MYSTERIOUS: Bad design things | Mind Blowing Facts

Design is meant to make life easier, but anyone who has wrestled with a confusing shower dial in a hotel or had a minor breakdown trying to follow the instructions for assembling furniture knows that it doesn’t always work out that way.

There is one silver lining, though: when a product frustrates you, it’s rarely your fault. More often than not, the blame sits squarely with the person who designed it.

Take doors, for example. Have you ever confidently pushed a door, only to find it needed to be pulled? This is actually one of the most well-known examples of bad design, and it even has a name.

It’s called a “Norman Door,” after Don Norman, who wrote The Design of Everyday Things and spent a great deal of it asking why so many everyday objects feel harder to use than they should.

His point was that design should communicate with you almost without you noticing, through shapes and surfaces that tell you what to do with them before you even think about it. When that fails, the door wins.

The reason we get so stumped by something as common as a push and pull door is precisely because of those signals, ones we respond to without even consciously realizing it.

When we see a vertical bar or handle on a door, we naturally reach out and grab it, and that grabbing motion makes us want to pull. But if the door has a flat surface instead, we instinctively know to push it.

An ideal door, assuming it doesn’t swing both ways, will have a vertical bar on the side you need to pull and a flat panel on the side you need to push. When designers ignore that logic, or mix the two up, they have essentially set a small trap for everyone who walks through.

This kind of invisible communication between an object and its user is at the core of what Norman was writing about.

He built his thinking around two principles: discoverability, which is about whether something makes clear what it can do, and feedback, which is whether it confirms you're using it correctly.

When a designer gets both right, a product feels effortless. When they get it wrong, you end up with things that require guesswork or an unnecessarily complicated manual.

This is why the concept of human-centered design puts so much emphasis on empathy—on genuinely imagining what it feels like to use something you’ve built, rather than assuming it’s intuitive just because it was intuitive to you.

The most reliable way to test that is to put the product in front of real people. Someone who designed something already understands it completely, which makes them a pretty poor judge of how obvious it is. Watching a stranger use something for the very first time will tell you more than months of internal review ever could.

Even that has its limits, though. When Coca-Cola reformulated its drink in 1985, the decision was backed by extensive research that consistently showed people preferred the new taste over the original and over Pepsi. The launch was still a catastrophe.

It didn’t matter that the new version may have technically tasted better in a blind test—what people knew was that it tasted different from the Coke they had grown up with and loved, and that was enough for the public to turn on it completely. Within three months, the company brought the original back.

Scott Berkun, a bestselling author and speaker on innovation and creativity, argues that design failure is actually a good thing, because without it we simply wouldn’t know what good design looked like.

He used to keep a notebook where he’d write down every idea that came to him, and most of them were, by his own admission, just plain unworkable. But that wasn’t really the point.

Each bad idea taught him something about the problem he was trying to solve that he hadn’t thought about before, and each new attempt was a little more informed than the last. As he puts it, out of every five or six ideas, he’d find one or two that might actually be worth pursuing.

All that’s to say that while we are certainly having a great time laughing at these designs and wondering how on earth they ever made it out into the world, they are not entirely without purpose. 

Each one is a record of what doesn’t work, and sometimes knowing that is just as valuable as knowing what does. They push designers, and really anyone who makes anything, to think differently and do better the next time around. 

Call it failure if you want, but maybe it’s more accurate to just call it experience.