While looking at a few household cleaning tools, I noticed that many of them have a hole at the top of the handle for hanging them on the wall. However, only a few of the homes I’ve seen are equipped with enough hooks or pegs to accomodate a Swiffer, broom, and all the other hook-laden items. Many of them end up on the floor of a closet, or precariously propped up against a wall.

On the plus side, some of these products are actually designed to stand on their own. My inexpensive vacuum cleaner does just that, although it’s rather bulky when in the standing position. Given that most people probably have a shortage of hooks and other hanging attachments in their homes, I’m surprised that so few products are designed to be stored standing up.

Sure, making a product stand on its own requires an engineering effort and some extra parts. But once you add that feature, it can be a significant selling point — if you promote it properly, that is. The key is to provide messaging on the box, website, etc. that reminds people of the hassle of all the items that end up in a pile in the closet or garage, and then show how a product that stands by itself is the easier, hassle-free choice.

Of course, if such a trend caught on, manufacturers would have to start providing measurements of how much floor space each product takes up while standing, which is something I’ve never seen on a consumer product.

While reading through a design book, I came across an article about the history of the key ring. According to the book, the ubiquitous, tightly-wound metal rings that hold our keys together have only been around since the 1970s. If this was true, what did people use to keep their keys in order before then?

Still somewhat in disbelief, I asked some older relatives to confirm what I had read. At first, they were surprised to hear that there was ever a time before the modern key ring. But then they acknowledged that the 70s sounded about right for the date this simple innovation came to pass. When I asked what they used before that, they had a tough time remembering, but eventually described a different type of key organizer.

Let me get to the point of this story. Sometimes a design is so much better than its predecessors that customers eventually forget what it was ever like to live without it. To them, the innovation has always been there, and they can barely pinpoint when it actually came about. In other words, the things we take for granted — whether they be key rings, power steering, or the redial button on a phone — are so fundamentally useful that they become indispensable. And as we forget about the time before we had the benefit of these innovations, we silently cement them into our lifestyles as things we never intend to live without.

It’s counterintuitive, but if customers start to take your product for granted, you probably have a real winner on your hands.

I recently saw a few pictures of Braun’s original coffee grinder design. What struck me the most about it was their smart use of color. In particular, the place that you hold down on the lid and the button that starts the grinder were both red, while nothing else used any bright colors. At a glance, the user could immediately tell where to focus their attention.

I’m surprised we don’t see this more frequently in modern products. Specifically, color coding would be great on toasters, kettles, popcorn makers, and anything else that gets hot while in use. The designers could either use red or orange or yellow on the hot areas, or something like green or blue on the ones that are safe to touch. While people are pretty good at figuring out the surfaces to avoid, it certainly wouldn’t hurt to provide a little bit of guidance from the start.

Ever notice how different a product looks after a few years of regular use, compared to the day you first took it out of the box? Aside from normal wear and tear, some products just seem to fare better than others when it comes to long-term durability. Yet aside from fielding complaints from highly vocal customers, most companies probably never get to see what their typical product looks like after it’s spent time in the wild.

Sure, you can run simulations in the lab to mimic the effects of 10,000 key presses or 50 drops from a coat pocket. But these can’t possibly account for the huge variety of ways that real people use and abuse a device in their day-to-day lives. For instance, I once talked to a customer whose coworker had spilled an entire soft drink into their laser printer. Somehow I doubt that HP or Samsung runs lab tests on their printers for sugary beverage resistance. And there are thousands of other weird things that people do to products because, well, they’re people.

I propose a different approach to long-term durability testing. Manufacturers should randomly select a group of customers who would participate in a sort of trade-back program. After a set period of time, maybe three years or however long the product usually lasts, they would be able to exchange the old product for a brand new one, at no charge. The catch is that they have to return the old product to the company along with some notes on what they liked and disliked, especially regarding durability, along with anecdotes of how they used or abused it during ownership.

By using this process, product designers would learn a lot more about how their devices hold up in real usage. Coupled with the anecdotal evidence of how a particular customer made use of that device, this information should make it much easier to improve product durability and reliability.

When I look at the navigational menus on most DVDs, I am immediately struck by how busy everything is. Nearly every surface is either covered by an image, or a texture, or some sort of animation. Nothing is left unadorned, creating a very busy design that makes it hard for the viewer to accomplish their goals. The last time I checked, that means actually watching the movie or TV shows on the disc.

We can generalize this problem quite easily: if every element of a design is covered with patterns and complex images and videos and animations, you lose the natural hierarchy and contrast of the design. Everything screams out for attention, and nothing whispers in the background. And this isn’t just a problem with DVD menus: Flash websites, magazine ads, and other media are frequently loaded up with overly busy visual structures.

Here’s a simple rule of thumb: if your design has three or more distinct areas or layers, at least one of those should be simple, basic, and unadorned. Maybe this is the background area that you cover with a solid color, or the body text that you render as simple black-on-white. By giving that element a restrained and subtle visual presentation, you’re setting the stage for the rest of the design to be that much more interesting and engaging.