Poorly designed things that make using them difficult?

[Whatisthisfuckery]

Spice jars, who in hell has designed the dimensions of spice jars? What measurement of spices does one usually find in a recipe? Teaspoons. What can you not quite fit in a spice jar? A fucking teaspoon. Whose bloody bright idea was it to design a jar that makes it hard to dispense the most common measurement of the ingredient contained within?

Ahh, that’s better, I needed that rant.

Go on, rant away. What poorly designed thing makes you angry inside?

[quote 5Pac]@mintymable What are the giveaways that they have been designed by men as opposed to women? I'm just interested in this sort of thing.

I have stayed in hundreds of hotels over the years and I also mainly encounter travel packs with men for men in mind.

Shower curtains - Not fit for purpose at all. Would rather pay a little extra and have a screen.[/quote]
I'm not @mintymabel but toilets off-centred to allow for a sanpro bin on one side is one sign. I've been making sure that behind the scenes things are designed to be located at a lower level so that shorter people can see them easily

[quote whatnow41]@DearTeddyRobinson re the Dyson handheld. I'm disabled so can't use a full size vacuum but also can't hold my finger on the button for long. Also can't pump my own petrol. www.fuelgrip.com

This fits the Dyson perfectly and is cheap as anything, got my MIL one of these for her handheld Dyson too. [/quote]
@whatnow41 that is a great idea! Thank you. Such annoying and badly thought out design, clearly by someone who has no intention of doing the actual bloody hoovering

Placemarking as I wrote a long post and then it vanished! So mnhq are not immune from this thread

I couldn't possibly comment on MN policy, but websites that force you to object individually to cookies from every single vendor - like you're going to look in detail into each one and decide to object to companies 1, 4, 6, 9 & 10 that you've never heard of tracking you, but happily allow companies 2, 3, 5, 7 & 8 that you've never heard of tracking you. And then the 'legitimate interest' rubbish - that seems to be designed to gaslight you into agreeing "well, you didn't complain before when we hoodwinked you into letting us track you, so we think you're a jolly bad egg to want to stop us now".

Most infuriating of all is the wording "Your privacy is important to us". Yes, in the exact same way that your handbag is important to a mugger.

Those fold-out bottle holders that they have underneath the trolley in Lidl. Put any more than three bottles in (i.e. what you could easily fit inside the trolley anyway) and they all tumble straight out again and land on your foot. In the meantime, even if you make the wise decision not to bother trying to use them, they serve very well as a constant foot-basher as you're pushing the trolley.

@LemonadeSunshine

The postman propping all deliveries against the outside of the front door....which opens outwards. We're either trapped in the house if the box is large enough or it plops onto the floor and gets immediately wet. There is a perfectly functional made for purpose box for these next to the door.

You could put a note on the door asking that they use the box.

I haven't rtft but immediately thought of toilet cubicles where the loo roll dispenser is on the wall BEHIND the loo. Just why??? Getting in some yoga practice while I'm on the loo is not really a good idea. I've come across this more than once!

Will now read the whole thread and see if this has ever annoyed anyone else

I assume the washer changing time left is because it realised it needed a longer rinse or spin.

I wish my microwave didn't beep five times when finished or if it has to the noise was pleasant.

I haven't rtft but immediately thought of toilet cubicles where the loo roll dispenser is on the wall BEHIND the loo. Just why??? Getting in some yoga practice while I'm on the loo is not really a good idea. I've come across this more than once!

More often than not, it's right next to the auto flush sensor too, so not only do you have to contort yourself to find the bog roll, you also get the privilege of a lovely fizzy-wet bottom in the process.

@EveningOverRooftops I did try to tug it with pliers but no luck, it may need a more loving touch

Ministry of crap and greedy design examples in this house

Shampoo manufacturers who deliberately design their bottles so you cannot easily stand them upside down, to get the product out of. I changed shampoo after 15 years when the manufacturer made the top curved and therefore wouldn’t stand up, upside down in the shower. Their greed, they lose my custom.

Wrapping bananas in sealed plastic even before the pandemic

Manufacturers who refuse to clearly show what plastic recycle number is on a product. Out council are very strict and only take numbers 1,2 and 5, rejecting your entire bin and or possible fine if you get it wrong. A 5 and an illegal 3 look surprisingly similar when embossed in font size 3 in one colour plastic.

Pill manufacturers of specialist drugs for people who have mechanical failure and they put the pills in packaging that would bemuse and perplex an ambidextrous and determined 7 year old. DH has 9 pills a day and 6 of these I have to cut out/ wrangle out of the aluminium blister packs and organise into his pill box. This is fine for DH because I just sit there watching TV and it takes an hour to organise his drugs for two weeks, what about the people who don’t have help?. I use gardening scissors to navigate the packaging around the pills or risk breaking my thumbs to extricate each pill. Really poor design. Some bright spark sat at their desk designing the packaging and thought, poor buggers they have neurological, mechanical failure, I know make it part of a Krypton factor test to get at their drugs, will also cost less in physiotherapy sessions. The way they are packaged would not stop a child, just put them in a pill bottle please!

And can we have a toothpaste tube which does not develop crustiness around the cap? Would it be too hard to put it in a jar?

Dishwasher tablets do not need to be individually wrapped, they are not little presents, they are a cleaning aid .....

I know it’s already been said, but stop putting stickers on my fruit, I know what a bloody Apple/ banana/ orange/ mango/ feijoa looks like and can read the variety in the shop.

And breathe.....

@SunshineCake

We have a typed note on our door asking for parcels to be left in the porch - they still prop them against the door as per @LemonadeSunshine above. And they prefer to hammer on the porch windows rather than pushing the fully functioning doorbell. Not a design flaw, more a human idiocy thing.

@TinyGringotts- whaaaat?!.. You might have changed my life with this tip
But seriously, an ‘open here’ sign would be nice, for idiots like me.

Thinking about it I also struggle with opening ready made sandwich packs so there’s a theme here. And I use a carving knife for opening letters, to my exh’s great amusement.

a Henry hoover: poor stability and spends most of time in operation on its side.

It's been very cathartic reading this thread. Absolute yes to bacon packets not resealing (yes I could use cling film, buy a box etc but if they SAY it's resealable it bloody should be!)
Yes also to washing baskets not fitting under machine doors. How hard to think about this??

My coffee machine is generally good and makes great coffee BUT it's smaller than I thought and can only fit an espresso sized cup under the spouts. A standard mug is just a little too big to get under where the coffee comes out. Fine if I want an espresso but if I want a bigger coffee, I have to make it in a smaller cup then pour into a bigger cup. Tiny issue but it annoys me when I haven't had my caffeine to turn me back into a reasonable person.

All those saying about opaque skincare - some brands you can stand the bottles over the light on your phone to see what's left inside. I like Tropic as they don't have a pump, they have a "rising platform" inside cleanser/moisturiser etc that pushes all the product up to the top so there's no wasted product. And you can unscrew the lid to scrape the tiny last bit out if you want but it's barely one days worth if anything. No I don't work for them, I just like it!

People buy your spices in packets from the Asian shops and decant into jam jars or or a masala dabba and get a spice spoon.

I don't need large packs of spices, the Sainsburys jars are the right size and unless you use a lot of spices they will just sit around taking up space and losing their colour. The jars also fit on my little shelf and look nice.

For those of you whose wipes are drying out - store the packet upside down.

Oh if we're doing technology: StupidSearch boxes.

I spend a lot of time searching databases of historic records: military records, medical records, Birth/Marriage/Death records, school records.

Perfectly good search functions, with separate boxes for forename and surname, have been replaced by a single box which returns eleventy million results with only one syllable in common with the search term.

The CWGC one is a particular offender. God forbid you should be looking for a John Donaldson. You will be trawling through Donald Johnsons, Josephs, Jameses... CWGC results effectively cannot be ordered by date or unit any more, because you have to use the ordering option on alphabetising to concentrate the surname you actually want amid the 30 pages of results.

Also, I know the surname I'm searching for can be spelt White or Whyte. That's OK. I can do two separate searches: at least I'll only have 15 results to click through to check, not 500.

The London Gazette is now completely unuseable. And again, god for-blooming-bid you should be looking for a company name like Marks and Spencer: there is no way on this planet you can persuade it not to read the "and" as a logic operator and return every single page with a Spencer and a Mark.

The irony of the StupidSearch boxes is they replace separate surname/forename/place/date boxes because those are supposedly "too hard" for poor widdle researchers (how they imagine researchers too stupid to understand a surname box will understand any documents found is a mystery); but in fact the researcher has to be vastly more knowledgeable and remember each different site's tricks to wheedle the StupidSearch box into producing halfway decent results.

AND and "string" are typical tricks, but some then use * and some % for wildcards. Some always assume the search term is merely the front of a string (thanks guys, I was actually looking for three folk named Hill, Green and Johns, so 10,000 replies about hills, bowling greens and Johnsons isn't really helping. Also, these were surnames which should be in a key field for this record: I didn't sodding ask you for random occurrences somewhere in the text body).

And breathe.

Honestly, there's a reason Ancestry hasn't gone the StupidSearch route: it's a pay service with subs as short as monthly, so it lives or dies by delivering appropriate results to researchers.

If you have records with key fields, let me sodding search by them!

Most infuriating of all is the wording "Your privacy is important to us". Yes, in the exact same way that your handbag is important to a mugger.

THIS!

Especially the "legitimate interest".

What, so all the other usages you've just made me individually opt out were not a legitimate interest, even by tech companies' wild stretch of the meaning?

And until now you were cheerfully selling me to these folks? Mm-hm.

I just looked at Tru Earth. I will continue with washing powder I think, not all loads require the same amount of detergent and I can bash the box to remove the last dregs and then recycle it.

I do have a problem with some of the plastic bottles of detergent/conditioner/hard water liquid but have stopped using conditioner because of the crap that is in it, and Surf and Waitrose liquid is in decent bottles at the moment although am phasing out the use of liquid in favour of powder - because of the machine and the packaging. Liquid is better for hand washing though.

I had a ham storage box. I then had sweaty, smelly ham so unless it will be used up almost immediately it doesn't seem like a good idea. If it will be used immediately, there's no point anyway.

Flour storage sistemaplastics.com/products/bake-it/2.4l-bakery-with-cup

Also in a larger size, with the cup, and other sizes without the cup.

Whenever someone talks about dripping teapots, all I hear is the wonderful Kenneth Williams shrieking 'I want a teapot wot don't dribble!'
on Jackanory. Yes, I am that old.

LemonadeSunshine

The postman propping all deliveries against the outside of the front door....which opens outwards. We're either trapped in the house if the box is large enough or it plops onto the floor and gets immediately wet.
There is a perfectly functional made for purpose box for these next to the door.

You could put a note on the door asking that they use the box.*

Our post person knows where our post is to go, and there is a note somewhere as all the stand in post people know. Some time ago I recall seeing something where you could advise the sorting office of your 'safe place'.

@toria658

Mobile phones. I use my phone as erm a phone, with text messaging ( should I need to email, browse the internet etc I have a laptop, iPad designed for that explicit use!) I have small hands, ginormous cell phones make it hard for me to use, carry and takes up too much space in my bag. I loved my iphone5, fitted in my hand etc... can we have phones that are not mini iPads oh no, they have to be ginormous and bulky. Samsung aren’t much better either ....

This is why I recently got the iPhone 12 Mini - it's the size of the iPhone 5!

@SplendidSuns1000

I've become that twat that has giant jars and bottles in my laundry room containing pods, powder and other washing products because my twig fingers can't open any of the child-proof tubs!

I can't tell whether I love or loathe the soy sauce bottles that don't let it out drop by drop. The spout bottles are great for measuring high quantities but I end up getting half a cup poured on my sushi??

I have a coffee bean grinder that is entirely not safe to be washed. It's designed for coffee, herbs and other small things to be ground so it's not just reserved for coffee. Even when wiping it out (around the non-detachable blades) there's always a hint of basil in my cappuccino.

Liquid foundation that you can never scrape everything out of (even with cosmetic spatulas) and the useless lids on loose powder that let 0 product out.

Hint of Basil

Buy a cheap hand grinder for the herbs 🌿