Bad Design - (James Regan)

The George Foreman 360 grill:

This grill has an overall good design but parts of it just fall flat and make it frustrating to use properly.  First, I believe (but am not sure) that there is only 1 way to attach each of the plates, so, even though all of the plates except the bottom lined plate give the affordance of symmetry I have difficulty each time I try to put the plate on.  Worse, there is very little obvious causality for when the plate is actually attached and will not simply fall off when I try to close it.  

Another problem in the design is that while it has a temperature slider it is simply labeled Low to High and has no mention of the temperatures that go with each power setting.  This means that without the instruction manual there is no way to be certain that you will choose the right setting for new foods.  This caused a problem recently when I tried to make pancakes on it.  I thought since it looks like a griddle it might be able to be used like a griddle, however because the temperature was not given I didn't realize that the grill did not get hot enough to actually cook the pancakes.

James J Regan IV
COO Emeritus Consulting
B.S. Computer Science
B.A. Linguistics
University of Rochester
Class 2010