With my post Tap user interface failure still fresh in my mind, I was most amused to come across this post on Farmer Ted’s porch about the bad user interface of a clock.

This alarm clock is so badly designed it needed its own online technical support page!

So where’s the support page for that bloody tap in my bathroom?!!!

This is one of many shopping centres (malls) in central Singapore. So what is its name?

In a country where different cultures and languages mix freely and sometimes oddly, the idea of a shopping centre named “Pork Mall” is actually not that far fetched…

This is a very funny example of what can happen when designers work without sufficient awareness of the complete context of its use.

Surely someone must have supplied some sort of measurements during the briefing stage? Surely the designers would have visited the site?

This must be particularly embarrassing given the nature of the business. Assuming of course that people do notice these things. I have …

I spotted a rather nice looking simple desk clock in a local homeware store over the weekend. It was a rectangular white box with a square cross section. The face was made up of numerals formed by a matrix of bright white LED bulbs. All rather understated and nice looking.

The problem was on the back. There was a sticker which said: “Do not turn on …

This is a fun little demonstration on how we see, or don’t see, some things that are immediately in front of our eyes.

http://www.dothetest.co.uk/

Thanks to Gavin and Ingrid for this.

A display-window-sized poster scaring shoppers in front of a shop in Singapore.

I love these ads. Really clever (not not too clever). And very much appealing to the cerebral and not the visual (unlike most ads).

Well done to the Financial Review.

This is a real shop in Singapore.

Singapore is purportedly an English-speaking country.

Hence this must be a deliberate piss-take.

I can’t wait to discover their number two branch, named “doo doo” of course.

ROTFL

In this Sydney Morning Herald article, Clemenger’s Mr Morgan complained about how an ABC TV series The Gruen Transfer had demeaned and trivialised the advertising industry.

Maybe the ad industry felt threatened by the thousands of reader-created mashup ads on the series’ website. Or perhaps by the sheer amount of ordinary people who jumped at this opportunity to serve some back at the ad companies …

This funny and somewhat dark greenhouse calculator on the ABC’s website appealed greatly to my morbid sense of humour.

Prof. Schipinkee’s Greenhouse Calculator.

FYI I should die at age 49.1 years. Not bad. Only 11 years to go!

Spotted on The Register.