UKC

My wife has a normal Casio Baby G watch that just tells the time and date.
However to adjust the time by one hour you have to:

Press button C six times to enter Edit Mode
Press button D to display Analog Hand
Press button A until digital time flash
Press button D to move analog hands
And press button B to lock
Press any button to stop at time
Press button A to Exit
Press button C to get time mode

I can only imaging that the "Baby G" refers to the idiot Casio Engineer who designed it.

In reply to m0unt41n: How would you have done it?

In reply to m0unt41n:

I find often people who design things don't seem to give much thought to the on going life of the product.
The last factory training course I went on had an engineer from the design team on it. He was doing the same training as us service guys because there have been too many complaints about aspects of the design.
It was truly one of life's mist satisfying moments watching him get more and more frustrated trying to re build the intake assembly that he had a hand in designing.

In reply to m0unt41n:
Tell her to ditch the casio, and just dial 123 from a phone instead. Hey Presto! The current time whenever you need it

Who needs complicated watches eh?

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In reply to wbo:

Press Button A to display Settings and advance through options (change Time / Date / Alarm)
Press Button B to select Time which flashes Hours
Press Button A to increase
Press Button B to accept and it displays Minutes Press B again and now back to normal display

In reply to m0unt41n:

Most of the GShock / Baby G range have a DST option. On these models you can change shift the time back and forth by and hour with 4 clicks.

In reply to cezza:

Thanks, will have a look at the instructions.

Although this option would somewhat limit the number of countries we can go to though.

In reply to m0unt41n:

Design is an expensive business. In a world of quicker, quicker, cheaper, cheaper, it is rarely going to advance properly. This is why much of the stuff that we talked about in design offices in the 1980s hasn't arrived yet.

If you are in China then this is easy. You have plenty well-educated cheap labour and no developed commercial law to stop you stealing designs. In Europe where most of the richest people on the planet live, the value of companies is often based on intellectual property which you have to preserve using rigorous design control and recording, trade marks, patents, and so on. ££££££££

In the UK, very few people running companies have the faintest idea how this works. Any f*cking w4nker can be employed to do design work. If you want to know why the UK economy scrapes along behind that of its neighbours then that is a significant part of it.

The two leaders of the pack in engineering design used to be aviation and the automotive industry. We still have something approximating to an aviation industry because if you let the to55ers run that then the damn things fall out of the sky and everybody is in trouble. In the automotive industry, rubbish designs simply grind to a halt at the roadside and we barely notice it happening but next thing you know the Germans are running everything.

In reply to m0unt41n:

I've never understood why the people who make toasters don't seem to know the dimensions of a piece of bread.

In reply to Jim Fraser:

That pretty well sums up a lot of UK Ltd but what continues to surprise me is not the subtleties of cutting edge design but total incompetence where something is obviously stupid if the company had actually bothered to try and use it.:
Most head torches with gloves
Waterproof mobiles whose screens go bananas when wet - just needs a reduced function lock mode for wet
Windows 8
etc

In reply to andi turner:


Or why the dial goes down as low as 'slightly warm bread'

In reply to m0unt41n:

Do NOT start me on head torches!

In reply to ThunderCat:


Or why they use small shallow crumb catchers and leave a nice crumb sized gap all the way around the edge of it for the crumbs to fall through onto the work surface.

In reply to m0unt41n:

Simple things made stupid by idiot designers?

Rock shoes - they totally lost the plot.

In reply to ThunderCat:

I no longer wear a watch, I just read the time off my phone( no need to call the clock)

On the very odd occasion that I don't have my phone, I just look around me, and the time is usually visible.
On my GPS, iPad , or in the car, or at the railway station or whatever, I have not been stuck so far

In reply to m0unt41n:

Any pager, ever.

I dislike mine so intently it no longer has batteries and I am utterly reliant on the phone - painful, but not as painful as trying to work the useless bloody pager. It has a green button (which generally stops things happening) and a red button (which makes noises and alters things when you press it, which then can't be undone without more noisy presses). And a grey button which turns on an invisible light. Sometimes. But not all the time.

When a page message comes in, it will play an irritating note forever unless the correct combination of buttons is pressed in the right order. That combination is usually green, red, green, green and then red again, although this can also shunt the message into a memory which can only be cleared by taking the battery out.

The only other thing I have to interact with that causes my blood pressure to rise to the same degree is a Siemens S280 nitric oxide analyser, the user interface of which was made by someone who thinks yes and no mean something different to how every other person on the planet understands. Just turning the bastard off drives me nuts. "Power off?" it says and then gives two options, "continue" and "yes". Continue powers it off - yes keeps it running. Aaagh!

b

In reply to ThunderCat:


I like the simple robust industrial type toasters, you push a lever it opens to reveal a generous area for toasting. Add bread , pull a lever and it closes. Set a time.

In reply to Jim C:

I still think there is a market for a microwave with a rotary knob for time and a button you can press if you *really* want to defrost something for 15 minutes.

99% of microwaving is 'put in, cook, take out' or 'put in, cook, stir, cook again, take out'. Ours has 23 buttons, of which I use minutes, seconds, start and stop/cancel. Apart from when I need to change the time on it, when the other 19 buttons have to be pressed in some arcane order.

b

In reply to ben b:

The Canon G16 camera manual has 212 pages.
DC

In reply to ben b:
Got a simple one as you describe, for my elderly mother( BM Stores)

Tempted to get one for myself they are ideal.

In reply to m0unt41n:
Microwave ovens. Why why do I have to press the power level button before setting a time? I just want full power. It's simple.

WordPress plugins. The most popular photo album plugin lists every upload and gallery oldest first and any sort functions have to be reset each visit. Galleries can't be arranged in an order that is convenient to you. After you have thousands of photos uploaded you can imagine how convenient this is.
It's not the only plugin to list oldest first, Do they even use their own products?

Microsoft Word. The original and worst. Designed by geeks loosely connected to the normal world, with operating functions scattered randomly over preferences, menus, palettes and icons.

TVs. Just show the whole of the program synopsis in the EPG. It's only a couple of lines. There's plenty of room if you design it nicely. It's not a delightful treat to have a button to press to show more, and another one to get back.

The Met Office weather map has removed all the lochs and roads from Scotland, and to further aid you in locating your forecast has such renowned centres of population as Pubil and Carrot.

In reply to m0unt41n:

My Tag watch is great. Almost 20 years old but simple and indestructible.

My head torch on the other hand....I've had to look at a Youtube video twice now to find out how to open the battery compartment

In reply to m0unt41n:

Some of the things descrbed here are cheap and stupid. However, many seem to fit another category. This is the add value through features category. This is the same as front wheel drive and four wheel drive cars with front being crap and cheap and four being the added value feature where they write their own cheque.

Make something complicated with loads of features; head torches are a good current example; and ask the customer to pay for all of those wonderful features even though they don't need them and even despise them.

So not all about the designer. Often about the marketing and product planning types.


[Story of my life in 7 minutes: youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg& ]

In reply to m0unt41n:

A cheap watch that you couldn't disable the Atomic Time Sync - not one to carry when you are in remote/poor reception locations.

Waking up and trying to guess where in the world the watch thought it was, did provide some amusement though.

In reply to m0unt41n:

This is an area commonly known as human factors design, all engineers should have to learn it. There was lots of fun poked at my crutches by my colleagues in the human factors team when I broke my ankle in september!

In reply to m0unt41n:

The prosecution would like to bring three more charges:

PARAMO GILLET
The zips on the two hand pockets zip close downwards, apparently so that you can partly zip them with your hands inside to keep them warm. Hello Paramo, just think about it for a moment:
a. anything in the pocket falls out when you start to unzip them
b. having put your left hand in and closed the zip as much as possible with your right hand, you then put your right hand in and ..................

MOUNTAIN EQUIPMENT BRACES
The two plastic clips at the end of the braces which thread through the elastic loops on the trousers are shaped like a fish hook to lock it into place.
a. the name 'fish hook' is the clue, you cannot undo the damn thing whilst wearing them since the hook always catches as you try to pull it back through the elastic loop.
b. have a look at Arcteryx to see how to do it properly, and cheaper.

PETZL ELIOS HELMET
The buckle catch is so small you cannot undo it one handed. Their excuse that no-one has complained in nonsense since they now promote a magnetic buckle which can be used one handed.

In reply to digby:


I have ended up buying the cheapest Microwave since that has two simple dials, time and power, and a start button. The idea of having to use a keypad is ridiculous. Ditto washing machines, we usually only use 2 or 3 programmes so the cheaper and therefore the simpler the better.

Strange because with electronics Apple and B&O and others charge a massive premium for simplicity. And the cheapest is usually full of badly thought out buttons.

In reply to m0unt41n:

Ridiculously short charger leads for expensive handheld electronic devices. Some accountant somewhere is patting themselves so the back for saving 0.01% of the item price.

In reply to m0unt41n:

The prosecution would like to add to the indictment :

BERGHAUS PACLITE OVERTROUSERS
They laminated the edges of the zip but not the covering flap which always jambs the zip. It would only have added a few grams to have designed it properly. It's hard to believe that anyone in Berghaus actually bothered to try these out before commissioning the manufacture, otherwise they would have changed it as unfit for purpose.

In reply to spenser:



Medical equipment is the worst! Half of it is thought up by some Consulant Physician based on some pile of bits he found in his shed. Dreadful.

In reply to digby:


My firefighter friends all hate microwaves. Apparently, they keep ending up pointing hoses at them. Beware!!



I hate Microsh1te Word. Twenty five years ago I was making a living from technical authorship. All of the desktop publishing software that existed was dreadful to use and too slow and almost impossible with primitive small networks. MS Word 5.5/6.0 and Word 2.0 (duh! what happened there?) were largely as useless as the DTP rubbish though a lot smaller app and thus quicker to use. No significant improvement to this day.

None of those were as easy, quick, flexible and well-equipped as Wordperfect 5.2. Any paper size, any column layout, almost any font, any colour, amazing ability to handle images, fantastic shortcut keys, good spellchecker and the best grammar checking I have ever seen. If I could get a version of that to run on Windows 7 Pro 64-bit then I'd be a happy man.

In reply to Jim Fraser:

+1
Wordperfect - bring it back please.

In reply to Babika:

Could I just mention 1-2-3
Where you could do everything twice as fast using shortcut keys instead of a mouse

In reply to Jim Fraser:

I still I remember how easy life was before the Government bought MS Office and made everyone else who worked with them change from WordPerfect to Word. When a Copy of Word arrived on 12 floppy discs compared to WordPerfect's one or two, I smelled a rat, or at least a turkey. It still won't put pictures in the right place

In reply to m0unt41n:

Digital car clocks. Every one has a different system for changing the time. It is always counterintuitive and requires referring to the handbook. What was wrong with a good old dial?

In reply to Postmanpat:
Remember how easy tuning a car radio was when you knew where the tuning knob was and could feel it? Probably why it's regarded as unsafe to tune a radio now while driving - the mental and optical effort required to locate and operate buttons is too great compared with a simple twist of a knob.

In reply to m0unt41n:

and cp/m as well

In reply to m0unt41n:

Also include Microsoft (again) for taking two working pieces of software (Powerpoint and Excel) and totally destroying their usability.

In reply to Jim Fraser:

I'm amazed but the poor design on some outdoor products. Don't get me wrong I'm not having a wholesale grumble, but I regularly come across features that don't work, are too awkward, fail, are in the wrong place or are actually missing a trick. Sometimes I wonder if the designers ever use the stuff. One of the latest classics was a roll top closure rucksack which was not only uncomfortable and had axe attachments that took about 5 minutes to use but had a zip pocket right in the 'roll zone'..

I reckon most of us could design a really good climbers rucksack. Mine would feature zip entry for full access, rather than about 15 million buckles, hooks and drawcords.

In reply to Rich W Parker:
That's why my last 2 sacs have been from Aiguille in Staveley, the last one was actually made to order and they produced it to their previous patterns at my request. Brilliant quality.

In reply to Rich W Parker:


Your comment takes me to a recent BBC article I saw which followed soldiers on training in Alaska. Joining them was a merry band of old-ish ladies, dressed up in their street winter wear in the middle of Alaska, who were part of the US defence clothing team.

Their job i assume is to help design combat proof military uniforms...

...think about that for a while.

and the article in question: http://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-35727383

I think there is a lot to be said for the understanding of designers and the actual product they make. I guess a lot gets lost in translation between the 'athlete' product testers and the design team. Also a factor is that the design team is probably made up of some nerd fresh out of uni, ripe with good ideas but not necessarily the understanding of the physical limitations that they may have.

In reply to wercat:

Ah, I didn't know the made bespoke?

In reply to Rich W Parker:

I always feel that a zip closure is a weak point for a climbing sack. Zips break, the pullers break and they always leak.

In reply to m0unt41n:

Not just microwaves. Any cooker should just have one knob per hob, not some keypad that would have frightened Rick Wakeman in his pomp.

In reply to Rich W Parker:

Yes, I think it's always been a selling point that you can incorporate extras or modifications - I even got to choose colours!

Cioch Direct on Skye are similarly helpful with clothing!

In reply to ThunderCat:


My Mum actually sets it like that on purpose - and even puts slices back to back to get it "toasted" on one side only.

The suggestion that 10 seconds in the microwave might achieve what she wants a bit quicker was not appreciated.

In reply to ben b:
I deliberately only buy manual microwaves. Mine has two dials, one for power level (which is always left on "high") and one for time up to I think 20 minutes.

Insert food, turn knob to roughly required time (or, if you're going to be standing in the kitchen watching it, to any random time in excess of that required), wait until it goes "ping" or you think it will be done, open door, remove food, eat.

I can't think of a simpler or more sensible user interface.

In reply to m0unt41n:

I offer up the monkey at BMW that thought the correct orientation of the shift lever in their automatics would be to pull it backwards to engage forward drive and push it forwards to engage reverse.

In reply to m0unt41n:

I use these at work. Batch & expiry are printed on the foil rear, through which you pop the broaches, thus destroying the lot number & expiry data that you require.

http://www.kongsindental.com/pic/big/22_2.jpg

In reply to m0unt41n:

http://www.robertopiecollection.com/Application/images/Lawnmowers/qualcast-...

Another great one. If you want to mow up to the edge of your lawn, the wheel has to be over the edge, so if there's any sort of drop, e.g. onto a border, the wheel ends up in mid air & the blades shave the grass down to the soil.

In reply to Andy Hardy:

Rucksacks are inherently leaky anyway, so personally I'm not bothered. Buckles break too. I've been using the Osprey Mutant for the last year (zips only) and liked it so much that I've made it work for everything.

In reply to GrahamD:


There always is, it is just that if the manufacturers don't put it on the appliance then they use it to do the design.

In reply to Neil Williams:


I recently learned that the power adjustment is basically another timing adjustment, so perhaps they could be simpler still and just be made with one knob to control the time (the microwaves, as I understand it, can't be made any less 'wavy' - presumably they'd become some other sort of wave - so all the power adjustment does is regulate the period in which waves are produced. Though I suppose it's easier doing this for, say, defrosting something than manually giving it a blast, then a rest, then a blast, and so on).

In reply to m0unt41n:

cameras, what ever happened to load film and off you go?

In reply to Removed UserBwox:
The power adjustment basically turns the magnetron on and off (on for a few seconds, off for a few seconds) at different ratios. I don't think I ever found an actual need for it, though, mine has been on "full" since I bought it.

The defrost setting never seems to work very well - if defrosting a pre-cooked meal, I just fully heat it from frozen, whereas if I want to defrost fresh meat I just get it out in advance of wanting to cook it and allow it to defrost naturally.

In reply to m0unt41n:
Most "modernist" hotel bathrooms/ bathroom fittings!

Eg rather than mixer taps with a simple up/ down, left/right lever action (or similar) for on/off and heat control, taps whose operating method is disguised so that you need to spend 10 minutes working out how to turn them on/off and control the flow/ temperature.

Ditto for shower controls.

And showers where you have to stand under the fixed head to turn them on, giving you an initial freezing deluge.

Toilet bowls that are shaped so that a normal sized person using it either can't avoid smearing the rear of the bowl during a "movement" or ends up (some continental designs) with it piling up under his goolies!

These are not designs "built down to a price" as per a previous comment (Jim?) but supposedly "innovative" designs by people at the top of their game....but having endured so many of these in my work-related travel over the last 5 years or so, I'm convinced that they're actually designed by pre-GCSE kids on work experience placements. An absolute triumph of looks over utility.

In reply to m0unt41n:

One of my colleagues has a wireless rechargeable mouse. Which is great until it needs charging, because the port is on the underside of the mouse. Really don't know how hard it would have been to put the port on the side so she could carry on using it while it charges...

In reply to Rob Naylor:

Agree on hotel showers.

I used to think it was just me - I mean how could it take so long to try and work out how to turn it on and get the correct temperature? Part of the problem is that in the quest for aesthetics there are no useful words or symbols like Hot, Cold, Max, Min, shower, bath anymore. You just have to guess and do trial and error.

I stopped blaming myself when a software designer friend said that if it is not intuitive its the fault of the designer.

She has a point.

In reply to Rob Naylor:



You sure you weren't pooing in the bidet?

Actually hotel rooms are a goldmine of irritation. Have you ever found one where the lighting options and the location of switches are both intelligible and useful?

In reply to Rob Naylor:

Toilets - whoever thought square toilets worked for anyone ?

In reply to john arran:


Bidets are so 1970s, John!


In a word.....yes! A hotel I stayed in in Abu Dhabi once. May have been the Meridien Royal. But that's about it

In reply to ThunderCat:


Because it's perfect for toasting hot cross buns and teacakes. But only if your toaster has a bagel setting - one of those features you never knew how much you needed. Sorry I'm sorry, but whoever designed our toaster isn't an idiot, but a bloody genius !!

In reply to GrahamD:

I've got a square bog. Looks good and is comfortable. Only issue is the cost of replacement seats should this be needed.

In reply to Neil Williams:

The power control can be useful to stop the 'piping hot on the outside, but frozen on the inside' problem. It allows the heat from the outer to conduct to the inner, heating the item slowly, and more evenly.

Just like grilling sausages from frozen.

In reply to ben b:



I understand your pain, I have an ancient microwave that I'd quite like to replace for aesthetic reasons, it has 2 knobs one to set power and one to set time, all the new ones I see are dozens on buttons and cooking something requires skills similar to programming a 1970s super computer.

In reply to Rob Naylor:




You've started me now. There is no going back.

I regularly make jokes about the kit in outdoor shops not fitting me because it is "Chinese Large" but it is far worse than that jest might suggest. ISO standards exist for the size of human beings. Standards are issued relating to various industries to assist them to get their products right. My direct experience of these standards relates to commercial vehicles but I believe that a wide range of other similar standards exist.

Unfortunately, there is a fundamental flaw in this process. The average size of a human being across the entire world population is quite small compared to what we are accustomed to in Europe or North America. However, all this complicated and pretty stuff that is being made, sold, thrown away after a year and replaced again is bought by rich Europeans and Americans. A lot of them are 1.83m tall and even the ones who are 1.50m often have a backside larger than a Kodiak Grizzly Bear. Meanwhile, the results in the standards are for 1.60m chinese eating a couple of bowls of rice with meatballs and five cups of green tea a day.

With standards based on a 95% confidence level, the entire male population of northern Europe hovers on the edge of irrelevance.

The other angle is that water closets are only used in countries with rubbish diets. Over the last centrury or so , people in developed countries have been eating processed food and sh1tting rabbit droppings. As soon as some 1.83m 90kg European starts eating salad and bran the output(!) trebles and the chances of a designer toilet bowl with 'water-saving features' coping with that drops to zero.

(Water-saving features? If you had to flush it four times then it has water saving features!)

In reply to Postmanpat:


Something Ford got right with my car, 2 buttons one marked H one marked M, press H and Hours got up press M and minutes go up.

One thing that does baffle me is simple common car parts. Why do companies keep spending money making multiple parts with identical function? Take for example the brakes on my 14 year old ford focus, the brakes on last 4 versions of the focus haven't changed or gained any function they are all ABS, the vehicles are all a similar weight and the initial product works well and is proven and tested. So why have they produced so many different parts?

In reply to Postmanpat:


Changed ours on Sunday - to make the hours go up, press the up arrow button. To make the minutes go up, press the down arrow!

In reply to gethin_allen:

Try the cheap shops, that's where I got my traditional 2-knobs-and-a-door-open-button one from. Cost about £50 and doing the job perfectly.

In reply to digby:

Microwave ovens. Why why do I have to press the power level button before setting a time? I just want full power. It's simple.

Why would anyone want to use less power ? Surely if they had one power setting everyone would just put it on for less time.

In reply to m0unt41n:

GPS - tell me where I am straight away when I switch it on and let me scroll around from there. Then go to a loaded route with one push of the button. All else is the other 1%

In reply to hang_about:

Ages to change the clock in my car, without the benefit of the manual. In the process, I discovered that the sat nav will give the altitude of the car to within two feet (or three, or five) depending on how many satellites it can see, and it will tell me which ones. It will also tell me where the sun is. I can scarcely believe that I coped without this information before. All I need to do know is remember which menu leads to altitude....and drive somewhere where it actually matters, and matters more than all the spoilers and other pieces I would no doubt scatter behind me.

I also discovered that the car will park itself. I also discovered that if it can't see a car-sized gap for parallel parking, it will assume that you want to park end on. It span the wheel with impressive speed and endeavoured to park me backwards into the ditch, Fortunately, it had told me that I was in charge of go and stop. We tried again, after i had relieved it of its duties.

My Garmin bike sat nav has the following 'Routing options'
1. Cycling
2. Tour Cycling
3. Mountain Biking

there are also settings for 'Lock on Road', avoid 'Unpaved Roads' and avoid 'Narrow trails'

WTF is the difference between 1 and 2, let alone when you add in the other options?

If someone can tell me how to stop the .....ing thing sending me down narrow, unpaved cycle paths (indeed any cycle path) I would be eternally grateful (the obvious answer is not correct). That and how to avoid getting off and beating the bloody thing to death on the exact waypoint to make sure it's got the message that you're close enough and are now on the route to the next point.

If it sends me two miles out of my way so that I can take in 300m of bike path on the wrong side of a dual carriage way one more time, I shall jump a red light just so that I can cast it into the path of on-coming traffic.

In reply to m0unt41n:

Expensive little digital cameras....without an optical viewfinder! Who the feck, thought that was a good idea?

In reply to m0unt41n:
Costa coffee cups

In reply to Postmanpat:


Simple and intuitive on my Seat, did it tonight in a few seconds whilst sat at the traffic lights.

In reply to m0unt41n:

Kettles.

If it does not pour it fails
If the level window is behind the handle so my hand hides it when I'm filling it, fail
If the level window has a floaty ball in it that will scale up and jam in a hard water area, fail.
If it jets steam onto my hand at any point during normal handling, fail.

Toby

In reply to m0unt41n:

Another thing that's bugging me is transformer plugs.

We've just decorated my daughter's new bedroom and the sockets are, by happy accident, behind the bookshelf and the chest of drawers, so she can't get at them.

In her new bedroom, she has a low power bedside light and a low power clock, plugged into said sockets.

Unfortunately, both have bulky transformer plugs, meaning the units won't go back flush against the skirting, so I've had to make short extension leads with low profile plugs to get around this. The book shelf has a plinth with enough room underneath it to hide the plug and extension, but I've had to cut a couple of slots in the back to route the cables.

The chest of drawers doesn't have this design and I've had to tuck the electrics out of the way behind the bed - now needs about 6" of trunking on top of the skirting to hide the cables in the gap, ideally.

In reply to The New NickB:


Cant do it with engine on

In reply to MG:


Paper cups is another reason why I won't use the Starbucks in work. You pay a small fortune for drink and they serve it to you in a paper cup! How anyone can go on about the quality of a drink served in a paper cup I don't know. And to make things worse, Starbucks paper cups are not even recyclable.

In reply to m0unt41n:

CAPS LOCK

grrrr!

b

In reply to Wsdconst:



You must have very burnt porridge if you cook on gas using the same principle.

In reply to LastBoyScout:


Ah... the old 'motorsport heritage' thing. Sequential racing gearboxes are normally set up like that, pull for faster, push for slower.

Since neither option is especially intuitive does it really matter which they use? I mean we all learned to use the spectacularly unintuitive H-pattern shifter easy enough. Even a back to front dog-leg box only takes a few minutes to get used to.
jk

In reply to Jim Fraser:




Well, you've got me there, as I'm 1.86m and 93kg! However, your "standards based on 95%" and "water closets only used in countries with rubbish diets" comments are a bit contradictory, surely? If most of the world uses squat bogs or similar, then surely the standards should be based not on a global average but on an average of the actual user-population (ie yanks, europeans and those strata of societies in less-developed countries which *have* adopted western-style defaecatory habits)?

Actually, bog design I can usually cope with by judicious positioning. It's the equipment design of the washing and showering arrangements that really niggles.

Oh, and the bathroom in a hotel my wife and I recently stayed in in Paris where the door was glass (etched so as to be translucent rather than transparent, admittedly). That was not the main problem, however. The main problem was that there was a 15mm gap all around the door, with the hinges cantilevered out. This allowed bathroom sounds and (more importantly smells) to migrate into the bedroom area, which was less than pleasant.....moreso for my wife than for me . A secondary problem was that the door had no handle, so you had to jam your fingers into the gap and lever it open. Nothing to do with "standards" here. Just some "designer" placing visual aesthetics above utility and common sense.

In reply to gethin_allen:


Cray-1? Atari 400?

In reply to jkarran:



Probably true in this case. However, I have a traditional laptop where I stroke downwands on the touchpad to scroll down, and my wife has a touch screen version where you need to stroke upwards on the touchpad to scroll down. They both make sense in isolation but whenever I'm called upon to do anything on her machine I invariably do the laptop equivalent of zooming off in reverse and crashing into the car behind!

In reply to john arran:

Yes, I used to get confused between my Mac (two fingers, swipe as if moving a piece of paper on the screen, i.e. same as a touchscreen), and work PC (one finger on the right of the pad, swipe as if using a scroll bar i.e. the opposite of the above).

As for automatic gearboxes, as you set it in more relaxed conditions than a manual (unless driving it as a fake manual, which if you do it often why didn't you just buy a manual, or flappy paddle box if you dislike the clutch?), it doesn't overly matter which way it is.

In reply to Rob Naylor:
Plus an automatic light so you can't use the bog at night without illuminating the hotel room.

In reply to m0unt41n:

Having to click "Start" to close down Windows

Oh, and that bloody paperclip

In reply to m0unt41n:

Sit/stand workstations.

(Often introduced Just when you've finally got your table and chair workdesk ergonomics as good as it can be..)

A lockable slot at the back of the sit-stand tabletop for the laptop screen to poke from, and a keyboard shelf which folds under the tabletop.
The screen is so low, being a laptop, that if you raise the whole contraption, your keyboard ends up near chest level, so that your hand posture is akin to one of those insurance fixated meerkats.
Alternatively, get the keyboard level sorted, and with the screen being locked in position as far across the desk from you as possible, you'll end up with a posture something like The Simpsons character 'Mr Burns', or a submissive monkey.
You could say it's not the designer's fault on my final gripe about them; places I've worked have spent so much money on the workstation that they seem to have kept within budget by supplying the smallest laptop screen size possible. This accentuates the neck and eye strain accompanying the Burnsian posture given above..

In reply to Rob Naylor:



Paris,
France .................... say no more

In reply to m0unt41n:

Do any of you own a washing machine?

And of the 853 different programmes it can do, how many do you ever use?

In reply to ThunderCat:




You are 1998 and I claim my £5

In reply to Andy Hardy:

I use:-

Boil wash
40 degrees full wash
Hand wash
Rinse and spin

No others. I'd be happy if those were the only options.

In reply to Neil Williams:

I only use rinse and spin if something's gone wrong. The rest of the time it's 30C, full speed spin.

In reply to Andy Hardy:
I use rinse and spin when I've been lazy and put the machine on in the evening, and left it to the morning to empty. A quick run of that gets the resulting creases out.

In reply to Postmanpat:


I assume you are talking about your car, mine you certainly can. I've got to admit, it is the first car I have owned where it wasn't been a complete faff.

In reply to LastBoyScout:


Don't drive an automatic Audi with auto engine stop start and auto brake hold then if that bothers you - you will have a lot more to think about.

Car programming that is being far too clever - had a courtesy car with auto stop/start and auto brake hold. Great idea in principle but coupled to an auto gearbox, as soon as you slowed to around 2 mph the auto brake took over and stopped the car and then switched off the engine. If you really wanted to just check a junction before turning, you had to use the throttle/braking carefully, as if it was too slow it would auto brake/switch off engine -repeatedly if one of those busy congested junctions where you had to edge forward to see if clear to go.

Of course you could switch both systems off by two separate switches helpfully placed over a foot apart, but if the auto braking had happened it then decided you really needed the handbrake and put that on instead when you switched off the auto brake hold.

Why it is programmed to assume every time you slow to a crawl you really wanted to stop and switch off the engine! Could it not have been programmed to wait until the car actually stopped!

Try parking it - made you look like a learner . Stops you when creeping into a parking space and cuts the engine. Also why is it programmed to switch off the engine when you are shifting from drive to reverse! The engine just has to restart immediately if you really need to reverse.

Nice car otherwise .

In reply to Climbing Pieman:

That sounds a dangerous flaw.

Perhaps a car version of this:
youtube.com/watch?v=bzD4tIvPHwE&

which was caused by the plane believing incorrectly that the pilot wanted to land it.

In reply to Neil Williams:

Could be in some everyday circumstances, or if a driver panicked. With the auto the restart in drive meant it immediately moved forward.
Certainly over complicated programming.

In reply to Climbing Pieman:

I get a lot of courtesy cars through work. The top of current hate list is the Peugeot 308. Everything has to be done through the stupid slow touch sensitive control screen. I just want to turn the heating down a little; this shouldn’t involve pressing five buttons.

I don’t like the A class twisty knob thing and the electric handbrake feels very counter intuitive, down in the foot well near the accelerator and you have to push it to put the brake on and pull it to take it off

The golf is the only courtesy car I actually like….

In reply to galpinos:
Luckily I don't like Peugeots ; ever since I owned one that had a monthly visit with the garage for faults for the 18mths I put up with it.

In reply to digby:

Yeah, but it's ready before yours. And it's not burnt its caramelised.

In reply to Climbing Pieman:

This sounds terrible. If I could get a new example of my 14 year old car I'd be perfectly happy with it, the only reason I want to replace it is because everything expensive about it is worn out, but when I do replace it I'll likely end up with a computer on wheels

In reply to gethin_allen:

You'll be in for a real shock if you end up getting a nearly new car!

One of my neighbours was talking about his one - auto lights, auto high beam, lane departure warning, speed sign recognition camera, etc etc. Most things are "automatic" - When he "opens" the boot all he has to do is put a foot just under the rear bumper and the boot lid opens or closes.

The list what some new cars can do is staggering, and all controlled by computers. Also can be recorded by computers - another neighbour says his car records automatically when, date and time, and where his journey was from and to, can display a map of it, how long it took, what speed, what fuel consumption, etc., draws up various statistics of how the car was driven!! If it breaks down or is in an accident the car will apparently automatically dial a control centre to assist with a recovery/emergency request sending location information.

Keep to an older car if you want to minimise all the computer controls.