Design failure: the e-reader

This utterly unnecessary fix has an impressive list of features.

• ‘Paper-like’ magnetized ink display: almost like paper!
• Digital Rights Curtailment. You buy it; we keep it.
• Limited range of titles. Available material subject to the manufacturer’s commercial interests and marketplace demand.
• Poor user interface lacking basic file organisation tools.
• Small display of invariant proportions.
• Unable to display colour images.
• Half or less than half the dot resolution of commercially printed paper.
• Displays 16 levels of grey, the square-root of the greys available on this video display screen.
• Allows days of continuous reading time. After device is recharged for 4 hours, you’re back in business for days more reading.
• Relies on state-of-the-art wireless communications network to function.
• Unavailable where electricity supply unavailable.
• Available intermittently where electricity supply intermittent.
• Lifetime expires as soon as 3G wireless connectivity protocols and hardware become obsolete.
• CAUTION: Fragile. Do not drop, flex, expose to moisture, extreme heat or cold, or place under heavy items. No user serviceable parts inside. Battery non-disposable and costs the same as a soft-cover novel.
• Cost: only ten times the price of a large hardback novel.
• Contents not included in purchase price.

Design failure: mobile phone

Poor user interfaces, both physical and virtual, are part of the package in this modish cellphone.

The physical interface has a number of flaws which flow from both mean-and-tricky and oversimplifying design mentalities.

The device conceals both its power button and its three main menu navigation buttons, then ensures the buttons are physically unpleasant to use. The image below shows the navigation and power buttons on the product. Imagine unpacking this product with the intention to use it as quickly as possible. You have charged the battery and inserted a SIM. You must find the power button. The usual visual cues are red colour and one of the standard international symbols for ‘on’ and ‘off’. In this keypad layout colour has been removed and the power symbol reduced in size to something a little smaller than the letter ‘o’ in this sentence. When you locate the button despite it or its label not being coloured in red but in low-contrast grey on silver, imagine pressing it and experiencing the almost imperceptible travel, lack of physical feedback from distinct edges and tiny size built into the button’s physical design. The central navigation button and alphanumeric keys share these poor tactile qualities.












Though they have been stripped of their expected green and red colour cues, the ‘call’ and ‘hang up’ icons suggest clearly enough what functions the buttons on which they have been printed carry out. Even so, the indistinctly demarcated, flat, open spaces where a simple closed shape raised from its surrounds should be, do not suggest that the handset icon is anything more than a decoration.

The user is expected to know that the unlabelled outer ring of the navigation button conceals a tilting mechanism that has four ‘clickable’ directions. Application menus are accessed with two other well-disguised physical buttons: these are not button-shaped, have none of the coloured trim that appears around all the other keys, have almost invisible backlighting and no printed labels at all, but they do have onscreen labels, ‘Options’ and ‘Back’, as shown in the picture below. This labelling invites confusion in the mind of the user with the functions of the tilting navigation button, which has ‘up’, ‘down’, ‘left’ and ‘right’ directions.




















Note: red arrows not included with phone.

The software interface of this cellphone is a messy mixture of Windows-like file tree metaphor and Web-like hyperlink metaphor. It presents users with non-conventional cues and requires secret knowledge for the use of everyday functions.

Those who read left-to-right and who are familiar with desktop computer GUIs, expect ‘options’ to be on the right-hand side of most menu bars and the ‘back’ navigational arrow on the left, ie, back to where they started reading and/or looking. Click on the Tools menu in the Firefox Web browser to see an example of this convention.

Applications are accessed by using directional presses of the tilting navigation button and pressing icons. To select from application menus requires secret knowledge of the two silver keys and the non-conventional arrangement of their functions discussed above. To send an SMS, the next most likely thing the average user wants to do with a cellphone, you must navigate to a text message module in the cellphone’s software interface. It is there that the user will discover that ‘predictive’ text mode is on by default, and when engaged it uncontrollably and incorrectly predicts the word you are attempting to type on the keypad, by forming the incorrect word before it has been typed. This function is not switchable unless you know its secret button.

The cellphone’s user guide is supplied on a single fold-out paper sheet, which presents large quantities of small print and greyscale images in a 21-cell grid of 100 x 75 mm ‘pages’ – making each page about the size of a playing card. The instructions for turning ‘predictive’ texting on or off appear in the layout below the following picture.











The user guide has been designed with good layout rules in mind and it follows plain-English technical writing conventions, but its effectiveness is defeated by its having been forced into a physical layout that more resembles a magazine flat plan than a finished document.

The development of ‘predictive’ text software is a quick and dirty fix for the inherent design limitations of a telephone dialpad. A dialpad is not by nature broken and does not need a fix unless it is forced to become a device for typing text. The best design solution for a device that is designed to send text messages as well as receive and process numeric input is shown below.

Design failure: chess board

Here is another unnecessary fix of a design with a high degree of functional and aesthetic integrity. Why the designer of this chess set thought the hierarchy of chess pieces, which is fundamental to any chess player’s understanding of the game, should be unnecessarily emphasised by setting each type of piece on a different physical level is unclear to me, unless it was in order to be interesting for about one minute. Not even the classificatory scheme makes sense, as pawns, which are of a value equal to one another, here appear on a different level each.

This chessboard would be supremely awkward to use as the setting for an actual game of chess. Imagine, for example, the difficulty of visualising a bishop’s move of more than one square.

Design virtues: evident structure in a lawnmower

A petrol-engine lawnmower is an ungainly machine which probably needs a complete design rethink. However it is a good example of design that completely refuses façadism. It hides nothing beneath panels or fairings except, for functional and safety reasons, the rotating cutting blades.

Design failure: mean and tricky bed base

The shin-barking bed base has become fashionable – a poor design which in many of its variants lacks even space for storage underneath its exaggeratedly bulky, physically dangerous frame.

Kitsch façadism defined

Kitsch façadism forces an object into a form that has no relation to its use. In the making of this object good ergonomics was the last thing on the designer’s mind.

Designed hyperspace in a mobile phone

Designed hyperspace can be illustrated as shown in the above picture. The blue line represents the plan view of a plastic panel for a small electronic item such as a mobile phone. The red line represents the plan view of the device’s internal electronic components such as printed circuit boards. The space between the red line and the blue line is called ‘designed hyperspace’ because it has no purpose except to deliver the promises of marketing hype surrounding the product. It is also space that, though real and physical, has no place in the product user’s understanding of the product and its uses.

The images below show some of the insides of a Palm Pre, a product which uses façadism to suggest that its shape is ‘organic’. Only designed hyperspace makes it so, although the shapes of its real components are interesting in themselves. I doubt this sort of façadism serves any ergonomic purpose: a packet of cigarettes is as satisfying to hold as an organically shaped piece of moulded plastic, and its paper-based materials are arguably more pleasing to touch.

Design failure: obsession produces a chimaera

The problems here are familiar ones. The item is a chimaera which does three things poorly. The suggested use of the end-pieces of the form as a magazine holder is optimistic. The acute angle of the V-shaped section will cause more than one or two magazines to jam together, interfere with each others’ removal and to flip out onto the floor. The designer’s obsession with bentwood forms wastes storage space and the shelf is too low, positioning books at ankle height. Finally, the seat is too hard and without lumbar support.