Far too often designers forget the purpose of the exercise is to communicate.

Christchurch transport decided to colour their buses teal blue, apparently to symbolise that water was important to Canterbury. The new colour has drawn a complaint from the sight-impaired because the buses are difficult to see. I have not seen them in action, but the pictures show the buses blending into the scene, an effect compounded by their large windows which show the background on the other side. Apparently the citizens of Christchurch spent $94,000 on designers who failed the most elementary test: was the colour helpful to users?

Recently I was at the launch of a book which was said to be well designed.. The type of the text was in sans serif, which. I am told, is harder to read. The picture captions were in a small font – about 7 points. This website uses 12 point but if you are sight-impaired and (even barely) computer literate you can blow up the image. You cannot do that in hard copy. (Coincidentally, while drafting this, I picked up a book in a bookshop which interested me. The blurb on the back cover was 8 point; I put it back.)

We went to a restaurant meal after. The room was very noisy. All the tables were shouting. I understand the need to have hard floors and table surfaces for cleaning. But the walls and ceilings do not have to be so uncompromising. Even more mysterious, why add ‘background’ muzak to the clamour? I once asked a very expensive restaurant to turn its music down. The disarmament resulted in less shouting and better conversation.

One of us had a new hearing aid which had a setting which reduced the background noise to give better restaurant conversations. It does, but the instructions for use are near unintelligible.

What is common to these examples is that the needs of the users were ignored by the designers. They designed for themselves, not for those of differing backgrounds and, apparently, certainly not for those suffering limitations including those associated with aging.

You will recall that an earlier column grumbled about the failure of too much software and too many websites to be user friendly. This column generalises the issue.

Following the earlier column, some people mentioned that on occasions they have gone to a shopping website and become so frustrated they made their purchase elsewhere. That underlines a remark in that column that, despite spending a fortune on their designers, senior executives never go near their websites and they certainly never ask their grandmothers to use them either.

It is said that an organisation’s website is a window on its bureaucratic soul. That must mean that a lot of government organisations are ugly, complex and confused. Perhaps the web designers have captured their clients more accurately than the senior leadership teams intended.

Fortunately it is not a universal phenomenon that designers appear to care little about their end users; I have yet to be run over by a Wellington bus. There are some entire activities where New Zealand design does a lot better. Writers generally have their readers in mind and while not all artists focus on the general public they certainly do on potential purchasers; news websites generally connect, presumably because they are mindful of the alternatives but also because journalism comes from a culture of communication. I am also struck that when they want to dress up, most New Zealand women do it well (the provocative or outrageous aside); there is a whole industry focused on raising their fashion sense.

Many years ago I was on a committee which was concerned about poor quality design in business. Typically management thought they could do it adequately themselves. Perhaps the New Zealand public tolerated the botches, but if you were exporting, good presentation is vital. We asked some designers to prepare a case for better design in business.

No doubt the result of their effort was very clever, but it did not work (the pamphlet actually fell apart in your hands). Business executives dismissed it as proving that designers were of no bloody use – just expensive.

It is said that the cultural roots of our British immigrants came from a period when aesthetic sense was [particularly deficient. Even today, good taste is more widely evident in Central Europe than in Britain. That says that good design is not just a matter of getting the profession to think more about end users, but that we also need to raise the standards demanded by the users. The public should complain when a monopolist supplies poorly designed services and reject what is dished up to them if it does not meet their standards – including teal buses that people cannot see.