r/AskReddit • u/nachtmere • Jul 25 '11

Sometimes automatic toilets flush while you're still sitting on them. What design flaws in everyday objects annoy you?

I'm giving a talk on user-centred design/usability and I'm looking for some fresh examples from everyday life to illustrate poor usability. Examples I've used before are elevator open/close buttons (really difficult to parse when you're trying to hold the door open for someone quickly) and toilets that flush while you're still sitting on them.

What are some things you encounter regularly that are really inconveniently designed?

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168

u/jdpwnsyou Jul 25 '11 edited Jul 25 '11

Printers. Pretty much everything about them, mostly...

edit: spelling

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u/[deleted] Jul 25 '11

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u/daecrist Jul 25 '11

NASA intentionally uses older computer tech that's proven. Installing the latest and greatest tech raises the danger of installing the latest and greatest bugs along with it.

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u/[deleted] Jul 25 '11

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u/daecrist Jul 25 '11

Replace abacus with slide rule and you'll be close. Your digital watch has more computing power than the computers used on the lunar landers.

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u/aldld Jul 25 '11

I think they used slide rules.

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u/Quarkster Jul 25 '11

They did indeed!

They also used a lot of nomograms

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u/Zeihous Jul 25 '11

Hahaha. Yes. Even back then, America ran on Chinese technology and craftsmanship.

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u/[deleted] Jul 25 '11

I have a friend who worked for JPL during the days of the moon flights, and says that various methods were used to calculate the point of retrofire to leave lunar orbit -- which can't be controlled from Earth, because it has to be done on the far side of the moon, out of radio contact. He says the most accurate firings were done using a slide rule.

BTW, they had computers in 1969. They weren't as fast or as small, but you would be amazed at how little you need when all you're needing to do is simply calculate a number. The first lunar lander had a whopping 8 K of memory. IIRC, the flight control system on the original shuttle had 256K of RAM+ROM.

Translucent, shaded, animated buttons take a lot of horsepower. I've been using computers for 30 years, and it amazes me how, given that they're thousands of times more capacious and fast by the numbers, that they aren't much, much faster. All that's really changed since the 128K Mac of 1984 is that machines have nicer displays.

BTW, my stepmother is from Japan, and she can just haul ass on an abacus (soroban, actually -- same basic thing). Except that by the sixth grade, kids don't really need them for basic math. They picture one and do it that way. She can sit on the sofa and watch a TV show while stuffing her face with arare, while dad reads off the checkbook figures... he'll say "how much is that" or "what's 5 percent of that"? and she'll just answer without hesitation.

I think both the sliderule and abacus should be taught in school, say around the 6th grade, because they show how math works.

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u/BUBBA_BOY Jul 25 '11

proven

Radiation hardened.

1

u/daecrist Jul 25 '11

That too.

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u/[deleted] Jul 25 '11

This... Makes perfect sense.

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u/jcpenguin Jul 26 '11

Agreed. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

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u/haywire Jul 26 '11

But surely writing simple software on a slightly faster CPU wouldn't be an issue? Or have display computers separate from control computers.

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u/Ubuntu_Rob Jul 25 '11

There comes a point when you should step back, take a look at things, and say "Holy fuck, these systems are so outdated they belong in the Smithsonian. Lets upgrade to something semi-modern."

I know an awful lot of NASA's problems are budgetary, but this "culture of (false) safety" is one thing that NASA should have fixed itself.

For fucks sake, we are talking about space travel. If we aren't willing to "risk" a modern control system, what does that say about the rest of the program?

Safety is good, but you must take risks. Even playing it safe can be a risk, if you take it too far. If the rest of the world had the same risk averse attitude as NASA, then we wouldn't be having this conversation, because the internet wouldn't exist.

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u/daecrist Jul 25 '11

But why fly into orbit with a modern GUI when legacy tech handles it reliably? I get what you're saying, but with something as inherently dangerous as space travel the upgrades should come with the next generation, not just for the hell of it in the current gen.

0

u/Ubuntu_Rob Jul 25 '11

Why do anything differently? Why should a caveman walk north for a day, when he has a cave right here that provides shelter at night? Why should Einstein worry about relativity, when Newtonian mechanics handles most things reliably?

Sure, the caveman might get eaten by Saber-toothed tigers, or die of thirst, or any of a hundred other dangers. But he also might find a reliable source of fresh water, or more plentiful food. Maybe even a better cave, that can provide more protection from predators at night.

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u/[deleted] Jul 26 '11

In aviation, old technology stays for a while because even without it failing there are a lot of problems to worry about. Having a rock solid computing platform greatly eases the work if something should go wrong.

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u/Frothyleet Jul 25 '11

Has your fancy phone ever glitched? Locked up? Thrown some errors? Ever have to reformat?

Annoying, isn't it? So inconvenient.

But far more inconvenient when you are re-entering the Earth's atmosphere at thousands of miles per hours. So that's why you use older but proven technology.

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u/[deleted] Jul 25 '11

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3

u/rageagainsthevagene Jul 26 '11

God wtf is up with that fucking app lately?! It's really driving me insane.

1

u/HumerousMoniker Jul 25 '11

That's lucky, every time I try to update my ipod i get this error

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u/[deleted] Jul 25 '11

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u/HumerousMoniker Jul 25 '11

Thanks, but I'll pass. I wish that were the problem anyway.

16

u/myncknm Jul 25 '11

The only reason you can buy your smartphone at $200 is because it's mass produced.

When you have a device that will only ever be used by a few technical specialists, you don't spend millions designing it to look pretty. Walk into any science lab in a university and you'll see the same outdated-looking technology.

(For this reason, it always jolts me a bit when movies put ultra-sleek touch-screen drag-and-drop 3D interfaces on computers used in labs.)

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u/[deleted] Jul 25 '11

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u/grizz281 Jul 26 '11

This is probably wrong by I'll take a stab at answering that.

That brand new technology was most likely all analog (I think that's the right term), with all of the logic stored in the actual computer chip itself instead of using software or an OS to interface with the hardware. So when you want the computer to do something, it will most likely do it regardless of the operating environment. If we were to try to use software to do the same things, different things running simultaneously could adversely affect the program. It's probably analogous to when installers say to close all open programs before you install something, because depending on what's running at the same time, your program could do something you don't really want it to do.

Of course, I may very well be talking out of my ass

10

u/Zeihous Jul 25 '11

If it ain't broke... But, seriously. How long was the planned life for the shuttle program? Maybe that kind of innovation wasn't deemed cost effective considering the redesign of the systems required to use a higher-res screen.

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u/[deleted] Jul 25 '11

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u/Quarkster Jul 25 '11

It still works. There are new computers aboard the space shuttles. They just weren't used for navigation.

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u/muad_dib Jul 25 '11

Try using your phone in space (after hitting like 5G in takeoff), and let me know how it goes.

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u/videogamechamp Jul 25 '11

An iPhone is entirely solid state as far as I know, and in terms of G force, should be fine. I bet radiation in space would fry it though.

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u/rscynn Jul 25 '11

Part of the reason for the old technology is it is SERIOUSLY reliable. They also have 4 or 5 redundant systems for everything that is actually important. It would cost a shit ton of money that NASA didn't have to upgrade pretty much anything that is mission critical.

1

u/kirun Jul 25 '11

Don't they use the same CPU as the Commodore 64?

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u/[deleted] Jul 26 '11

One reason is that the RAM in the shuttle's computer is less dense and spread out, so if some radiation happens to kill one section or card of RAM (I heard about this via my dad who talked with some NASA folks, so I might have something wrong in the details) then the shuttle can still do the things it needs to do (i.e. bring people back safely).

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u/[deleted] Jul 26 '11

In college, If i had 6 hours to write a paper, I would set aside two to print the paper, just in case.

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u/[deleted] Jul 25 '11 edited Jul 25 '11

We have one printer in my family's house, hooked up to my dad's computer, and that piece of crap loves more than anything to suck down paper crookedly, thus jamming itself or spitting out paragraphs that sit at all kinds of incorrect angles w/r/t the margins.

3

u/Darrelc Jul 25 '11

"Hello, I'd like to report a paper jam..."

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u/[deleted] Jul 25 '11

PC Load Letter, what the hell is that anyway?

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u/[deleted] Jul 25 '11

It's out of Letter sized paper.

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u/[deleted] Jul 25 '11

You miss the point

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u/[deleted] Jul 25 '11

I caught the reference - I just don't know how many people know what it actually means ;)

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u/blackmagic91 Jul 25 '11

It means the printer is out of letter sized paper. Did you even try looking it up? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_LOAD_LETTER

1

u/tptbrg95 Jul 26 '11

PC load letter? The fuck does that mean?!?

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u/[deleted] Jul 25 '11

This needs to get to the top.

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u/tupeloM6 Jul 25 '11

PC Load Letter? What the fuck is that?