Fifteen Consumer Electronics Design Mistakes
Let us count the ways these modern marvels of technology drive us bonkers, day after day.By Benj Edwards | Sunday, February 7, 2010 at 11:39 pm
Remote Controls
Mistake #4: Too Many Buttons
Device(s): TV, DVR Remote Controls
Call it Benj’s Law: The number of buttons on the average TV remote control doubles every 15 years. Let’s take a look at the button forecast:
1950: four buttons
1965: eight buttons
1980: 16 buttons
1995: 32 buttons
2010: 64 buttons
2025: 128 buttons
2040: 256 buttons
2055: 512 buttons
The current Time Warner Cable DVR remote control (circa 2009) already sports 62 buttons (yes, really), most of which no one ever uses. As silly as the above forecasts seem, they might be a bit too relaxed: with the way things are going, TWC might upend Benj’s Law and release a remote with a button for every single channel next year.
There’s simply no need for so many buttons, be it 62, 128, or 1000; many modern remote functions could be simplified through clever use of on-screen menus. My favorite TV remote of all time, for a Daewoo TV set, boasts a mere 22 buttons. You could add four for DVR functionality: record, start/stop, fast-forward, and rewind. There you go: the perfect remote has only 26 buttons.
What Were They Thinking?
There’s a common design fallacy in consumer electronics which posits that things have to get more complicated to get better. The need to generate constant revenue for manufacturers results in intentionally short product lifespans. Each new generation of products must add features (that aren’t always necessary) to entice consumers to ditch the product they have and trade up for a shiny new model. We tech fans call that “feature creep.”
Before long, you end up with a 20-headed monster-of-a-thing that nobody wants to touch. Then Apple comes in, simplifies it, and becomes the hero. I can see it now: Steve Jobs and the one-button TV remote that senses everything you could possibly want to do with it.
Mistake #5: Inconvenient and Confusing Buttons
Device(s): TV, DVR Remote Controls
Similar to the keys on terrible PC keyboards, remote control buttons somehow end up in the least effective and most confusing places. I’ll just give you one example of many hundreds:
It’s a mess, but still not as bad as some remotes. It hosts a large grid of uniformly shaped and sized buttons. There are two power buttons (guess which one actually turns on the device?). And you’ll (rarely) find the two buttons you want to use the most — volume up and down — in the lower right corner. I know first hand because this is the remote for my father’s hi-fi receiver, and it has maddened me on many an occasion.
My father also owns a CD player remote that one has to power on by pushing the remote’s “on” button while pointing it at the CD player. You must power up the remote before you can use it for anything else. So to turn on the CD player remotely, you have to push the “on” button twice: once to turn on the remote, and once to turn on the CD player.
As a subset of this mistake (and mistake #4), many remotes try to cram too many functions onto a single button, making the task of figuring out what each button does quite confusing.
What Were They Thinking?
This is just a case of plain ol’ bad design, with no evidence of design foresight or decent usability testing on the manufacturer’s part.
Telephones
Mistake #6: The Chin Disconnection
Device(s): Cordless Telephones
Have you ever hung up on someone with your chin? How about your cheek? How about your hand while you were repositioning the phone? Your intrepid author has experienced every one of these scenarios as he braved 25 years of bad cordless phone design. (In retrospect, I consider it training for this article.)
If you’re a member of the mobile phone generation, you might not understand: many cordless telephone designers placed “talk,” “flash,” or “hook” buttons or switches in inconvenient or ill-conceived places. The “talk” or “hook” button usually turned the phone on and off, while the “flash” button quickly switched over to another line to answer call waiting.
The worst scenario is when there’s a flash button right next to your chin. Before phones were microscopically small and easy to inhale accidentally like they are now, people used to hold phone handsets between their shoulder and their head for hands-free operation. That left your chin or cheek perfectly positioned to press against flash or talk buttons and hang up on your friends. I can’t even begin to count how many times I’ve done that. A friend whom I had not yet met in person even accused me of having a “Dudley Do-Right chin,” which I swear is not the case.
What Were They Thinking?
They had to put all those buttons somewhere, didn’t they? Some designers just put them in bad places, or used buttons that weren’t recessed and were too easy to press by accident.
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Consumer Electronics Design Mistakes « Tomi Engdahl’s ePanorama blog Says:
November 4th, 2010 at 2:12 am[…] Let us count the ways these modern marvels of technology drive us bonkers, day after day. Fifteen Consumer Electronics Design Mistakes article shows how thing have gone wrong. Avoid making those and similar mistakes on your own […]
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And That’s What You Missed on Technologizer Says:
December 31st, 2010 at 12:34 pm[…] Benj analyzed the most notable consumer electronics design mistakes, including the legendary flashing 12:00. […]
February 8th, 2010 at 2:32 am
Apparently it’s possible to program some HP printers to display a customised message when the paper runs out. I know this because a mate of mine programmed a handful of university printers to display FEED ME A STRAY CAT.
February 8th, 2010 at 4:26 am
I have this Philips radio,
http://www.p4c.philips.com/cgi-bin/dcbint/cpindex.pl?ctn=AE2380/00&scy=FI&slg=ENG&grp=PORTABLE_ENTERTAINMENT_GR&cat=RADIO_CASSETTEPLAYER_RECORDER_CA&sct=PORTABLE_RADIOS_SU
Great sound quality.
Except whenever you press a station button there’s a very loud beep. Totally annoying and infuriating.
I had to buy an other radio.
February 8th, 2010 at 5:49 am
One aspect of DVD encryption and DRM in general you only glanced at, is that the DMCA made it illegal to circumvent such schemes. Thus, ripping your CD (which has no digital encryption or DRM) is legal under the fair use precedents established by the Sony Betamax ruling. But ripping your DVD for those same fair use goals (such as place-shifting) is not legal.
So it was the content lobbyists who pushed the US government in the 1990s to establish a framework that will condemn us to DRM for the foreseeable future. Even though ripping tools exist and the encryption standard is a joke, it nevertheless provides the legal basis for suing anyone using those tools, without regard to any copyright or fair use considerations.
The ‘designers’ in these cases, were the lobbyists, who wrote the law the Congress passed and President Clinton signed.
February 8th, 2010 at 6:34 am
Blue LEDs. Ten eye-piercing blue LEDs sprinkled around a laptop keyboard. Half of them always on. Two or three change to orange to signal that whatever is on the faint, nearly unreadable case markings in now “off” …
February 8th, 2010 at 6:52 am
“in the case of the iPhone and iPod touch, it allows Apple’s products to be incredibly thin and lightweight properties that would likely suffer if the devices incorporated removable batteries.”
As opposed to the Nexus One, which is much thicker and bulkier than the iPhone because it has a removable battery.
February 8th, 2010 at 10:02 am
I don’t know how wide spread it is, but my HP printer has ridiculously small ink cartridges. I don’t think I can even get 100 sheets out of the black before it runs out. (Hmm, there’s even court cases about this, I guess it’s a bigger complaint then I thought.)
I’m also going to disagree with the internal iPod batteries being a design flaw. I have had more problems with hard drive damage (as I drop the classic, again,) on the iPods, and no real issues with the battery.
Between my wife and I, we’ve owned 4 ipods, and two iphones, battery degradation has never been an issue, though I’ll agree, as a Pandora player all day means I’ll need to charge it at the end of the day. But so what? the iPhone charger is small, and the cable is “multi” functional, if you count being able to use it on ipods as multifunctional.
February 8th, 2010 at 5:37 pm
I can agree whole-heartedly with the VCR and alarm clock issues. Luckily (at least for a little while) my VCR could scan the airwaves and set its clock and date based on the time broadcast by a PBS station. Now that all transmissions are digital, that doesn’t happen anymore. But it’s hard to view that clock from the attic, especially when it’s not plugged in…
And the alarm clock that I (still use) has the scroll-through-time method of setting, which means if you pass one minute from your intended time, you have to go all the way through the 23 other hours to attempt to get it right again. I usually just leave it, because a minute is usually not that big of deal.
February 8th, 2010 at 7:25 pm
The red off light is the one that drives me crazy. I just bought a small LCD TV for my bedroom and it has an annoying blue light when it is on and an even more annoying red light when it is off. As I can’t sleep unless there is total darkness in my bedroom, I had to unplug the TV every night.
Then I realized that the manufacturers have actually done me and the environment a favor as I now unplug not only the TV now but all my electronic devices to save energy.
February 9th, 2010 at 3:15 am
On the water heaters I’ve seen in various office kitchens, they have an array of LEDs – all red.
Some signify good news (power on, tank full, water at dispensing temperature), some bad news (half-full, completely empty) but, regardless of the message, the LED is always red!
It mays seem like a small thing, but if designers cannot get the user interface right of something as mind-numbingly simple as a water heater, what hope do they have for anything more complex?
(PS: I’ve also seen, bizarrely, a water-cooler that was so badly designed that new users would press purely decorative ‘buttons’ to try to dispense water…)
February 9th, 2010 at 6:48 am
12:00 Flashers.. I knew how to set mine up so they did not flash.
LED’s.. Well, I know how to fix those too but it is frustrating when the LED turns OFF when the device turns on.. I have disconnected a few.
Copy Protection…..
I recall a letter I sent in to a software house once back in my C-64 days
“What does copy guard do?”
It makes the software harder to load
It wears out or damages the consumer’s disc drive
It adds to the warranty replacement cost (Please replace this one)
IT makes Mike Henry (Author of Fast Hack’em,, which by the way would NOT copy that program) Rich and Famous
Kracker Jax however… DID copy that program, wiped out the copy protection and let me load it without hammering the head stop on the disc drive.
Likewise. I’ve been able to copy DVD’s even copy protectd ones, for years. Don’t do it.. but have the ability.
Same for DRM CD’s and other digital medai.. Now that I have done.. but the reason I have the hardware, and the reason I’ve made digital copies beyond what the DRM allowed…. Is that I OWN the rights to those recordings. (Either I or my classical musician daughter that is) Till she moved out west I was her recording engineer.
February 11th, 2010 at 9:35 am
You forgot to include sliding multi-position switches.
For instance my alarm clock has a four position switch ordered as such: set-time, set-alarm, alarm-on, alarm-off. The switch is so hard to push that it is almost impossible select the two middle choices without overshooting and pushing it too far.
February 13th, 2010 at 12:52 pm
my father bought an alarm clock back in the early 80s and it has two glorious features:
1. on the top it has a keypad with all 10 digits, to set the time or alarm time you just type the time. and an am/pm button.. genius!
2. the snooze time is VARIABLE! set it to 15 minutes if you want! no more of this 9 minute BS..
alas, i only saw that clock in my dad’s bedroom.. he’s still using it, it still works.. i think it was GE branded, iirc..
February 16th, 2010 at 2:55 am
how would you like to be a 80 year old and try to operate your tv
useing th button on the set that are located on the bottom of the set
instead of eye level
February 17th, 2010 at 3:15 pm
If there’s a blue light for ON that you want to see, and a red light for OFF that you don’t want to see, put enough blue cellophane over it to block the red light. The blue will come through fine.
February 18th, 2010 at 8:32 pm
There is NO off LED on anything. It’s a stand-by LED. It shows that the effing thing will react to your remote control. When it’s actually off, there will be no light. Everyone that complains about it is lazy and doesn’t care about energy consumption. Switch the multiple-socket-extender-thingy off every night. Not a big deal.
February 26th, 2010 at 7:45 am
The worst kind of copy protection wasn’t XCP. XCP doesn’t affect you if you are smart enough to have your autorun turned OFF, or use vista/seven, which always asks for your permission before it launches the autorun executable (even with the uac off).
The absolute WORST kind of copy protection was Cactus Data Shield. Cactus had all the usual XCP nastiness (software that executes itself without warning, forces an EULA onto your face, sound is in crappy low bitrate compressed format), plus, it also utilized data corruption.
The audio section of those CDs had some audio blocks intentionally removed and replaced by data blocks. The thought behind that was that CD players would ignore the data blocks by treating them as read errors (and thus correct the audio as they do in a scratched cd), while computers would decrypt the data blocks as audio, which resulted in loud audio hash. This prevented the user from ripping the CD even if he had bypassed the rootkit (by disabling autorun).
Too bad CD players with MP3 support employ computer-like firmwares too, which is also the case for many car cd players.
Needless to say, the CDs were playable only on the most basic CD players. Recalls and returns were massive. Meanwhile, pirates were happily exploiting the analog hole, and if the device was a professional sound system, the burnt disc would have better audio quality that the corrupted original one! Talk about plain ol’ design mistake!
March 6th, 2010 at 5:42 am
what size do 99% of users print on? Standard 8.5″x11″ letter size paper is the answer.
99% of users in north america, actually, the rest of the world use that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A4_paper
And then it makes sens to have the printer precise the format she need, since you can send a job in legal and have only A4 in the tray.
March 9th, 2010 at 11:42 am
“Mac laptops also adopting the sealed-battery design.”
The batteries in Apple’s current laptops are not sealed in as they are in iPods and iPhones. Sure you can’t simply turn the laptop over and pop the battery out, but the battery is totally removable and replaceable by way of undoing various screws.
See for example
http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repair/Installing-MacBook-Unibody-Model-A1342-Battery/1667/1
March 9th, 2010 at 11:56 am
dsq: Actually the Wii has THREE LED power states. Green is on, Yellow is standby, and Red is “off”.
March 9th, 2010 at 9:30 pm
I think a lot of these are only design mistakes if you don’t understand the design. Sure a standby LED lighting up when a device is off might be bad, but the thing is the device isn’t actually off, the red LED isn’t an off light, it’s telling you that part of the device is still on. If you don’t like it, switch it off at the wall. Removing the red LED won’t switch the device off, you just won’t realise part of it is still on.
Likewise the flashing clock on a VCR was designed to alert you to the fact that the time had been lost, so you don’t sit down later to watch that show you recorded then realise it didn’t record because the time had been lost. I agree with the backup battery though, computers have always remembered the time even if they were powered off for days, but I guess when most people go shopping for a VCR they don’t ask whether it remembers the time across a blackout.
March 9th, 2010 at 10:33 pm
While any kind of drm is bad, Apple’s fairplay implementation was actually considered one of the most relaxed around. Yes you needed iTunes to play it, but you could authorize other computers to play it too. You could also burn it easily on a cd without restrictions. I have some music from iTunes from before the switch, and never found this implementationn of drm very bothering, except for typing in 1 password (once) after a fresh installation of my computer if i wanted to play music.
March 9th, 2010 at 11:52 pm
That red light tells you that your TV is plugged to mains and is wasting some energy (suspend mode). Led itself uses minimal amount. Just unplug it or use extension cord with on/off switch.
March 10th, 2010 at 2:43 am
I’m with you on most of these items and I suppose that most alarm clocks are rather non-intuitive, but for some reason you use a photo of a Sony Dream Machine, the best alarm clock I’ve ever come across and still use after who knows how many years. To me it’s always been a stand-out in terms of clever features and ergonomic design among simple electronic devices.
So I’m just sayin’ I think it’s a bad choice of photo…
March 10th, 2010 at 3:11 pm
Back in the early days of remote controls, devices often had mechanical power switches on the consoles in addition to the remote’s power switch. If you turned it off from the console, you would not be able to turn it back on from the remote.
The “off” light back then was usually labeled “standby” and existed to let you know that you could use the remote to turn it on. If the light wasn’t on, then you’d have to get up and press the power switch yourself.
It’s still useful in the regard for some devices, like non-slimline PS2 and PS3 consoles, which have mechanical power switches in addition to the soft switches. The light tells you that the mechanical switch is in the “on” position, so the soft power switch (or remote or game controller) will be able to turn the unit on.
March 11th, 2010 at 10:24 am
In the 1980’s, most IBM and IBM clone computers had a power switch IN THE BACK. You had to reach around the computer and guess where the switch was (probably bumping a cable loose in the process), or crawl behind the desk with a flashlight everytime you turn it on.
These same computers (and even some computers today) have 3 audio jacks in the back for the speaker output, headphone output, and mic input. Of course, all three of these jacks look exactly the same. My first Acer PC put a colored block (red, blue, green) around each port, but there was no icon or word to describe what each color referred to. In the darkness under the desk, you couldn’t see the color anyway. This bad design probably cost PC manufacturers big bucks in technical support costs as users called in to complain that the sound is not working.
March 12th, 2010 at 4:59 pm
The power switch on the IBM PC and PC/XT was actually on the side, and it was very large and easy to find. It also made a satisfying clunk sound when you flipped it off. It’s actually modern ATX power supplies that put the (very tiny) physical switch on the main back, though there is rarely any reason to turn it off.
I agree wholeheartedly about the stupid audio jacks though, it’s impossible to figure out which one to plug your speakers into without actually getting out a magnifying glass and looking at the plugs on the back of your computer. How often does anyone use the line in or mic jacks anyway? These days most computers have them on the front of the case thankfully.
March 12th, 2010 at 7:09 pm
The mistake you’re making is thinking that there were any designers involved in these products at all. Typically, there are not. There is a total disrespect for design in most engineering-focused companies. A product manager has a deadline for when they have to ship the product, and they badger a team of engineers to build the product on time and under budget. That is why there are so many copycat and derivative products: no creative people were involved at all, just business people and engineers. If you can’t create something new, you just look at what it out there, what’s already been done, how things are “supposed” to be done, and you poop out yet another VCR with a flashing clock and no backup battery. As long as it can go into a box stamped “VCR” and it can play video cassettes, job done.
March 13th, 2010 at 3:29 am
I think people (Benj _and_ the multitude of commentators thus far) haven’t given the VCR its due – because it was often so hard to program and set its time, we have remotes with thousands of buttons, idiot-proofing by Apple of batteries, _all_ encryption on DVDs, CDs, and other DRM, printers that only allow you to use their maker’s printer cartridges, etc.
Why HP’s engineer’s decided to use the “PC LOAD LETTER” error message, you should ask them. However, it also shows that again, like the VCR, no user interface is foolproof – so now we get remotes with LCD displays, touch interfaces that screw up with fat fingers, cell phones with overloaded button functions,…
Those VCRs were – and still are – insidious.
March 13th, 2010 at 6:34 pm
Some of these “Mistakes” are examples of planned obsolescence, which while annoying to the consumer, is certainly not a mistake on the balance sheets of the company who made the “mistake”..
However, the LED thing is one of my pet peeves. Not just the “its off” LED, but general overusage of LED’s in general. I have taken to various means of killing LED lights in my equipment.
Seriously, have you ever counted the number of LEDs we now have in our homes? I gave up counting at somewhere over FOUR DOZEN just from my computer setup. I have gone through all my external hard drives, and detatched the LED lights internally. Some were incredibly bright. Two of the drives had dual LED’s that flashed *back and forth* when the drive was accessed – and are incredibly bright. I have a USB hub with a piercing blue LED that lit up my entire room that’s now covered over with several old floppy disk labels. Most of these LED’s I don’t need. I’ll know, for example, that my external hard drives are not working because… wait for it… they won’t show up in Windows. I’ll know my speakers are off because… there’s no sound! My DSL modem has FIVE of them! FIVE! Wouldn’t ONE LED be enough? Green and solid=good. Flashing=Wait. Red=Bad. But FIVE? And why do they have to always blink? It blinks to show traffic of course, just like my hard drive… which means if I’m downloading all night… both the DSL modem and the external hard drive are… constantly blinking. Thank goodness for duct tape over the DSL modem! And what’s with the PIERCINGLY bright LEDs anyway? A status LED is one thing, but one that can light up the 7th level of hell?
I’ve been waging war on these LEDs now for a while. I try to avoid just taping over them – that’s kinda fugly – so there are a few remaining I haven’t killed yet. I have dreams of there being some magical “device” that can burn out LED lights just by putting it near one. Haven’t found it yet.
March 18th, 2010 at 11:09 pm
Actually, here in Australia, I have always found the “PC LOAD LETTER” message very informative.
For some stupid reason, when adding a new HP Laserjet printer to Windows (even 7), the drivers assume that you are still backward enough to be using imperial sized paper, when most of the world now uses metric.
The message tells me that the drivers are Amerocentric, and I have to wrestle with them to convince them that there are actually other countires in the world, and try to urge them that I want to use A4 paper. (Which can take some doing to make A4 ‘stick’ in Windows, let me tell you.)
March 21st, 2010 at 1:23 pm
#1 – the red “off” light is actually a “stand-by” light. It is in effect a warning of the very thing you bemoan – the device is using power to remain on stand-by. No light = *truly* and completely off.
#13 – PC LOAD LETTER, outside of the US I’m guessing this message more commonly means “Your word processing application is misconfigured”, i.e. your MS Word document is set to print to LETTER, but the printer only has A4 paper loaded. When the document arrives, the printer is saying “I need the LETTER paper that YOU told me you want to print on”. Dumb printer? Nah, dumb USER!
March 21st, 2010 at 3:58 pm
Ha ha, pathetic americans with their AM/PM time. I laugh at your face!
March 31st, 2010 at 11:31 am
I agree LEDs are overused. The worst I’ve seen yet are those Microsoft Intellimouse Explorers with the stupid red tail light. Why in heaven’s name does a mouse need a bright red light on it’s rear end? I immediately took mine apart and snipped the rear LED leads. It’s just something useless that was sucking USB power for no reason and lighting my room up at night.
I hate the blue ones too. Some of those are so bright you could use them on airport landing strips.
April 3rd, 2010 at 3:08 am
In the original IBM XT PC, if you turned in on without the keyboard connected it would stop booting (ie stop working) to give you an error message: ‘ERROR KEYBOARD NOT FOUND’, and then ‘PRESS ANY KEY TO CONTINUE’.
April 13th, 2010 at 12:17 pm
Re: LEDs. My current TV has an LED which is on when the TV is turned off and off when the TV is turned on. I can see why this would be annoying in a bedroom, but for the media room I love it:
(1) Light off and there’s no image? Means the TV isn’t plugged in.
(2) Light on and there’s no image? Means I need to turn the TV on.
(3) Light off and my movie is playing? Fantastic. I don’t have a glowing light distracting me from the image on the TV.
Re: PC LOAD LEGAL. The “PC” code is perhaps unnecessary, but virtually every printer I’ve owned has the capability of loading multiple sizes of paper. Knowing what size paper the printer needs to print the document currently sitting in the queue is valuable information — particularly if you’re dealing with a shared printer in an office setting and may have no idea what computer sent the document currently in queue (or which document is in the queue).
May 11th, 2010 at 2:29 pm
Led lights are great because they are long lasting and consumes less electricity.**-
June 25th, 2010 at 10:56 pm
I have a 1988 Commodore 1084S moniter. And the best thing about it is the has just has only a red on led, that is only on when the moniter is turned on. They do not make electronics today that last long, and have less anti-features like the Red off LED.
July 9th, 2010 at 9:26 am
i always wait and look on the internet about the latest consumer electronics items that i can buy.”~`
August 5th, 2010 at 10:35 pm
With early remote controls there was a wire that people used to trip over again and again. Thank god for infra red! But i think the worst mistake were those big floppy disks, endlessly getting jammed in the
Ben – Kindle Case
November 29th, 2010 at 11:19 am
Mistake #1: The Red Off Light
Advantages for me:
You can easily spot the device in the dark and switch it on.
You see it is powered, without the off light you’d be guessing.
Real design mistakes look different.
March 3rd, 2011 at 12:41 am
NFL Jersey $21.88
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web:tradetrusting
September 1st, 2011 at 6:46 pm
Thanks once more for a lot of things.