Design flaws

It frustrates my wife no end how I can come home and not notice that she has cleaned the entire house or that the boys have strewn every toy all over the house, yet I will notice and get annoyed at the smallest design flaw
in something.

My latest annoyance is the trend for shirts to have buttons halfway down the sleeve on the outside with a strip of material with an eyelet on the inside to facilitate the rolling up of the sleeve. This is an okay idea, the fashion designer who came up with this must have observed that people (like myself) often roll their sleeves up.

But as far as I am concerned what is a good idea ( I say only good because you don’t actually need to stop your shirt sleeve unrolling with a button, but it is fashion where appearance is more important than function) has been let down by poor execution.

The button placement on the sleeves of my shirts sits squarely on the elbow joint which means I can only complete two rolls before covering the button under a third roll. Two rolls is too short as it leaves my sleeve halfway down my forearm, but three rolls is good. Admittedly some people may like two rolls but even so the length of material to wrap back to the button is too short and so ends up scrunching the rolls in an untidy mess.

The second grievance is try ironing the damn thing. The button is smack bang in the way of running the iron down to create a nice crisp edge.

Now I know that I am ranting about such a small thing, but it annoys the heck out of me because it could be a workable design by following the basic principle of product testing.

To make sure this (like any design) works well, test it out on a focus group and get feedback and make any necessary adjustments to improve
the design.

In this case, move the button higher to allow a third roll above the elbow and over to the inside of the sleeve more to allow for ironing the edge. And measure the length of material needed to wrap up to the button neatly to avoid scrunching the rolls.

Such simple alterations will fix the problems and bring this consumer back to purchasing these brands of shirts again. Meanwhile I hope my good old fashioned buttonless sleeves don’t have a wardrobe malfunction and unroll on me suddenly.