Get Premium
Dark mode theme is available exclusively for premium users. Learn more about the benefits of subscribing.
No fees, cancel anytime.
No fees, cancel anytime 
then open in external browser
and click "Open in External Browser" 
People Point Out 50 Popular Products With Design Flaws Everyone Has Just Learned To Accept
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.
#1
Electoral College voting system for US president.
RELATED:
#2
Any product that has removable stickers that don't peel off easily and leave residue that requires Goof Off to remove. Idiots.
Bob Brooce 1 week ago
I get it when it's a price label and being easily removable would let people peel it off and replace it with something else. Others should be thicker material with a weaker adhesive.
#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.
Geoffrey Scott 1 week ago
Salesman:" Unfortunately this Escape SE does not have a large screen, all it has is a Driver Info Center"..."You don't understand, that's a selling point for us".
#5
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.
Kurt Ramsey 1 week ago
This is the single most genius idea i have heard. Get this person their Noble Prize now.
#6
The bag in the box of cereals should be ziploc.
Nota Robot 1 week ago
I just transfer the contents to a convenient container with lid. Otherwise, rolling up the excess plastic of the inner packaging and holding it in place with a clothespin will work in a pinch. Lastly, opening the inner packaging over all the width is not necessary. Cutting off a corner is enough if you go fir the clothespin solution.
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.”
#7
**Blinding headlights!!!**
On newer vehicles.
#8
Plastic clamshell packaging the amount of times I've got cut.
Schrödinger's Douchebag 1 week ago
When you buy scissors and you need scissors to open the packaging.
#9
Why can't I push a button on my TV to make my remote beep?
Kurt Ramsey 1 week ago
Okay, the toliet foot pedal is still the best, but this is clearly runner-up.
#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.
#14
Hand soap pump bottles with the tube that’s not long enough to get out all the soap.
#15
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.
Bob Brooce 1 week ago
Don't be ridiculous. You're *supposed* to wear your glasses while showering.
#16
“Skip Intro” should be a setting, not something i need to select every 21 mins.
#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
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?
I Dunk My Caramel Milk Chocolate In BBQ Sauce 1 week ago
Yes, I never played with batteries as a kid but I was not a dumb baby.
#20
Shampoo bottles that flip open so easily in luggage but NEVER when you’re in the shower with slippery hands.
Grace Knowlton 1 week ago
Or you accidentally drop because wet hands and the freaking lid breaks
#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.
Sally Moen 1 week ago
Tamper-proof packaging is all thanks to the a55hat Tylenol po1soner back in the '80's
#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.
pfeils wife 1 week ago
YES! A commercial comes on and its 10x louder than the show I'm watching. I think they do themselves a disservice when they do this because I immediately mute the TV, which means I'm not hearing ANY of their ad. Leave it the F alone and I won't mute it.
#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.
Michael Largey 1 week ago
So the contents go bad early and you have to go out and buy more. What are those manufacturers thinking anyway?
#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.
Daniel Atkins 1 week ago
Just remember these slides replaced the metal ones with pea gravel at the bottom.
#29
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.
#30
30 thousand buttons on TV remotes. Personally, I use like 5 at most 😅.
Hobby Hopper 1 week ago
Roku has this figured out. Their remotes are simple and intuitive, yet highly functional.
#31
The human body. Like why is my breathing apparatus a choking hazard when I eat or drink??
Bob Brooce 1 week ago
Because evolution is guided by chemistry and physics, but still fairly haphazard.
#32
Whoever set the arbitrary length of the average bathtub needs dangling out of a window by their ankles, IMHO.
Sally Moen 1 week ago
I want a Japanese-style hot tub-thingy, so I can sit up or lounge in the nice hot bath and get my whole body in, right up to my nose.
#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
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.
StrangeOne 1 week ago
We need a place to put our coats and purses when we wash our hands, instead of trying not to get our winter coats and purses all wet and gross.
#35
Successfully getting plastic wrap pulled to the length needed, cut and actually placed on the item in a nice rectangle or square.
#36
Anything I had to adjust as a left handed person to use because the standard is right handed only.
Sally Moen 1 week ago
There's an evil bias in writing pads and stationery to righties. Doesn't seem good that lefties get ink or pencil smeared on their palms as they work, nor that there isn't a universal scissors that can be easily used by both right handed and left handed people
#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.
Bat cat in a hat 1 week ago
That's with everything that works like that, tissues, baby wipes, cleaning wipes, bin liners. It's infuriating!
#38
Scissors that are in packaging that can't really be opened with anything other than scissors.
Oerff On Tour 1 week ago
A bandsaw would work. Or a blowtorch. And what about a stick of dynamite?
#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.
Bob Brooce 1 week ago
On my S9, and probably all modern Android phones once you have a cursor anywhere in the text holding the space bar turns the entire keyboard area into a touch screen for easily moving the cursor to exactly where you want it. I suspect that iPhones have a similar feature that most people just don't know about.
#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?
I Dunk My Caramel Milk Chocolate In BBQ Sauce 1 week ago
No it wouldn't but the additional £0.01 it would take would just be TOO MUCH for the company's budget /s
#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.
#43
Why isn’t bacon packaging resealable?!
#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!
Geoffrey Scott 1 week ago
Metal cans.. as a custodian, whose job involved every 3rd or 4th year paint touch up, a screwdriver hole poke or two in the pour side in the sealing part of the can allows the paint to drain back in, also a quick brush stroke around the rim helps get it to seal better too.
#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.
Green Tree 1 week ago
I've realized a lot of bath bombs are just epsom salt with coloring and scent. They still make nice gifts but for myself I use dollar store epsom salt and a couple drops of essential oil for pennies.
#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!!!!
#50
PAPER STRAWS, ON GOD THEY ARE ANNOYING AS F.
Continue reading with Bored Panda Premium
Unlimited content Ad-free browsing Dark mode 
What do you think ?
MeowZedong 1 week 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 1 week 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.
Child of the Stars 1 week ago
Right?? A fair number of these are people not using something correctly or efficiently in the first place or there's fairly simple workarounds. I don't have any problems with like 80% of this list.
Load More Replies...
Toothless Feline 1 week ago
There are numerous grocery products I don’t buy in particular brands solely because of the packaging. My latest one is refrigerated pickles. Almost every brand except Claussen uses these plastic tubs with really shallow lids that are overfilled with brine, guaranteeing a mess when you pull off the tab to open them for the first time. Claussen and Kroger put refrigerated pickles in glass jars, just like the shelf-stable pickles are packaged in. (I don’t care much for the flavor profile of the Kroger pickles, though, so I usually just wait for the Claussen to go on sale and stock up. About once every two months, Kroger puts out a digital coupon to get any Claussen jar for $3.99, good on up to five jars at once. The regular price at Kroger here is nearly twice that.)
Sue 1 week ago
Why are sugar, flour & cornflour still sold in bags, even when so many other products changed their packaging due to tampering?
Mike F 1 week ago
If the product is coming out of the bag, it's pretty evident that someone messed with it.
Load More Replies...
BrunoVI 1 week ago (edited)
How about not having every electronic device use the same, simple beep to communicate to me. Ever have an appliance beep every 5 minutes as some sort of warning? You can't possibly find the beeping appliance if you have to wait 5 minutes between beeps. How about distinct beeps? Or better yet: Half of these appliances have LED screens on them. How about they use those to communicate the problem? Or, I don't know, I can buy a talking greeting card for $1.25. Maybe have the appliacance actually say, "the dishwasher door is ajar" (and just put up with the Dads denying that fact).
Sandy Jones 1 week ago
I want the scroll bar on the right side on the screen to be larger then a fleck of pepper
SchadenFreudian Psychology 1 week ago
The population is aging, and a lot of packaging is worse for people with bad eyesight, mobility problems, lower dexterity, etc. If business people were smarter, they would consider this when designing their products.
MeowZedong 1 week 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 1 week 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.
Child of the Stars 1 week ago
Right?? A fair number of these are people not using something correctly or efficiently in the first place or there's fairly simple workarounds. I don't have any problems with like 80% of this list.
Load More Replies... Toothless Feline 1 week ago
There are numerous grocery products I don’t buy in particular brands solely because of the packaging. My latest one is refrigerated pickles. Almost every brand except Claussen uses these plastic tubs with really shallow lids that are overfilled with brine, guaranteeing a mess when you pull off the tab to open them for the first time. Claussen and Kroger put refrigerated pickles in glass jars, just like the shelf-stable pickles are packaged in. (I don’t care much for the flavor profile of the Kroger pickles, though, so I usually just wait for the Claussen to go on sale and stock up. About once every two months, Kroger puts out a digital coupon to get any Claussen jar for $3.99, good on up to five jars at once. The regular price at Kroger here is nearly twice that.)
Sue 1 week ago
Why are sugar, flour & cornflour still sold in bags, even when so many other products changed their packaging due to tampering?
Mike F 1 week ago
If the product is coming out of the bag, it's pretty evident that someone messed with it.
Load More Replies... BrunoVI 1 week ago (edited)
How about not having every electronic device use the same, simple beep to communicate to me. Ever have an appliance beep every 5 minutes as some sort of warning? You can't possibly find the beeping appliance if you have to wait 5 minutes between beeps. How about distinct beeps? Or better yet: Half of these appliances have LED screens on them. How about they use those to communicate the problem? Or, I don't know, I can buy a talking greeting card for $1.25. Maybe have the appliacance actually say, "the dishwasher door is ajar" (and just put up with the Dads denying that fact).
Sandy Jones 1 week ago
I want the scroll bar on the right side on the screen to be larger then a fleck of pepper
SchadenFreudian Psychology 1 week ago
The population is aging, and a lot of packaging is worse for people with bad eyesight, mobility problems, lower dexterity, etc. If business people were smarter, they would consider this when designing their products.
You May Like “Hand Sanitizer In A Water Bottle”: 50 Stupidly Dangerous Designs That Defy Logic These Creative Business Cards Surely Win The Advertising Game
Donata Ruzgaitė
Akvile Petraityte 🇺🇦
Related on Bored Panda
