It actively encourages the otherwise pretty unlikely scenario of making only partial or near contact with the connector and not quite properly plugging it in. A dangerous possibility from a safety perspective but also a great way to lose a bunch of data by having it lose power or short out during operation. It's one of the most exquisitely designed inconveniences hell's engineering department could have possibly developed.
I have a truck where the oil drain plug is directly over the axle. I have to strap an offset funnel under the drain to get it to not splash all over the fuck, and of course, it's not easy to get that stay put so inevitably I have oil everywhere. Same truck has the oil filter tucked up where I need a special oil filter wrench with a ratchet and extensions to remove it, and when you pull the filter out, you have to tip it so it spills the oil inside everywhere.
I had an idea a long time ago of a website where you can crowdfund a private investigator to find engineers that do shit like this, and a crew to go over to their house and beat them halfway to death.
Alec from Technology Connections is known for his extensive rants about household appliances: https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections
As for me, I'm just trying to avoid things in general, and things I don't enjoy in particular. Perhaps the only things that I find annoying at my home are:
- An awful flow-through gas water heater, which requires me to wait for like a minute before water gets up to temperature every time I need hot water (I'd go with an electric one myself, but unfortunately I'm a renter for now). It's also a poor design because it's going to fuck over humanity in a couple decades via climate change.
- Packaging on almost all processed food. I don't need everything I buy to be in a plastic bag. It's an incredibly poor design because it is almost always non-recyleable, either because it has a thin foil layer or it's a mix of plastics or both, filling the landfills forever and contaminating everything with microplastics.
- Poor window frame design, combined with inevitable building settling, has resulted in a cracked window twice within the last year.
I have many more gripes about things, some of the most prominent:
- Most modern smartphones just suck. Gimme back the headphone jack, an SD card slot, and a back that I can open with my fingernails! (thankfully my current phone has all of those despite being only a couple years old and very cheap)
- Generally everything that has a battery which I can't replace
- Bluetooth headphones without a headphone jack or at least audio-over-USB are an awful design, it would cost the manufacturer like a dollar do add that functionality that can come in really handy and yet they don't
- Fuck clothes without pockets!
- Cheap plastic crap from wish.com or similar that's designed to fail after one use, it just shouldn't exist. I hope CPC bans this shit soon. (although I find it fun to pull out broken christmas lights from recycling, fix them and then get free christmas lights for every New Year's)
- "Teflon" or similar frying pans. Just get a cast iron one. Lasts forever, doesn't poison you, also allegedly enriches your food with iron
There are many, but my current bugbear is the wireless Apple mouse. It has a built in rechargeable battery and and a tiny little port for you to plug the recharging cable in. The port is mounted on the bottom of the mouse rendering it useless while it's being charged. I guess it's to make it look nicer but it's so stupid.
US can openers. In other countries, they cut the sides of the can not the top, so the lid has no chance of falling in while dulling the edges. It also allows them to be much smaller and easier to use.
cups, glasses, bowls, anything that doesn't have a spout and makes a mess every time you transfer liquids
Every time I spill something I'm reminded how much better lab glassware is (beakers etc)
I'm going to go with that horrendous, non-absorbent, 1/8th ply toilet paper that gets stocked in public and office bathrooms.
I'm on Team Bidet now, so it doesn't bother me as much as it once did... but the stuff should not exist.
I'm guessing that one day, the people who buy the stuff will figure out that it they're not winning if it costs one-third the price of normal TP when everyone has to use ten times more of it, but who knows when that day will happen. Because it hasn't happened yet.
Any mug that has a really hemispherical, smooth handle. You put a hot beverage in there, and the weight is enough to make your fingers slide down the handle, and then you burn yourself on the main body of the mug unless you really squeeze.
Any faucet that just barely sticks out over the sink, so you have to touch the back of the sink to wash your hands (british sinks are even worse, though).
Humidifiers.
It's just a pool of water with a little nebulizer and a fan to blow the mist out a chimney.
Trouble is, they're all made by the fucking plague demon Nurgle with the sole purpose of aerosolizing mold and bacteria by having the tiniest nooks and crannies than cannot be reached to be physically cleaned.
And before I get the "you gotta clean it with vinegar every week" comment, two points:
- You don't soak your hands in soap and rinse them off and call them clean. You gotta scrub them.
- Am I supposed to fill a 5 gallon bucket with vinegar to soak the whole water tank every week? Because the chimney goes right through that bitch.
For example, I'm incredibly confused about how you're supposedly to measure liquid laundry detergent with the cap. At least the kind that I have sits on it's side, so if you measure it with the cap it just leaks everywhere and makes a mess.
After pouring the detergent into the appropriate receptacle, toss the cap in with your laundry to be washed like everything else. No mess.
Some toilets have a perfectly round bowl so they don't stick out as far and take up less bathroom floor space - and they work fine, but only in bathrooms that anticipate the vast majority of its occupants to be equipped with a vagina. For those of us rocking a penis, those fucking toilets are horrible - sitting on that damn thing requires you to contort your junk around like some sausage-Houdini as you're sitting, so that you can guide it through the remaining 2 square inches of open space not occupied by your legs or ass. Then when you're actually seated, you still have to sit there and awkwardly hold the thing so it stays pointed straight down.
Fuck up any part of that, and the tip of your dick hits the seat or the inside of the bowl.
...and they must be like $3 cheaper than an oval toilet or something, cuz 99% of US apartments seem to be equipped with the round, vagina-only toilets.
Oval bowls are the way. No matter what's in your pants, it gets the job done without the significantly increased biohazard risk.
I guess in fairness, the problem isn't with their design, it's with the people who purchase the toilets treating them as sex-neutral when no the fuck they aren't!
I just replaced my windshield wipers last night and it was a nightmare. The wipers I got are supposed to be universal, which means the little plastic bit that connects to the wiper arms has a bunch of little sub parts that you're supposed to remove based on what wiper arm connection your car uses. Well, considering I'm not well versed in modern wiper arm connection standards, and I'm also stubborn and don't think you should need to dig out your car manual just to change your fucking wipers, coupled with the fact that the instructions that came with the wipers are just 6 wordless diagrams vaguely showing you what bits to remove based on which esoteric wiper style your car uses, I struggled with those sons of bitches for like 20 minutes in below freezing weather.
Reusable water bottles, especially their lids. They build up microorganisms faster than a petri dish and the more complex the bottles are, the worse it is.
Worst offender are the ones with integrated straws. Sure, they look nice and are a good idea, but cleaning them thoroughly is a nightmare. Also, I don't know how people tolerate the ones with exposed straws or mouthpieces. Isn't that incredibly unsanitary?
More generally, why doesn't anyone except for Nalgene make reusable bottles without rubber gaskets? Gaskets get stinky, then you have to peel them out, scrub like mad, and then awkwardly stretch them back in. I've been looking for a metal water bottle without a gasket for ages. They literally just need to shove the Nalgene-type screw-on top into a metal body.
Bonus points if someone designs a gasket-less bottle that opens in the middle so I don't have to fiddle with a bottle brush every time I wash it.
In general, I wish more things would have a common design that manufacturers get to reuse and incrementally improve upon. Take, for example, plastic chairs and office chairs. There's probably a million variations in existence and someone had to model, prototype, and make tooling for each and every one of them. Sure, there's varying price points, design languages, and use cases. But even for the same price point there's at least several thousand chairs with the same overall look and feel. All of that duplicated work and effort, only to make several thousand variations, none of which have a distinct advantage, and each with their own completely solvable problems. Why don't they just pool their efforts and design one example with as few flaws as possible for that overall design and price?
I've always thought that most toilet paper holders are over engineered. You don't need a little springy rod between 2 posts, you just need an L-shaped bar with the short end screwed to the wall and maybe a little knob on the end of the long side to keep the roll from sliding off. And it's not that the spring style is especially difficult to use or prone to failure or anything, it just seems like a no-brainer to me to use a one-piece holder with no moving parts instead of one that has at least 4 parts (the base, 2 halves of the roller, and a spring) I'm seeing more of that style around these days, which I appreciate.
Stove vent hoods that don't actually vent outside are fucking stupid. My over the range microwave basically just takes smoke from my stove and blows it back out over my head almost directly at the smoke detector.
I've frequently run into shelves, mounting brackets, etc. that seem to totally disregard stud spacing. We got one of those fancy Samsung frame TV's a while back, to get it to sit so flush to the wall it has its own special mounting brackets, 2 little plates with sort of a modified keyhole slot that you slot 2 little knobs on the back of the TV into. It's actually not a half bad way to mount a TV, probably one of the easier TV wall mounts I've ever personally used, the tv itself is actually pretty damn lightweight (because they moved all the heavy electronics into a separate box you need to hide somewhere) but still I wanted to make sure my fancy TV wouldn't fall off the wall, so I wanted to mount it to the studs, but of course the spacing of the brackets doesn't allow that option. I was able to bolt one side a stud but I had to get some toggle bolts for the other side. I'm pretty sure the whole TV is well within the rated weight capacity of one of those toggle bolts in drywall, let alone 2 in drywall and 2 in a stud, but still, it feels like a dumb design choice. (It's possible that other sizes or newer models do allow for mounting entirely to studs, the size and model I got didn't)
I helped a friend replace the wax ring on his toilet recently with one of the newer style rubber gaskets, which as it turns out made the toilet sit imperceptibly higher, which meant that the bolts holding it down were no longer quite long enough to screw the nut onto to tighten it down. With a quick trip to ace hardware and a minute perusing my options, I settled on some Danco zero cut bolts, and I definitely think that is a far superior design to the standard bolts that are probably holding down damn-near every toilet you've ever used.
On the subject of toilets, I can't think of any particularly good reason for the tank to be a separate piece from the rest of the throne like on most toilets. The gasket and bolts there just add more places for something to start leaking. It's probably an ease of manufacturing thing, but we have the technology to make one piece toilets now, the two piece style should be obsolete.
Keyboards are the obvious one.
The standard keyboard layout is designed to slow down typing, because typing too fast lead to the arms of a typewriter hitting each other.
And why is one of the most accessible large keys fucking Capslock?
And why is there empty space around the cursor keys, so you have to use WASD as a workaround in games?
I'm not even talking about the menu key, Windows key and Copilot key.The other one are bicycles. An aerodynamic riding position is uncomfortable for most people, so is the saddle, and when you break too hard, you fly head-first into whatever you were trying to avoid. Recumbent bicycles are better in almost every way.
Our president
I always run into the common problems with my plumbus, no further explanations needed i think.
Overtime, our kitchen knives. Knives need to be thin, as thinner knives cut through ingredients more easily. Today's knives are designed instead to be marketed. Something incredibly thick, and sturdy, to make it feel "premium", when all its doing is tiring you out, since using a heavy knife gets exhausting, especially when its so thick it wedges in ingredients.
Vintage European knives are slim, and almost petite, because they knew how to make a good knife, in the same manner japanese knives are ground extremely thin, sometimes thinner than a postcard.
light bulbs that die too often.
those pots and sauce pans that use a screw to connect the handle. the screw head generally places inside the pot and will get to all your food.
chopping boards. plastic chopping boards enhance your meals with microplastic. composite wood enhances your food with bacteria lodged in-between wood pieces. bamboo -- too thin and ends up similar to composite.
Chairs and tables. Why do I have to squeeze my thighs between the chair and the dinner table and then bend down awkwardly when I eat to not splatter all over? Why are chairs so high and tables so low? Just put the table higher so the food is closer to my mouth and why do we even need chairs anyway?
Milk cartons suck now. In the 90s, we could fold and push to open. Why do we need scissors to open them now? Oh and half of them now have a plastic lid in the middle so you can't even pour out the last drops anymore.
The new caps they're putting on plastic bottles are awful. Make it very hard to put back on properly and we've have a few incidents with them looking on but they actually cross threaded and leaked. I just rip them off now.
Also, why is the glue on cereal boxes so damn strong now? I end up tearing the box more often than not these days and that never used to be the case.
Hangers with those hooks on the sides that I guess are meant to slip the collar of the shirts into? They don't really serve as a good use plus they seem to get tangled with other hangers at times and hang securely anyways. I've seen better hangers at work where there is a strip of some rubber compound on the top sides of each hanger, they hold things much better and I feel that's the more better of the design for a hanger.
I’m incredibly confused about how you’re supposedly to measure liquid laundry detergent with the cap.
You just gave me a stupid idea. First measure out the exact volume of detergent you need for one load - eyeballing it I'd guess 20mL (I'm notoriously terrible at eyeballing volume, so, grain of salt) - then get a 20mL syringe and some IV tubing (it's got one-way valves, so when you connect a syringe to it and draw up, it pulls from on side of the line; then when you depress the syringe back down, it goes out the other side). Tie something heavy to the intake side of the line and throw it in the bucket of detergent. Run the other side of the line to just above the detergent receptacle if your machine has one; or near the door for you to just aim it.
Load clothes; pull syringe, push syringe, close the door, run the machine. No detergent dripping all over the place!
...detergent is probably too viscous as-is to go through IV tubing at an acceptable rate, so you'd probably have to dilute it with water first to thin it out, then adjust the amount you pull accordingly.
@bpt11 Soda and beer cans. There's always a little bit left.
Me
Try to find some that are made properly.
