9 Product Design Examples One Person Decided for Billions
Some of the most influential product design examples in the world are things you use every day and never think about.
For example: It’s a busy Monday morning. You’re already late.
Your phone is tucked between your shoulder and ear as you rush through your routine. While discussing work on a call, you make coffee, tie your shoes, grab your keys and head for the elevator.
What’s interesting is that your mind was somewhere else the entire time, yet your hands knew exactly what to do.
You didn’t have to think where the elevator button was or figure out how the coffee machine worked. You simply knew.
Someone before you chose where that elevator button should sit, how that coffee handle should feel or how long should the shoelaces be.
Those decisions were made once by someone, then quietly repeated by millions, sometimes billions, of people every day without even thinking about them.
And that’s exactly what we’re exploring at Emoris today: 9 everyday product design examples so familiar that most of us stopped questioning them altogether.
1) Why Do We Still Use the QWERTY Keyboard?
You use a QWERTY keyboard every day on your phone, laptop, tablet, and sometimes even on your TV.
Most of the time, you aren’t looking for individual letters. Your fingers already know where they are.
It will be surprising for you to know that a QWERTY keyboard wasn’t originally designed to help people type faster. It was designed to solve a problem from the age of mechanical typewriters.
In older times, typing too quickly caused the metal arms inside a typewriter to collide and jam. To reduce this, commonly used letters were separated across the keyboard, slowing down typists just enough to prevent problems.
That problem disappeared long ago. Yet the same layout remains on nearly every keyboard we use today.
Why? Because the world collectively accepted it as an unspoken rule. It’s a behaviour we have all learned, and honestly, it’s just…convenient (And globally lazy).
A design decision made for typewriters survived the transition to computers, laptops, smartphones, and tablets.
Fascinating how billions of people now use it every day without giving it a second thought.
A Different Way to See It
- What if keyboards were arranged alphabetically instead of using QWERTY?
- What if every laptop manufacturer used a different keyboard layout?
- If keyboards were invented today, would they still be rectangular shaped?
2) Why Does Time Live Inside a Grid?
You see your calendar every morning. Maybe to check a meeting, count the days to the weekend, or see how far away your birthday is.
Whether it’s on your phone, laptop, or hanging on a wall, it almost always looks the same: rows and columns filled with neatly arranged dates.
Time itself isn’t arranged in boxes. It wasn’t born in weeks, months, or tidy little grids. Those are structures we created to make something ‘abstract’ easier to understand.
At some point in history, people needed a reliable way to track seasons, plan events, and organize daily life.
Over centuries, calendars evolved into the format we know today, and eventually became so familiar that we stopped seeing them as a design choice. They simply became the way time looks.
The calendar wasn’t the only way to organize time.
It was a design decision that survived for centuries, became familiar to billions of people, and eventually started feeling less like a choice and more like the way time was always meant to be organized. It’s one of those product design examples that reminds us how easily a solution can become a standard.
A Different Way to See It
- What if there were no months, only Day 1, Day 2, Day 3… all the way to the end of the year?
- How would you plan your life if there were no boxes to put time into?
- If humans were designing time from scratch today, would we organize it this way at all?
3) Why Did Phones Replace Home Button With Gestures?
Pick up almost any smartphone today and you’ll notice something missing.
The Home Button.
Not too long ago, it was one of the most important parts of a phone. If you were lost, you pressed it. If you wanted to go home, you pressed it. It was a physical memory your thumb could always find.
Today, that button is gone. Instead, we swipe.
A quick swipe up takes us home. Another gesture opens recent apps. We move through our phones using invisible actions that most of us perform without even thinking at all.
And the interesting part is that gestures weren’t always obvious. We learnt them together.
When Apple began moving away from physical buttons in favour of gesture-based navigation, it felt uncomfortable to many people.
But the change solved an important problem: it created more screen space without making phones larger.
Over time, Android phones also copied, and the gestures stopped feeling new.
Now billions of people use their phones in a similar way, rarely thinking that someone had to decide that a swipe can replace the home button. It’s another reminder that the best product design examples often disappear into everyday life.
A Different Way to See It
- What if the home button never disappeared? Would today’s phones feel incomplete if they still had one?
- What if different brands used different gestures?
- How long would it take for a completely different gesture to feel just as obvious as swiping does today?
4) Why Do Airports Trust You to Take the Right Bag?
If you’ve ever taken a late-night flight, this must have definitely happened to you.
You’re tired, waiting beside the baggage belt, watching multiple black suitcases go around in circles. One finally appears that looks exactly like yours. You grab it, start walking away, and a few steps later realize it’s someone else’s.
Embarassed, you keep it back.
The strange thing is that baggage claim has worked more or less the same way for decades.
Hundreds of bags arrive. They are placed on a moving conveyor belt. Passengers walk up and take the one they believe belongs to them.
Weird, no?
For something that carries passports, clothes, valuables and sometimes an entire vacation’s worth of belongings, it’s surprising how much the system relies on basic human honesty.
And maybe that’s what makes the whole thing so funny yet interesting.
After a journey involving security checks, scanners, tracking systems and airport staff, the final step relies on people simply picking the right bag.
A Different Way to See It
- What if your phone showed the exact location of your luggage throughout its journey?
- What if collecting a suitcase required the same boarding pass used to check it in?
- Would baggage claim feel safer, or just slower, if every bag had to be verified before leaving the airport?
5) Why Are We Still Tying Our Shoes?
You must have tied your shoelaces today without giving it much thought while talking to someone, while rushing through the door and maybe without even looking down.
It’s one of the actions that lives entirely in muscle memory. Once you learn it as a child, it becomes automatic. Your hands simply know what to do.
Surprisingly, shoelaces have survived for centuries yet on paper they seem inconvenient and requires us to stop and tie them over and over again.
Velcro loses its grip. Elastic stretches out over time. Zippers can jam. Shoelaces, on the other hand, adapt to different foot shapes, can be tightened exactly how you like, and are easy to replace when they wear out.
A piece of string, a knot, and a design that has lasted longer than most products ever will.
Like many of the things on this list, it isn’t necessarily the only way to do it. It’s a simple product solution that proved reliable enough for generations of people to keep using.
A Different Way to See It
- If a designer introduced shoelaces today, would people think it as a good idea?
- Why do we accept tying knots every day but question so many newer solutions?
- Are shoelaces still around because they’re the best solution, or because they’re familiar?
6) Why Do Most Pen Caps Have a Hole?
You’ve probably chewed on a pen-cap during a boring class, clicked it absent-mindedly during a meeting, spun it between your fingers, or maybe even tried whistling through it once.
And yet, there’s a tiny detail you miss almost everytime: The small hole at the top.
It looks useless, but there is a good enough reason for it’s existence.
Just like you may have chewed on a pen cap during class, someone else did too, except theirs accidentally ended up being swallowed or inhaled.
That tiny hole exists for moments like these. It helps maintain airflow and reduce the risk of suffocation in a situation most people will never experience, designed for that one serious, unfortunate day.
The hole doesn’t improve how the pen writes. It doesn’t make the pen more comfortable to hold. 99.9% of the users will never even benefit from it.
But for that 0.1% it’s serious enough to design for and that’s where some of the most thoughtful design decisions live.
A Different Way to See It
- If the hole doesn’t help the pen write, why has it survived for so long? Hint: Cost cutting!
- Is the best design sometimes the feature you hope you’ll never need?
- What other tiny products around you exist because something once went wrong?
7) How Does a Petrol Pump Know When to Stop?
You visit a petrol pump to refuel the tank of your bike. The fuel starts flowing, the numbers on the screen keep climbing, and then, at exactly the right moment, there’s a small click.
It stops.
No overflow/fuel spilling onto the ground and no one rushing to pull the nozzle away at the last second.
The person filling the tank might be talking to someone, checking another vehicle, or simply looking elsewhere. Yet somehow, the nozzle always seems to know when the fuel is enough.
The secret is built into the design of the nozzle itself.
As the tank fills up, changes in air pressure trigger a mechanism that automatically cuts off the fuel supply. It’s a small piece of engineering based on the Venturi effect, designed to prevent overfilling before it happens.
It’s one of those product design examples which only becomes visible when it’s missing. Without it, every refill would depend entirely on human attention and timing, which is not very efficient.
A Different Way to See It
- What if petrol pumps had no automatic cut-off and attendants had to guess when your tank was full?
- Would you notice the nozzle’s design if it failed just once?
- How much fuel do you think would be spilled every day if that tiny mechanism didn’t exist?
8) Why Does a Pressure Cooker Whistle?
In majority of the Indian homes, recipes aren’t measured in minutes. They’re measured in whistles.
Yes, you read that right!
One whistle for this. Three whistles for that. Somewhere from the past, an entire cooking language emerged around a sound coming from a metal pot in the kitchen.
As a child, you probably didn’t know what those whistles meant. You would hear one from another room, and immediately someone would know whether to lower the flame, turn off the gas, or wait a little longer.
Now you do the same.
Interestingly, that whistle wasn’t originally designed to communicate cooking instructions. Its primary job was to release excess pressure and keep the cooker safe.
But over time, people in India began using it as a signal. Without opening the lid/checking the food. Without even entering the kitchen.
A sound designed for safety slowly became a shortcut for communication.
And today, billions of people understand exactly what that whistle means without ever being formally taught.
A Different Way to See It
- What if pressure cookers had been invented before clocks became common in homes?
- How many family recipes would need to be rewritten if cookers didn’t exist?
- What if pressure cookers had no whistle and only a pressure gauge?
9) Why Are Manhole Covers Always Round?
You walk over it all the time.
On busy streets, near footpaths, in parking lots and sometimes right in the middle of the road. Most of us barely notice it.
It’s boringly just there. A heavy metal cover sitting on the top of a hole.
But, do you know that shape isn’t random?
A circular manhole cover can never fall through its own opening, no matter how it’s rotated. Unlike a square or triangular cover, there’s no angle where it can accidentally slip inside.
The circle solves the problem simply by being a circle!
No lock required. No complex mechanism. Just sheer geometry.
The shape has other advantages too. It’s easier to move by rolling, distributes weight evenly, and doesn’t need to be aligned in a specific direction before being placed back.
It’s one of those rare product design examples which feels obvious only after someone else has already solved it.
And now when you know the reason, it might be hard to imagine it being any other shape.
A Different Way to See It
- How much extra engineering would be needed to solve a problem that a circle solves for free?
- Will manhole covers still be round 500 years from now?
- Is this one of the few designs that has almost no room for improvement?
Conclusion: The World Didn’t Have to Look This Way
After reading these product design examples, it’s easy to think this article was about keyboards, calendars, shoelaces, pressure cookers, or manhole covers.
But it wasn’t. It was about decisions.
At some point, somebody decided where the keys on a keyboard should go. Somebody decided a whistle was the best way for a pressure cooker to communicate. Somebody decided a circle was the safest shape for a manhole cover. And somebody added a tiny hole to a pen cap for a situation most of us hope never happens.
Those decisions were made once. Then repeated by millions and billions of people who chose to never question them.
The thing about good design is that it never asks for attention. It slips into the background of our lives and becomes so familiar that it starts to feel inevitable.
Almost everything around you could have been designed differently.
The next time you press a button, tie your shoes, hear a pressure cooker whistle, or just pick up a pen, pause for a second and ask yourself:
“Who decided this should work this way?”
It might surprise you by how many invisible design decisions are hiding in plain sight.