The world's worst toaster

The GE microwave that came with my house is worse than I thought was possible. It includes an appointment scheduler (!) and has some sort of message button I've never pressed for fear of being reminded of what my voice sounds like. Apparently the designers thought there was a large underserved market of families whose entire lives revolve around their microwaves. All the buttons to support these extra features mainly make it less convenient to use for heating up food.

The worst feature by far is its insistence on having its clock set. Every time I lose electricity, which happens every few weeks in my neighborhood, it refuses to cook anything until I:

  1. Press "clock" to set the time (even though all other functions are disabled).
  2. Enter the time in HHMM format.
  3. Press "start" (but don't get too excited about actually "starting" anything yet).
  4. Locate the single-purpose "AM/PM" button and press that either once or twice.
  5. Press "start" again.
  6. Enter the date in MMDDYY format.
  7. And again press "start".

What this means is that you can always calculate how long it has been since the first time I zapped my morning instant oatmeal after the last power outage by subtracting from the current time and date displayed by the microwave: 2011-11-11 11:11 a.m.

So, yeah, don't design a web site like that.

As a counter-point, I have the world's best microwave. There is only one button that I use - the add 1 minute button.

Put the food in, hit the "add one" button once or twice, and that is it. The microwave starts automatically. As far as I can tell, it took 40 years of microwave UI development to get to this point.

So was this "star" marketer fooled by marketing? "It's pretty fancy and shiny and microprocessor controlled. And it makes toast." Shouldn't the criteria have been related to function: like 'I only have to insert toast and remove toast... it's one step shorter than old toasters'.

As an aside, I'd love to post this on his blog, but that doesn't appear to be an option. Is accepting critical feedback in an open forum a risk not worth taking when marketing oneself?

I guess it's to prevent phishing. If you have to take all the steps yourself instead of clicking on a link from the e-mail, the chances of someone being able to hijack a link are smaller.

If it's always (1) click link, (2) enter credit card details. You are teaching your users to become victims of fraud.

Irony is that company that sold that Toaster made money. How ironic (and encouraging) is the fact that companies like eBay, Microsoft makes loads of money ;-) Feature-laden products sell. At the day end, we all want to acquire powerful things and you'll find very few powerful products in this world that were made keeping in mind the less is more philosophy.

Reminds me of the Plantronics desk phone headsets. I don't know where they get the engineers to design these. Just a few examples of what's wrong:

- the base station has a "configuration dial" that requires a flat object to insert into the slit to turn it

- There are 2, yes 2, pairs of volume buttons on the base itself, AND one on the headset..

- The mute button on the headset has a sharp protrusion that literally pokes you in the finger when you try to push it..

Seth's post and experiences with such systems make me appreciate sites like tumblr and slinkset quite a lot.

PDF user guide: http://www.plantronics.com/media/media_resources/literature/...).

There are plenty of bad toasters out there. Many products are designed (destroyed) as this toaster was with lots of extra super duper features in mind, thinking that users absolutely have to have the ability to do X...and y, a,b,and c.

Then they hit you with all the options all at once. Yes build in that must have functionality but don't forsake intuitiveness. Don't mistake functionality with usability.

By making a simple task more complex you do not necessarily increase customer safety (or satisfaction) and as henning notes so aptly, "Making it easy for people to give you more money on a regular basis is a good thing."

In my experience air travel is more akin to the 11 click ebay example than a 2 step toaster.

Man, Seth Godin can't even do a good job of reviewing a bad toaster. When writing a critical review, the bar is clearly set at what Amazon.com reviewers come up with. Godin should see where that bar is set for bad toasters:

http://www.amazon.com/review/product/B00004R92D/ref=cm_cr_dp...

I note, with some smugness, that "DANGEROUS --- SHAME ON TOASTMASTER" is also a catchier title than "World's Worst Toaster".

This sort of interface problem is common with clocks too. We have a clock at work that signals break time; it has four alarms but you have to manually turn them off. One time I had to be the one to turn it off, and I looked at the back. Four identical, round buttons - simply labelled "A", "B", "C", and "D". WTF? I need the manual to look up what the buttons do!

"It took me more than 11 clicks to send them $6."

Upgrading an account in Backpack, 37Signals' web-based calendar/PIM/organizer thing, takes 4 clicks.

Making it easy for people to give you more money on a regular basis is a good thing.

Note that it takes roughly the same amount of effort to downgrade or cancel your account altogether.

Even better than that toaster, when I tried to reinstall my wireless driver on Windows a while back (since then, I have seen the light and switched to Ubuntu), the new driver wouldn't install because a few files were missing. "Please click here for help [online]."

I kid you not.

The worst designed telephone: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/02/worst-designed-telephone-in-...

What's the deal with toasters...

And would you believe that the process of air travel is like...two steps:

1. Go to airport 2. Get on plane.

My god, if human heavier-than-air flight is simpler than applying heat to bread, then we are all boned.