rotary dial telephone
I've heard the telephone acclaimed as a triumph of intuitive design. I think
not. I remember learning to use the telephone as a child, and I still
remember the frustration involved with learning its idiosyncracies. You had
to turn the stiffly-sprung dial all the way from zero to the digit you were
trying to select, then wait for it to ratchet back. It was easy for your
finger to slip out of the little holes, and if you were in a hurry and didn't
get the dial twisted all the way against the stop, you'd get a different
number from what you thought you were dialing.
I was just about ready to leave home when my parents got a pushbutton phone, but when I got my own, it was still rotary dial - our local telco wanted almost 50% over the base price just for the pushbutton phone. Later, when tone dialing came in, there was still a surcharge, but by then cheap pushbutton dispos-a-phones were available, and I simply flipped the switch so it would talk to my rotary line.
ice trays
When I was a kid - hell, up into the 1980s - ice trays were made out of
aluminum, with a lever-operated louver arrangement that was supposed to crack
the frozen clump of ice into cubes. The setup, common for at least forty
years, simply didn't work - the ice would freeze solidly to the cubes, and you
could pull the lever right off without budging a single cube. So you'd stand
there at the sink, running warm water over the ice tray, trying to extract a
couple of cubes to drop into your drink.
It's possible a coating of Teflon or something similar might have kept the cubes from sticking to the louver so tenaciously, but if anyone ever tried it, I missed it. Instead, someone finally got the idea that a flexible plastic tray might work. It took a few years before they found a plastic that you couldn't rip apart with your bare hands, but after that it was smooth sailing.
gas pumps
Gas pumps used to be simple. You took the nozzle off the holder, flipped the
holder up or a lever down, depending on the pump, and pumped gas. No problem.
A couple of years ago the gas companies started getting innovative. Now you might have one nozzle for four different grades of gas, with one of those horrible feel-the-membrane panels to try to select what you want to do, as well as whether you're paying cash or credit, inside or outside, or whatever. However, the membrane panels, besides being nasty to use, are frequently UNMARKED. Whether they use some sort of stick-on menu that falls off, or the markings wear off, I don't know. But I've had to have the attendent come out and turn the damned pump on for me because there was nothing but a featureless black panel there.