Task 4: Bad Design

Due Sep 15.

Carefully observe objects or devices around you and find ONE that you feel is very confusing to operate or to understand. Choose either a

 badly designed object or product
 badly designed display or control
 badly designed signage or labelling

“Badly-designed” in this context means that users misunderstand the designer’s intent, resulting in erroneous usage. The designer’s solution could have been seriously flawed or doesn’t follow human factors principles. Focus on communication and interaction problems, such as package designs which cause the user to open it the wrong way eventually causing the contents to spill, or confusing road signage which could cause a driver to make the wrong move. Choose objects which cause confusion in operation as a result of the designer’s ignorance or misjudgement of how the user would interact with it. Unacceptable cases include those that merely require “upgrading” or re-styling a seemingly old-fashioned product or graphic to reflect contemporary aesthetics. Lack of durability, wasteful consumables, environmental damage, unappealing colours, wrong fonts, old-fashioned logos, etc are issues NOT appropriate for this assignment. This project is NOT about badly designed shapes, forms or graphics.

Observe and document how people wrongly interact with the bad design and what consequences occur as a result of the human error. Only original photos allowed: NO WEB IMAGES!

Present as an A3 poster a before-after analysis of your case, with annotations as to the design errors present. Sketch your suggested improvement.

You also have to upload a copy of your poster into the FBE Submit Folder and your blogsite.

See resources for this task here.