Bad Hardware UI Design

I am cheap. I admit this by way of explanation for why I often buy the lowest cost functional equivalent for many of the things I use. In electronics, this means that I will purchase the no-name brand if it offers the same functionality as the branded version. Looking at Gigabit Ethernet PCI NICs recently, I realized that they were ALL using the exact same Realtek chip. Thus it made no difference which one I purchased, they were all basically the same component on a PCB implementing the chip maker's reference design, with price as the only differentiator. You could possibly argue that there are differences in quality of PCB fabrication or assembly, but they are all made in China, and there's a pretty good chance that multiple brands came off the same assembly lines, or at least lines at the same manufacturer. They have all been cost reduced to the bleeding edge of functionality, so to my thinking they are all basically the same.

The differences that do pop up between the name brand products and the no-name versions are in the little design details. It struck me twice this weekend when I ran across amusing examples of bad hardware user interface design. The first was this USB drive housing for ATA hard drives:


Notice that they have helpfully labeled the LED as "LED." What does the LED indicate? I have no idea. To find out, I would have to read the documentation. And I'll bet that it was not written or edited by a native English speaker. I'm okay with this, because I bought the $19 box instead of the $29 box, and I'd rather have the $10 than a well-labeled LED since I'm generally not looking at it anyway. Still, I find it kind of sad that it was important enough to cast the text under the LED into the metal of the housing, but not important enough to actually convey any information with it.

Likewise, this consumer widget helpfully indicates the specific color of the LEDs:


Now, you might glean some additional information from the adjacent position labels on the switch, inferring that green means it is cooling and red means it is warming. Although it could also be that green means it is working, and red means it is not. Or green means that it is at temperature, and red means it is in the process of changing temperature. I just don't know. In any case, perhaps this is the last market differentiator available at the low end. If I had a choice between the cheap item with a random, useless UI design, and one in which someone had put several hours of thought into how to make it slightly more usable, I'd probably buy the slightly more usable one. Although only if it doesn't cost any more...