Core77

The excellent essay "A Focus on Use" reminded us about BadDesigns, a website often mentioned in our forums but which we never officially blogged about. BadDesigns was put up by Michael Darnell (a usability engineer at Microsoft) who lists a series of crappy interface designs in a variety of products and environments. Some are things we see every day, from cell phones and the light switches in our homes to speedometers and gas pumps, while others are things Darnell saw on trips overseas, like toilets in Holland and locking umbrella stands in Japan. Each one is photographed and problems are highlighted with arrows when neccessary.

Sadly, the site seems to have stopped receiving updates around '06, but there are still plenty of flaws/suggested solutions in nearly 40 different categories like "Unnatural ordering of control settings," "Things that don't work the way you expect" and "Things that are hard to handle." Darnell, are you still out there, can you hear us? Please fire up some updates! Unless one of you, dear readers, feel like picking up the torch...from its hopelessly unergonomic handle.

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