39 Everyday Products Hiding Design Flaws You’ve Never Noticed—Prepare to Be Shocked!
Ever stared at a door that insists you “pull” when clearly pushing seems way more intuitive? Or fought with that ridiculous plastic packaging around a block of cheese like you’re defusing a bomb? If this sounds painfully familiar, guess what? It’s not you — it’s the design. Don Norman famously nailed it in The Design of Everyday Things: “human error” is a myth. It’s all about design gone wrong, making our everyday lives a little, or a lot, more frustrating. Here, Redditors have rallied to call out the most maddeningly flawed products that somehow keep weaseling their way into our homes and offices. Ready to cringe, laugh, and maybe even nod in furious agreement? Scroll on — misdesigns you never knew you tolerated (but really shouldn’t) are waiting to be exposed. LEARN MORE.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Successfully getting plastic wrap pulled to the length needed, cut and actually placed on the item in a nice rectangle or square.
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.
Scissors that are in packaging that can’t really be opened with anything other than scissors.
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.
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.
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!
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