Difficult-to-use products: the niggles that let you down

For me it was the first mobile I ever bought myself. I had always had Nokia phones but I was given promotion at work so treated myself to a new Sony Ericsson W880i (because someone who I liked had the same phone), but just could not get the hang of it at all so after 3 days boxed it up and gave it to my little sister, she was over the moon with it and i went back to Nokia’s.

Had the same problem when I bought a new laptop and was so used to windows 7 that I could not get used to windows 8.1, luckily after making a few changes it’s just like how windows 7 used to look so it’s all good again. (I dread to think what would happen if i moved from Windows to a Mac lol)

The Tassimo coffee maker that you have to move all the way across the worktop to access the water tank. The Bosch instant cup machine that you have to twist to get the water tank off.

Morphy Richards 48401 Food Slicer and Shredder , retails for £49.99, although I paid £19.99 for a special offer in a magazine.
It just mashes and mangles up what ever you put into it, wouldn’t even slice cucumber. Total waste of money !!

I gave up on an Ipad 4, just found Itunes such a pain to use and Apple puts so many limitatiions on how I like to do things. It was MY Ipad not Apples! why should I be restricted from accessing my files. I sold it and now have a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 which is beautifully superb and lets me set it up to work in the way I like to work, such a joy to use after that auful Ipad.

I bought a Canon bridge camera to replace an Ixus that I had lost. The new camera is capable of all sorts of clever things but it had no printed instruction book and I cannot cope with sitting at my computer trying to read the thing. It also has no viewfinder so that when shooting I cannot steady it against my face and nor can I see what I am shooting in bright sunlight. I have persisted with it but can be quite disgruntled.

I bought a blue-tooth earpiece for legally answering the phone in the car. I don’t get many mobile calls and found it a real nuisance to put on each time I used the car, mostly for no purpose. Then the battery ran out! Haven’t used it since.

Roberts digital radio alarm, Which best buy. The controls are a block of 12 or 15 flat rectangular buttons with no separation between them, making it very difficult to distinguish by feel which button you are pressing. Have had it for 2 years now and only regularly use 4 buttons but still find it awkward. I can’t imagine that either the designers or the Which testers tried using it while lying in bed in the dark.

I bought a Canon PIXMA MG7150 printer about 3 months ago and am still struggling to understand its controls. The problem starts with juggling the contents of no less than 3 instruction manuals (2 of which are online) and guessing which one covers the problem needing a solution. I’ve had several computers and printers since 1980 and thought I knew something about how they worked. The Canon is by far the cleverest printer I’ve owned but also the most complicated to use. Even the terminology used in the operating instructions is weird. As we advance we seem to go backwards – at least Canon does.

Incompatibility between gadgets drives me up the wall. Most modern gadgets have built-in obsolescence although, to be fair, there is a limit to the number of different shaped holes a manufacturer can punch in one piece of kit. Soon there’ll be no holes and the gadgets will just wave to each other; old fashioned machines, even those with the essential perforations, will be useless if they haven’t been taught to wave. Then different kinds of wave will become incompatible and off we go again. And then there’s the software….

I have a Pure Evoke-1 radio with a 12V power supply and a rechargeable Pure Evoke-3 radio with a 9V power supply that looks almost identical and has the same power connector.

I wonder what would happen if I plugged the 12V supply into the 9V radio.

That’s my nomination for dodgy design.

I have a Sharp combination microwave that I purchased mainly because of the large cavity – passing-on a perfectly good Panasonic combi. Frankly, I am considering selling it off, at quite a loss, and getting a new Panasonic. What drives me up the wall? It is the stupid feature that switches off the display – after only a minute or so of lack of input. After 5 – 10 minutes might be acceptable, but I ask you – How much electricity does a display use running 24/7/365? Certainly not as much as my GEC Nightstor electric boiler takes charging (overnight) for one minute.

A store brand food processor. It does all the things it says it will do, but bloomin ‘eck, cleaning it’s a nightmare.

Also, stopped using my bluetooth earset as it kept falling off my ear.

Also, i keep hitting the caps button instead of ‘a’ on this ipad!

My old and cumbersome Murphy Richards Coffee Machine has sadly almost reached its final days and I need to replace it. I have looked at the new models on display in various stores with some disdain as to me they slightly resemble something I would expect to find in a sci-fi movie so the new purchase has been put on hold for the time being.

However, during a recent spring cleaning session I came across an old Cona Coffee Maker I had kept because of its beautiful and elegant design with its two glass bowls and arced handles I had been reluctant to throw it away. I set about cleaning it up and it now has pride of place on the kitchen worktop and still makes a perfect cup of coffee. Fortunately I had kept the instructions as it is quite complicated and a bit scary to use with its hubble bubble action but it is a joy to watch the whole coffee making process through the glass bowls from start to finish. I doubt very much whether it would pass today’s stringent Health and Safety regulations though.

My disappointment of the year has to be the You View box that Talk Talk persuaded me to have. It promised to do all sorts of things that my Humax recorder could not do. So long as I use it regularly it is OK up to a point, but it will not let me do catch-up on BBC or the commercial channels for more than an hour. And it is so slow to get started. It has to wake up for a start and it is slower even than I at that! Once it has woken up it then takes ages to get “ready”. I have often given up trying to receive channels through the box and reverted to the remote that came with the TV. Do not be talked into having one of these boxes.

I bought my husband a Nokia Windows phone and the writing was so small and in either red or blue on a black background that he could not read it. He hated it. He now has a Samsung galaxy ace,and loves it.

Not really a consumer product problem, but definitely a niggle caused by bad design: Why is there always gulley grating right alongside the air line at motor service stations? If there’s one thing guaranteed to drop on the ground and roll into the gutter it’s tyre inflation valve caps; their route to an after-life is via the drainage gulley. Not by chance, the service station shop has a handy packet of four replacement tyre inflation valve caps for sale at an exhorbitant price. Of course, on pulling apart the packaging they all fly out and head for the drain. Well who has a pair of scissors in the car for neatly opening valve cap packets? In-built perpetuality – it’s the new obsolescence.

My two year old Ferguson digital dab/fm radio.,has no details in the window, and the preset buttons do not work. not repairable as in a sealed wooden case.

I used to moan about ironing days until I bought a steam generator (one recommended by Which) and there are no problems with ironing now.

My only, wish I hadn’t bought it product, is a Morphy Richards steam generator “Power Steam Elite”, elite it is not, I thought I would try a steam generator after years of using a Tefal steam iron, which has a wonderfully smooth ironing surface, little did I realise all irons aren’t the same, the Morphy Richards felt like it had something on the sole plate that required peeling off it was so hard to iron with. I gave up on it after about 6 ironing sessions. They always say you get what you pay for and maybe this is the problem because I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on something that I might not get on with I did go for one on the less expensive side.

So many products used regularly in the kitchen are badly designed ergonomically. Two I will mention here are kettles and water filters. Many kettles are narrower at the top with lids which do not open fully, so filling them at all is difficult, and from a water filter, impossible. I bought a cheapish Tesco kettle which I had to send back for this reason. I’ve now bought their Basic kettle, which is fine for opening, but the lead comes out at the front of the base making it awkward in my small kitchen.
Lookiing at kettles in general, there are so many to choose from, but very llittle difference between them.

Water filters – I have always used Brita, but will not buy them again. The jug designs differ mainly in colour and small details such as handle shape. They are all shaped to fit in the fridge door, altfhough I don’t know anyone who keeps theirs in the fridge, using them mainly for filling the kettle. The narrow shape makes them top heavy, easy to knock over, and they feel very heavy to lift. On the first one of the maxtra jugs I tried (Marella) the handle was not filled in all the way down, so the edges near the bottom cut into the hand. That went back to the shop My current jug (Fjord) has a strip of rubber around the base. I thought this was a good idea until I knocked it – instead of sliding along the worktop, the rubber strip gripped the surface, it fell over and onto the floor where it broke. I replaced it with the same design as I’d bought a year’s supply of filter cartidges, but am looking for an alternative ready for when that one breaks.

My big niggle is NOT with a gadget. It is with the nearly all the duvet covers on the market now. WHO’s idea was it that we should go back to using BUTTONS to fasten them up with? What was wrong with poppers, velcro or zips. Being of a certain age my friends and I have arthriticky hands or at the very least stiff fingers and find BUTTONS fiddley and therefore time consuming, especially as some of us do the fastening up again before putting our duvets into the washing machine to prevent everything else getting caught up inside the duvet. Please, please can we have a campaign to change this awful old fashioned way of fastening up duvets?

I have two internet radio’s including a Which recommended “Pure” brand. Worked great till it updated.
I have long suspected that the in-house reviewers of modern tech gadgets do not realise how difficult some menu’s are, with oft-required features hidden into several layers. I then have to go and find a manual – rarely paper – that tells me how to do things, or contact a helpdesk online. And it all takes time, when all I want to do is listen to a specialist online radio station.
I’ve ended up using my pc with the speakers on loud.