14 Poor Product Designs Where We Don’t Understand How They Got Off the Drawing Board

Product design is quite the complicated job. You have to keep in mind not only the ease of use of the product, but the readability of how it functions, and the practicality it will have out in the wild. Of course, this isn’t the job of only one person… Well, there are product designers, but there’s also testers and a whole working chain of people before something is released to the public.

This is why we always find it surprising when a strange, poorly designed product is released to the market. How can they have passed every instance of testing, every hand in the company, and not notice the mistakes? Maybe they didn’t care. In any case, here are some poorly designed products for your entertainment.

Bowling With Babies

This coffee mug is referring to making bowls, but all we can see is replacing a bowling ball with a baby. Not a sensible idea.

How To Squeeze A Lemon

The instructions shown here on how to use a lemon squeezer are, to our surprise, wrong. You’re meant to put the lemon in backwards than how it is shown in the picture.

Dirty Hair Clipper

This dog hair clipper has a design that makes it look like wet hair is sticking to it. Good luck trying to figure out if it was used or not.

Armrest

The name ‘armrest’ might suggest that you can rest your arms while sitting on a bench, but apparently, that isn’t always the case.

Eat Bland Food

The difference in fonts makes this message read completely wrong, to the point that our eyes naturally go to the bold text first. And we don’t want to eat bland food, thank you very much.

Magnet

Unless you’re sticking this magnet on the edge of your fridge, it will never stick properly due to the design of the curve. And to think it is meant to grab something else, all while not being able to keep steady itself.

Circular Organizer

Granted, with pill organizers, you only want to open them one day at a time. But on that day of the week where you’re refilling the organizer, not being able to have each section open at the same time is quite a pain.

Walking Pad Trap

Our hands are already used to the feel of remote controls for all kinds of appliances, with a circular set of buttons surrounding the main pause/play/stop button in the center. Here, the pause and stop button are at the bottom, with the center one being to accelerate to 3mph. Quite the hazard indeed.

Bypassed Drawer

This bottom drawer has a lock so hotel guests can keep their stuff safe. And it is easily bypassed by removing the other drawers.

Topless Capybara

This strange capybara toy is meant to have its little paws on its chest, but instead it looks like it forgot to wear a bra.

Movie Coming Soon

It makes sense to promote movie adaptations of books in their own book series, although it all depends on execution. The movie that’s ‘coming soon’ here already came out three years ago, making this sticker incredibly outdated.

Trash Bench

This bench, while it can be bolted off, has no easy way to access its underside. Add to that the holes in the design, and the trash that it’s been collecting for years remains uncleaned by government staff.

Dumbo?

This is meant to be a Dumbo shirt for babies, with the final ‘o’ replaced with a heart. That replacement changes the meaning in more ways than one.

I Eye You

What we assume is meant to be read by this glasses case is “I see you,” but in reality, we read “I eye you,” which sounds like something a pirate would say.