When a design doesn’t work, it often draws more attention to itself than when it works perfectly. A wobbly shopping cart, a flimsy potato peeler, a puzzling highway sign: These are common nuisances.

Design exists to solve problems—functional ones, aesthetic ones, or both. But sometimes, instead of improving things, it creates even more problems than it fixes. And if you need proof, just look at ...

Good design is meant to make life easier. But every so often, someone misses the point completely. From signs that proclaim, ...

The joke: "This trick stair saves you countless seconds. Instead of walking down the stairs at a normal pace, this design feature helps you dive down them." ...

Many commercial Web sites fail to pass even basic tests for usefulness and usability largely because their architects use faulty reasoning to justify defective decisions. That’s one of the conclusions ...

Design exists to solve problems—functional ones, aesthetic ones, or both. But sometimes, instead of improving things, it creates even more problems than it fixes. And if you need proof, just look at ...