Some products simply were good enough decades ago and don’t need improvement. Yet, some smart designers keep trying to make them better – and making them worse in the process.

We have an iron at home that is such an example. If I gave it to you, you would not be able to turn it on without endless fiddling with it first. How could you make a simple household device so complicated that an “untrained” user cannot figure out how to turn it on?

I stay in hotels a lot, and therefore I get to try a lot of irons, different irons every time. I must say that more than half of the irons are poorly designed at best, and sometimes utterly annoying. Yesterday, I had to use this iron:

In the picture above you can see the dial under the handle that turns the iron on and sets the temperature. However, when the iron is in your right hand, it’s impossible to see what is marked on it,  and there is no reference mark. So you have to use your left hand to blindly turn the dial, turn it all the way to the stop, and hope you’re in the on position. To test that, you have to probe the surface with your hand, and if it is getting hot, you’re on. If it’s not, you’re off, and you have to turn the dial the other way.

The picture below shows my hand holding the iron. The space is so tight, even my fairly skinny engineer’s hand hardly fits in the opening.

The whole design is ludicrous.

Doesn’t somebody actually test these as prototypes before they mass-produce such utter junk? Ironing a single shirt with one of these points out numerous design flaws that frustrate millions of users in thousands of hotels every day.

And don’t even get me started about the spring-loaded power chord with the retract button that is supposed to pull the chord back into the unit – that never quite works properly after a few uses.

Irons should be locked down with simple, easily readable controls on top, clean, well-crafted handles, and a place to wrap the chord. Then we should stop trying to make them better. We’re not succeeding.