December 2022 Product Bug List

Having enjoyed the creation of the previous Product Bug List so much, I want to make such a collection of everyday product observations a regular part of the product design posts on the site. For November and December of 2022, below are some of the many product experience “bugs” that I personally encountered during my normal-ish life:

1. A real personal property theft hazard, the Bluetooth signal on my MacBook does not turn off when the laptop is asleep and/or closed. It would be very easy to use a BT signal receiver to detect my laptop in my car.
2. Getting clothes dry-cleaned is expensive, and can be a logistical pain depending on where you live. There must be a way to bring this process into the home…
3. At the Atlanta airport, the new bin-based x-ray machines for luggage are terribly slow, and it might be the slowest TSA Pre-check experience I’ve had.
4. At the Denver airport, there are some very low-pressure water bottle filling stations that take a long, long time to fill up a Nalgene.
5. My MacBook is terrible at joining networks it has joined before. I need to turn the Wifi off and on to join a network after it fails the first try.
6. I can’t tell if this is a feature or a bug, but the auto start/stop feature on my car does not work when the battery is in the process of dying. It’s actually a nice way to know when to replace the battery, but without knowing that behavior, it would be confusing.
7. In my car, you needed a non-standard T45 bit to remove and reinstall the car’s battery. Not a huge hassle, but an extra $10 out the window to AutoZone immediately.
8. Both of the Thinkpad laptops I have are very slow to turn a monitor on and become usable if you are trying to use them in a closed configuration with a separate mouse and keyboard.
9. In a conference room at work, you need to create a calendar event with the room assigned to use the HDMI cable ported into the TV.
10. On the Foothills Parkway in Boulder, when the traffic light dies, it just defaults to flashing red in all directions… what I don’t understand is that the light still clearly has power, so why can’t it reset itself?
11. Cities and other predominantly urban areas don’t have great access to ultramarathons!
12. Ticket companies have major monopoly issues, and especially for an artist wanting to sell tickets to specific groups like a local region or a specific income bracket, it’s nearly impossible.
13. On a Breville tea-maker, the “Hot Water” has text on the button itself, which has faded over a year of use. Other buttons have text off to the side that has not been affected at all.
14. On the “Good and Gather” (Target’s in-house food brand) seltzer boxes, the orientation of the cans on the box images don’t match the actual cans inside, which has sometimes led to cans spilling out the front when the box is opened.
15. It is often very difficult to pull together full-sized teams for rec sports leagues, especially for sports like soccer. I would personally love a 3v3 or 5v5 soccer league with mini nets.
16. At the Bills-Jets game in Buffalo this year, the sky-cam on the wire running across the field broke, and the camera crashed onto the field. The bigger problem was that the camera couldn’t be unhooked and it delayed the game to remove it.
17. My relatively old MacBook Pro slows down substantially when it reaches 1% battery remaining, to the point that it is impossible to save work and perform critical actions before the laptop shuts down.
18. When I have the Apple Messages app open in another standalone desktop on Mac, the box to enter text in does not automatically become available to start typing– I need to hit Command+A or use the mouse to click on the box to start typing a message.
19. When trying to see what ski runs and lifts are open at a resort, you constantly have to cross-reference a list of runs, and a static image of a mountain map, which is often grainy. Why not just have the statuses on a live map?
20. Pop Tarts are one of my pre- and during-workout foods of choice, but the fact that each individual package doesn’t show the flavor of the Pop Tart if you purchase them in a box can be a problem if you have multiple boxes you end up combining to save space.
21. At the Denver airport (and I assume elsewhere as well), the de-icing of planes during a storm is a highly manual process that takes a long time, especially if you have a traffic jam of planes trying to leave.
22. A new backpack I recently received does not have a water bottle side pocket big enough to fit a standard Nalgene (I likely over-hydrate, admittedly)

In future Bug Lists, I am hoping to add more visual aids to call out the issues I am seeing, but hopefully my WordPress skills can accommodate such an endeavor…

Recess 026