Archive for the 'Design Rants' Category

Update: Dell site design folk are actively reading the comments on the original post to evaluate how to better improve the user experience. Neat.

The whole “What the Dell?” design rant received quite a bit more attention than I expected (thanks to an initial link from Daring Fireball and snowballing from there).

Quite a few comments, too. Including comments from Dell employees that spawned a bunch of email communication with them. I have a new found respect for the company.

Aside: Yes, to be perfectly clear, I am an Apple employee. This weblog, however, is completely disconnected from my day job other than that many of my hobbies and my profession overlap. I am speaking entirely for myself here.

Initially, many of the respondents pretty much agreed with my opinion of Dell’s site design. Go read the original post if you want more context.

About 20 comments in, a comment from RichardAtDell shows up:

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I drink coffee. A lot of coffee. While I certainly drink coffee for the caffeine content and will drink Folger’s drip if I have to (shudder), I like good coffee. Fresh roasted. Grind it myself.

In particular, I prefer french press. Leads to an intensely flavored cup of coffee that really highlights the strengths of the roast and bean used.

As a result, I have a french press and bean grinder both at home and at work. I’m not so anal as to have spent hundreds of dollars on the grinder, nor am I so careless as to use one of those whirling choppers of death to pulverize the beans (those are only good for fine grinding spices).

Which has led me to the discovery of two intensely stupid industrial design mistakes.

The first is with the coffee grinder I use at work. A Braun KMM30. Now, I’m not normally known to be the most tidy of people. Yet, my coffee grinding/brewing area — the top of a filing cabinet — is a complete disaster area of grounds.

Why? Click through for the rest of the rant….

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I’m expanding the Design Rants to include crappy software design.

First up? Microsoft Word.

Now, it may come as a surprise that I actually like Word. Or, at least, I did like word way back on my Mac Plus in 1986 or so. And I find Word 2004 to be a tolerable enough word processor once you turn off enough features.

Almost. I still can’t fathom how a piece of software can consume more CPU cycles when hidden then when its windows are simply shoved to the back. That, at least, seems to be mostly fixed. Or maybe it is because I turned off the live word count feature which seems to recount words perpetually, even when the app is hidden.

No. That isn’t what motivated this particular post.
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We have an Aerus Lux 5500 canister vacuum cleaner. It “features” things like a bag full detector, temperature protection, etc…

Unremarkable, but nothing to complain about. Has a fine particle filter on the exhaust port that actually does a decent job of catching mold, fine dust, and other nasties.

It worked well enough until recently. Suddenly, the damned thing decided that the bag was always full. Put a new bag in, it would run for two seconds then shut down with the bag full light lit.

Annoying. But, wait, the fine particulate matter filter is on the exhaust port. That’s dumb. That means that the really small crap has to float through the whole suction device beyond the bag.

Could it be that the “bag full” detector is simply a sensor that measures the difference between the suction before and after the bag? If it is too great, the bag must be full?

Gotta open it up to find out.
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Anyone who has read this weblog for a while knows that I occasionally harp at length about notable industrial design issues that I run into. Often, these turn into rants railing against really pathetically stupiddesign.

I have several more of these brewing up. Obviously bad design seriously irritates the hell out of me and I’m going to share that frustration.

I hope nobody minds. (He says assuming that someone actually reads this thing).

I have created a category that will house nothing but the design rants.