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84 Everyday Items With Design Flaws So Bad, They Might Make You Wonder Who Approved Them
Interview With Expert
In his bestselling book The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman makes a sharp observation: there’s no such thing as “human error,” only flawed design.
So if you’ve ever hesitated at a door labeled “pull,” wrestled with the impossible plastic packaging on a slice of cheese, or spent your first day at a new job trying to decode the office coffee machine like it’s a riddle, you’re not alone—and you’re not to blame.
The truth is, design shapes how we move through the world, and when it fails, it’s worth talking about. That’s exactly what Redditors have been doing: calling out popular products that, despite being everywhere, still manage to frustrate.
Scroll down to see which ones hit a nerve for you too.
This post may include affiliate links.
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#2
Any product that has removable stickers that don't peel off easily and leave residue that requires Goof Off to remove. Idiots.
#3
The ‘push here’ perforated part of a cardboard box (like a box of kosher salt or corn starch) that NEVER works and instead just dents the box and makes it even harder to open.
Naturally, when you come across a product that’s frustrating—whether mildly annoying or a total disaster—the first question, after wondering if you’re the problem, is often: Who designed this?
To explore that question, Bored Panda reached out to two industrial design students to ask how they ensure their designs are actually usable—and whether it’s true that what we call “user error” is really just bad design.
Turns out, they agree with that idea.
“As designers, it’s our responsibility to make products that are accessible, intuitive, and easy to use. If someone struggles with it, that usually means we didn’t design it well enough,” Jessica Garcia told us.
“A good product should guide the user naturally—without requiring a manual. When we design, we need to test and think from the user’s point of view. If we skip that, we’re not really designing for them. It’s not just about how we think something should work, but how it actually feels and functions in their hands.”
#4
Every modern car with a touchscreen instead of buttons. It's just dangerous and needs banning.
#6
Why don’t toilets have a pedal you can step on to raise and lower the seat?
If you stand to pee, put one foot on the pedal and it will lift the seat. Walk away and it will go down automatically.
Kaitlyn Chuang added that the best designs are “intuitive—so much so that the user doesn’t really have to think about how to use it.”
“If someone misuses a product, it often points to a breakdown in communication between the designer and the user,” she explained.
She also referenced another famous quote by Don Norman: “Good design is invisible.” You only notice it when it fails.
“Take doors, for example. How many times have you instinctively pulled one with a handle, only to find out it was a push door? That’s not the user’s fault—that’s bad design.”
“As designers, we’re responsible for anticipating a wide range of user behavior. That’s why we test—because people will often interact with things in ways we never expected. I’ve had moments where someone used a product I made completely differently than I intended. It can be frustrating, but that’s where real improvement happens. Those moments push us to iterate and design with greater clarity, accessibility, and empathy.”
#10
Expiration dates on food packaging. It seems like it’s always a scavenger hunt to find them. It should be standard that they are always on the “front” main label.
#11
Where are my goddam files?
Windows, Apple, everything tries to hide the location where they're storing their files. No I don't want to default to storing on onedrive, I just want to be able to find my goddam files.
#12
The toilet brush. It should be fully hydrophobic or something so that it doesn’t retain toilet water after use.
#13
Shampoo and conditioner labels that look identical if you aren't wearing glasses. I have an idea for a brand called Shampoo (or conditioner) for People with Glasses, and the first letter of Shampoo is enormous.
#17
Trying to "type" anything on a search with the TV remote is excruciating. It's 2025, is this the best we can do?
#18
Any kind of squeeze bottle that can't be stood on its head. Ketchup, mustard, shampoo, conditioner, etc. When it's almost empty, let me stand it upside down so the last bit can flow to the opening!
#19
Shampoo bottles that flip open so easily in luggage but NEVER when you’re in the shower with slippery hands.
#20
I understand that battery compartments needed to be made more difficult for small children to open (specifically the type of small children who put everything into their mouths). But was a screw the best idea? A microscopic screw, threaded into plastic, and made of the softest metal available?
#21
The seal on bottles that has that itty bitty piece of plastic you’re supposed to pull to get it off. Absolutely never works. They should save the plastic and just have us do what we’re going to do anyway.
#22
Volume on streaming channels. Can we all agree on what 6is in volume and just let everyone scale from that. Watching Netflix volumes is ok. Switch to Hulu and IT BLOWS ME OUT OF MY SEat until I can find the remote.
#23
Food packages that are resealable but the glue they use is to adhere the seal zip to the bag is weaker than the seal. So when you go to re-open the seal, the seal zip pulls away from the bag and there goes the resealable feature.
#24
Why the hell does my stove / oven / microwave not have a battery in it that can withstand a .008 second power outage so I don't have to reset the time?
#25
The doors in bathroom stalls. Why is the gap so big? And why do they insist on making them swing inward on such a small space? I practically have to climb the toilet to get around the door to get out.
#26
When trying to highlight something to copy and paste it elsewhere, why has the highlighting become less and less precise and harder to use? Sometimes it picks up a space after the words highlighted (even if no space exists). On some webpages it simply will never select the portion of text you want. Microsoft products, Salesforce, and online are all big offenders. It also seems worse in some browsers than others (one of the few things I don't like about Firefox).
Do people know what I'm talking about? This is on multiple PCs in multiple environments so no it isn't just that my setup is jacked. The UI just seems to get worse and worse.
Oh and if Microsoft can keep their hands off Notepad that'd be nice. I want a place where I can paste stuff to strip off any invisible markup tags/language.
#27
The clear plastic film on things like potato salad with a tiniest little tab you are supposed to grab to pull it off. And the indestructible battery packaging.
#28
Playgrounds.
Somehow 90% of playgrounds were designed by people who haven't interacted with a child since they were one and have amnesia of their entire childhoods.
Let's make sure the slide is a dark color and angled in a way that it is baked directly in the sun for the majority of the day, that shouldn't be a problem, right? The bottom will be shaped so that all the gross rain water and dirt pools at the end for days after it's rained, so that will take care of that!
There are a lot of other toys and baby products that were clearly not designed by parents, but playgrounds are one of the worst.
#30
Reaching for the Immodium anti-diarrhea box you hurriedly bought only to discover the pills are individually bubble-sealed in plastic that takes 10 minutes+ to separate to get just 1 pill at a time. Solution: Just c**p yourself & apologize to everyone with you in the car for the rest of the 10 hr trip.
#32
Whoever set the arbitrary length of the average bathtub needs dangling out of a window by their ankles, IMHO.
#33
Those stretchy b******e seals on some condiments, e.g. ketchup, that doesn't allow anything to come out of the bottle until you're squeezing it hard enough to drown whatever you're trying to put the condiment on. "Oh, you wanted a thin line or a small dollop? Best I can do is half the bottle...".
#34
Anything I had to adjust as a left handed person to use because the standard is right handed only.
#35
Women's public restrooms. Older people and disabled need a bar to pull on to get up in all stalls. Seats need to be a trusted design not something to squat over or line with toilet paper. There need to bee multiple hooks so nothing has to touch the floor, for coat, purse, shopping bags. And wider stalls so you don't bump into your things. And toilet paper that you don't have to scratch for the edge. Maybe just bidets. Other countries have solved these problems (and many others) but we are stuck in our dysfunctions.
#36
Successfully getting plastic wrap pulled to the length needed, cut and actually placed on the item in a nice rectangle or square.
#37
It used to be that the next tissue would effortlessly pop up out of the Kleenex box, ready for use. Now you have to reach into the box, fish around for a tissue edge, peel one off the clump, and hope you don't rip it getting it through that awful plastic portal.
#38
Scissors that are in packaging that can't really be opened with anything other than scissors.
#39
Trying to place your cursor on iPhone texts. Like if I mess up a spelling two sentences ago, it is almost impossible to get the cursor to go the right place to make the correction. It highlights the entire word, or goes one or two letters over or entire words over from when I’m trying to correct. You can “drag and drop” the cursor too but that always seems to work worse for me.
#40
Zip technology. It hasn’t changed since forever, and the f*****g zipper on my jacket still gets caught in the cloth.
#41
Deodorant caps are smooth plastic and impossible to open with wet or recently moisturized hands. Would it k**l them to put a couple ridges on those caps?
#42
Absolutely any product that has an electrical cord... it should have cord management built in. The worst offender is my coffee maker. It makes the whole counter look funny because the stiff cord will not stay hidden.
#45
Tabs on food packaging.
I think someone out there thinks they did a great job inventing something that enables people to give a slight pull and hey presto - bacon!
Sadly no. That person is living a lie.
#46
Steel paint cans! They're incredibly messy simply to pour paint out of into a pan or cutting cup, then you have to messily try to wipe the paint out of the groove so that you can close it without spattering paint everywhere, trying to seal it so that it's not dried up when you want to touch up the room. But then when you do, odds are great that it's rusted inside and as soon as you pry off the lid it drops a whole bunch of rust particles into that paint that you needed.
Of course professional painters don't care about this, they are long gone when you need to open that can again.
My mind was blown recently by Home Depot's new paint system of plastic cans with pouring lids. Goodbye Benjamin Moore, hello Behr!
#47
Bath bombs being shrink wrapped. Someone really needs to come up with a better way to package them. Getting them open often involves shredding part of the bomb.
#48
The reseal sticker on ground coffee. They never stick. Not once. You always have to use your own tape.
#49
The fact that the paper sticks to Reese's peanut butter cups and peels off the chocolate!!!!
#51
Trash cans that don’t fit standard size trash bags. And they come with an impossible to remove sticker.
#52
I have yet to buy a vacuum where the cord is long enough to do my whole living room. Another foot and I wouldn't have to change plugs in the middle of vacuuming. It annoys me every time.
#53
Cars are designed to travel at speeds far in excess of the speed limit and increasingly with poor visibility and completely reckless acceleration. They also come equipped with driver distraction features.
#56
Individual fruit cups. No matter how I hold them or how carefully I try to peel the plastic, the liquid spills every time. I hardly ever buy them because of this. I can just imagine the mess kids make if they are packed in their lunch.
#57
Allow me to introduce the supposed world’s best design company. Pioneered a very innovative way of charging a mouse where you can’t use it while charging. I’m talking about the Apple “magic” mouse, and of course this mouse is useless compared to something like a mx master 3.
#58
The juice boxes with the little straws... it always feels like there is some juice left over in the box after you've sucked everything out with that little straw. Same with the Milk cartons with the plastic pour tab on the top.
#59
Every streaming service that has a series should have a “reset series” button for rewatches.
As it is, the second time I watch a series, every episode either starts at the credits or it just gets confused about which episode to play next. So it’s totally unreliable for the second watch.
Edit: Just adding on two good-sounding suggestions from other comments:
One person said that Hulu allows you to delete a series from your watch history, which would do this, if you go into the “watch history” menu. That’s a bit buried, but props to Hulu if that works.
Another commenter said that you can just create a temporary profile for each rewatched show on any/most streaming services, and then delete that profile once the rewatch is over.
I haven’t tried that, but it sounds like a clever around.
Credit to those two users for those ideas. (Sorry, finding and linking to your user names is way too much work from cell phone!).
#60
The little blue cheese dressing dipping cups for wings should be OBLONG NOT CIRCULAR. That way it actually allows you to dip a wing on its side correctly.
#61
Any tube-based product where you can’t squirt out the last of the non-newtonian goop (looking at you, ketchup and toothpaste).
#63
Hellman's mayo packets that they hand out at fast food restaurants. The perforated 'open here' corner works great...if you have snapping turtle strength in your fingers.
#65
Automotive vehicles having blind spots for over 100 years. A light? How about a better mirror and a light?
There are purposeful flaws built in cars to make things difficult for us to maintain, which makes being a mechanic frustrating.
#66
Glasses should have parts that you can adjust to get the fit right . Everyone’s face is different and many peoples’ ears are not level so this would make it so much easier, practical, comfortable and stop people like me snapping the arms off from continuously trying to bend them so that they fit level on my face.
#67
Outlook making find an old email impossible, even when searching the correct keywords, especially when it’s in a folder specifically saved for later and not deleted.
#70
The pull tabs on frozen pizza boxes never work. I try but end up ripping it open by the flaps of the box.
#71
Yes! Especially those cherry tomatoes with a flimsy cellophane cover and the bar code on the bottom. Turn it over to scan at checkout, hear the cover give way and then little tomatoes rolling everywhere. Perhaps a bit wasteful, but now I grab plastic bags in the meat dept and put things like this and leaky packaging in it. (Yeah, I am calling you out Dole pineapple chunks!).
#72
Microsoft Outlook Calendar. Show me upfront who accepted, and if someone proposes a new meeting time just give me a big accept button.
#75
Hulu not providing a "Mark as watched" type selection that you can use to mark an episode of a show as having been watched.
#76
My microwave can’t run both a timer and be used at the same time. Just why would they do that.
#77
Scotch Finger biscuits.
They really look like they should break down the middle every time, don't they?
#79
Clunky streaming UI. WHY don't I have the option to remove watched shows from my Saved lists without having to navigate with 6 clicks?
#81
Blundstone work boots. The material cannot withstand any sort of punishment or heavy use, but they are still marketed as work boots.
#82
Doona/duvet covers with the buttons at the bottom end, meaning you have to perform magic/crawl inside to get the doona in properly. It's 2025 and we can't at least have the opening on the long side? Or a zip/buttons around two sides? Something!
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What do you think ?
MeowZedong 9 months ago
The worst is when you buy a product and they won't let you use it without creating an account with them.
Little Bit 9 months ago
Built in apps on smartphones. I use probably about 5 apps regularly. My phone has about 30 built in apps, all using up my data, that I will never ever use for as long as I live but you can't delete them because apparently your phone won't work correctly.
MeowZedong 9 months ago
The worst is when you buy a product and they won't let you use it without creating an account with them.
Little Bit 9 months ago
Built in apps on smartphones. I use probably about 5 apps regularly. My phone has about 30 built in apps, all using up my data, that I will never ever use for as long as I live but you can't delete them because apparently your phone won't work correctly.
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