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The pleasures of poor product design

https://www.inconspicuous.info/p/the-pleasures-of-poor-product-design
227NaOH | | 78 | HN
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AriedK | parent | next
This gets quite close to chindogu, the Japanese art of designing objects that kind of serve a very niche purpose, but then without being useful. https://www.tofugu.com/japan/chindogu-japanese-inventions/
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ChrisMarshallNY | parent | next
I’ve always enjoyed the “useless teapot” that Don Norman has on the cover of DOET: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61KtiLw7BtL...
drfloyd51 | parent | next
I believe it is actually called: The masochist’s teapot.

I recommend this book to anyone remotely interested in design. Even today it is fantastic.

ChrisMarshallNY | root | parent
Reading it was a watershed in my life.

I never look at doors, without evaluating their usability, anymore.

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userbinator | parent
If the cap is screwed on and sealed, you should pour it from the side like a bottle of oil: https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/attachments/technical-stuff/1...
bcherry | parent | next
this really reminds me of the "worst volume control" from reddit https://uxdesign.cc/the-worst-volume-control-ui-in-the-world...
userbinator | parent | next
IC: With AI getting bigger and more controversial and so on, have you used AI to create any of these designs?

That is an interesting point to bring up, because this type of "almost but not quite right" is exactly what AI seems to naturally create.

Gigachad | parent
I think the difference is AI images tend to create mush or impossible geometry. The ideas here where a minimal change to the design renders the item entirely unusable takes a fair bit of creativity.
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Noe2097 | parent | next
"what if objects were actually designed for a bad user experience, instead of a good one? she recalled in a 2018 TED talk. That was my ‘eureka’ moment."

Or, she stumbled upon some article or the very Wikipedia page about it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chind%C5%8Dgu

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Gigachad | parent | next
I love that these are all fairly beautiful, stuff you'd really love to have if it wasn't fundamentally unusable.
lelanthran | parent | next
This is a link to the interview. here is a link to the products website: https://www.theuncomfortable.com/#
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Incipient | parent | next
I feel like I've seen some of these designs a VERY long time ago? Is this something old that the person was just interviewed on recently?
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whiteboardr | parent | next
It's missing the Magic Mouse.
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jrmg | parent | next
Now I’m wondering how you could create ‘uncomfortable’ versions of simple command line tools (ls, cat, more etc.) or perhaps shells.

Emacs and/or vi, depending on your inclination, have text editors covered already, of course ;-)

II2II | parent | next
Well, bash offers vi and Emacs as editing modes. We're already covered on that front. Many of the parameters for ls are cryptic, making it awkward to use for anything other than routine tasks without referencing the man page. more is so limited that many people choose to use a program used to concatenation files (cat) as a file viewer. Those who don't want to reach for their mouse to use their terminal's scrollbar buffer will use less, since it does more than more. Don't bother parsing that last sentence with bison, unless you have a yacc to shave.
al_borland | parent | next
Feed all command output through AI to summarize the results instead of actually giving the results.

Results from ls would be a few sentences explaining the types of files in the directory. Add a -l on there and it will give you a general overview of the permissions and size of the files. Ex. “These are rather large files that are primarily, but not exclusively, limited to root.”

Results from cat would give a summary of the file. You’d get the same results, with some degree of randomness from more and less as well.

Using any command with sudo would provide the same type of results, but in all caps.

Trying to pipe commands together would be a slop multiplier.

anonymous344 | parent | next
jus used new ubuntu instead of ifconfig (weird name) it had ip couldnt figure from the help how to get actually show the ip

so linux is already there

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bsjshshsb | parent
Use an agent for all CLI work.
anonymous344 | parent | next
as a designer and innovator, i appriciete this. this gives me ideas really out of box, just to see these. amazing!

i also do this for ui and app logic: go to some Microslop service, they are all like these...sad but true

eszed | parent | next
What's wrong about the glasses? I've been staring at them and trying to figure out why they're unworkable, as opposed to just a quirky pair of specs.
jaden | parent | next
The sharp angle of the bridge would dig into your nose.
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parallel | parent | next
Pointy bit on the bridge of the nose.
starmole | parent | next
the sharp point on the bridge is going to hurt your snout.
anonymous344 | parent
you don't have glasses ever, i guess?
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imp0cat | parent | next
The funny thing is that the toothbrush would actually come in handy for cleaning stuff other than teeth.

For example, the inner water tank of a robotic vacuum.

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keithnz | parent | next
given the title, so may software developers must be living in bliss! /s
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abstractspoon | parent
All seems very contrived. Not what I would call creative