As we saw in an earlier post, designing a child lock is no piece of cake. Neither is baking a piece of cake with kids around if you use the stove that Phil from Canada bought. He reports:

To avoid little kids burning themselves on a hot stove or changing the temperature of the pie baking in the oven, my new GE Profile Range comes equipped with a child lock (press buttons 9 & 0 for 3 seconds to engage). Great!

(Photo by GE)

Unfortunately, two minor oversights:

1. Turning on the childlock switches off any baking in progress (so you cannot use it to avoid little fingers from changing the settings on the oven or pressing the “off” button when you’re not watching)

2. The electric heating element controls are not lockable, so careless fingers can still get burned if they manage to turn on the heat.

Torsten from Germany was looking for a disabled function in the Microsoft Office tool ‘Visio’. Opening the ‘Disabled items’ window shows that there are no disabled items… except for the disabled ‘Enable’ button.. Ouch!

Paul from the Netherlands has two young kids and his old washing machine couldn’t keep up with the loads of laundry anymore, so he desperately needed a new one. With his kids having access to the laundry room, his major requirement was that the new machine would be kiddy proof. The washing machine salesman convinced him to buy this Samsung machine with child lock:

Unfortunately, his 2-year old daughter hacked it within 2 hours… The child lock is enabled by pressing 2 keys for 5 seconds, clearly a job too difficult for impatient toddlers, but the Samsung designers forgot to include the power button in the child lock scheme. Pressing it once disables the machine. Pressing it once again doesn’t resume it, it brings the machine in its initial idle configuration (although still child locked). So there’s no way to resume the original program, you’ll just have to rerun the program entirely and hope it doesn’t get messed with in the meantime.

Welcome to crappy design! On this site we’re going to keep track of ideas that were meant to be good, but didn’t turn out well.. Any idea is welcome, from past to present, from annoying to disastrous. Just submit everything you think is worthwhile to publish here, so we can share it with others and either learn from it or have a good laugh.

Have fun!