How Not to Design a Microwave
jordansmith.io
jordansmith.io
This can easily be fixed by coloring the indicator mark with a black permanent marker.
The only real improvement is the replacement of the door opening button with a more intuitive door handle.
Actually, it's not an improvement. A door opening button is easy to operate with one hand; a handle needs two in order not to shift the microwave. At least all the microwaves I've seen have doors requiring noticeable amount of force to open. My guess is it's to avoid the situation in which a large dish rotating inside pushes on the doors and opens it.
Translated to web, you're basically saying "all websites should use a high contrast serif font at >16pt. to avoid people committing dangerous mistakes when reading instructions online" :)
The analogy is more like web pages using scanned images of hand writing, which I'd also say is bad design.
The one I eventually found was also the cheapest one and almost the only one. The more expensive models were usually designed around a button interface and had plenty of features like thawing, grill, and so on. Of course all these extra features amount to little more than switching the magnetron on and off according to a programme. Go figure...
My mom (who has since taken over it) was very confused about the one second delay between adjusting the time and the microwave starting (just like the linked one there was no start button). She had obviously been accustomed to pressing buttons to get it to operate how she wanted. Which just maybe goes to prove that what is "simple design" is not necessarily the simplest interface but the interface most aligned to the users' previous expectations on how this particular item should work.
And at what temperature?
And if you want to cook in stages?
We have at home a programmable one from the 1980s. We constantly use it for stuff like "unfreeze 2 hours, then microwave 1 minute at 800W, then heat at 230C for 20 minutes, then keep warm at 40C"
Combined with the easy-to-understand knobs, this does sound much better.
Defrosting x grams typically takes y seconds, which is just a table lookup.
As defrosting most typically involves leftovers (rather than pre-packaged meals or ingredients), you will probably only know their weight, not how long it will take to defrost off the top of your head.
You could also change the screen backlight color in DEFROST mode to reinforce the mode change.
How would one know that? Do people routinely put leftovers on a scale before putting them into a microwave?
The Microwave starts when you close the door.
That being said, my microwave just broke down and I headed to the store to buy a new one. I was really disappointed at the new models. The UI seems to be getting worse on them. I have a feeling they are not even trying to innovate because it has become a low margin device.
People are still trying if you are interested.
Articles:
https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/28006/why-do-microwav...
https://medium.com/@bn/this-is-how-a-microwave-should-work-4...
Art Mockups:
https://www.behance.net/gallery/15102955/Microwave-Redesign-...
https://dribbble.com/shots/1309476-Microwave-UX-Concept
https://dribbble.com/shots/1449210-Microwave-Concept-PSD
https://dribbble.com/shots/3249355-Smart-microwave-UI-concep...
If you have others, feel free to comment! Appliance UX/UI is a very neglected area.
All these art mockups are just that: art mockups. "How do I make a thing look pretty". A tired mantra of programming smays: make it work, make it fast, and only then make it pretty.
Touch screens in the kitchen. In the effing kitchen! When you are often up to your eyebrows in grease, oil, flour, vegetable juices etc.
Oh, look, you have to turn the knob to set the time. To set the power you have to touch some other area and then turn the nob again. To set the time, you have to touch that area again to switch modes, and then set the time. BUT WHY? This is solved with just having two knobs! https://johnlewis.scene7.com/is/image/JohnLewis/233182566?$p...
Oh, look. As it starts, it shows you time remaining, and a stop button. Because you never ever in your entire life would want to, say, adjust time. Nope? The thought never even occured to the designer.
Oh, look, there are still multiple small buttons (that are already awkward on a vertical pane), but let's make them touch buttons! Oh, and let's leave them exactly the same as they are now, because the only reason why people don't understand how they work is because they are not touch buttons. Make them touch buttons! They will immediately become intuitive!
Oh, look, the iOS time scroller! Because that's exactly what I need: to be able to set 23h 29m 31s by scrolling through infinite lists of numbers. I wonder why is it that the vast majority of microwave uses are around 30s to 5min range on max power?
I could go on
And in the car, where you should keep your eyes on the road. Knobs work really well for adjusting the stereo and heater; replacing them with a huge touch screen is a terrible idea, and trying to make it less terrible with haptic feedback is a poor solution. Hopefully the current touch screen fad will pass.
These are completely impractical from a cost perspective, requiring expensive tooling (>$100K) and easily $50 per screen (e.g. iPhone screen https://technology.ihs.com/595738/), plus the massive firmware development cost increase from a small 8 bit micro to some giant ARM core, probably with a GPU as well.
You wouldn't design a phone app using the non standard widget toolkit unless you had a good reason, why do designers dabbling in appliance design not use the standard toolkit of physical switches and knobs to start with and see what they can come up with?
Seriously, what is it with embedded digital electronics designers and beeping? Nothing else has a gratuitous noisemaker. I swear if the home refrigerator was invented after the cheap piezo buzzer it would emit an ear-piercing bleep every time the door opened, or maybe when the compressor cycled on or off.
Is there some sort of strange subsidy or tax consequence so that adding a beeper has negative net cost?
A big ol' beep/nobeep switch on ovens would be a nice thing.
The FIRST thing you do is observe. Watch people in relation to the problem you are trying to solve. Listen to them. Ask them WHY they do what you observe. If at all possible, work out what motivates them and what problems they really have (which they often will not articulate to you). Only then start designing solutions.
I'm not saying his ideas about the design of the oven are invalid. But the fact that so few people in design roles even attempt the work of exploratory research is fundamentally the reason why so much of stuff is shit.
This isn't surprising though. Observational research is often frustrating, confusing or difficult to interpret. But above all it takes a lot of time. This is also the reason why, if you have another job like coding or marketing or whatever then you will not have enough hours in the day to do effective design.
There really ought to be a usability certification for products like these, a verification by an independent organization that a typical user is able to operate the most important functionality with few or no errors.
I rarely want more than a few minutes of heating time, and I rarely need more than 30 seconds of granularity so that one button handles most of my microwaving needs.
Though I agree that dials would be better -- I wish cars weren't moving toward touchscreens, in my old car I could adjust pretty much everything in the car - radio, climate control, etc without looking. In my current car, there's a touch screen for pretty much everything except radio volume which is on the steering wheel.
If I want to adjust power I can adjust from 150 to 600, and then there's a "Jet" function, but I have no idea what that is. More than 600? 750 maybe? Who knows.
Ten number buttons, 0-9, but each also corresponds to a useful time.
0 10 sec
1 15 sec
2 20 sec
3 30 sec
4 45 sec
5 1 min
...
Etc
Pressing any of these while the microwave is running would add that corresponding amout of time.
I guess you'd also need a power level button and a clock set button. There, all done.
https://www.webstaurantstore.com/panasonic-ne-17521-stainles...
Having home/office-use microwaves work like this is basically akin to forcing an average office user expecting something like Microsoft Word, to write Markdown in Vim instead...
If that average office user is going to write something (or use a microwave) more than a few times in their lives, it's worth to force them, because the (very small) cost of additional learning is almost immediately offset by gained efficiency.
Alas, what matters is short-time thinking, so UIs are designed for sellability instead of helping people do their tasks correctly and efficiently.
The problem is not designing for sellability. Is not acknowledging that (1) some people don't want to RTFM! and (2) other people are OK with RTFM but want serious efficiency and correctness gains for it, "I pain, now you gimme gain!".
So you figure out who your users are and design for your users.
Now, the absolute worst is the parent article's example, where someone managed to "design for no possible user" by both forcing people to RTFM and providing zero efficiency and correctness benefits in return. But designing for the wrong user is also bad.
There were other things you got "for free" after that - like defrost-without-cooking by ensuring all pixels remained below a target temp, but got above some other temp.
Hope that guy builds it.
For cooking people will either use recipe from a book provided with microwave and thus they need just a selection of a program, or they will use more advanced microwave with oven and will want to set temperature of the oven to something like 200 degrees for 40 minutes. In this case sensor would be useful, but it's already not a microwave story.
Users of a microwave currently expect extremely poor temperature control, and so don't even think about temperature because you get what you get. An interface which lets me heat something to exactly "drinkable but hot" is a revolutionary change in how I use the appliance though.
Same story with warming food: sure, you want it warm all the way through - if you actually know the surface temperature though, then you can model that - food that is cold inside is going to have different surface temperature decay rates to food which is warm inside, and some modeling of the observed thermodynamics means the appliance can know this.
So now we'd really be talking: "warm to safe temperature all the way through" and we can give a probability / % complete read out of how close we think we are to it. No more guessing, no more user interaction, also no burning yourself because some parts went superheated.
Put that option as the heating default, with literally what I just wrote explaining it next to it, and problem solved.
There's basically just one microwave I'm aware of that is actually proper design, mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16090081
What ever happened to the microwaves where you could key in a time and just press start?
Though perhaps a metastory might be "how not to write a UI essay".
(I actually rather liked this one. The off-the-rails discussion suggests either I'm an exception or the point isn't being clearly communicated.)
A big frustration is not being able to turn off the damn reminder tone though so I have to wait around to clear it when done.
I prefer 0-9 buttons, and lots of memories, mine has 3.
If you wanted a minimalist microwave though, you could have it reset each time the door is opened or after a minute or two of inactivity.
First of all, "Doing the job as efficiently as possible" is not a user's desire. Users always want concrete things and developer's opinion on what that could be or how that will be achieved by a particular user is very often quite far from reality.
Second, it's not a developer's job to create a tool that will help users to solve some problem in the way he thinks it is right. It is not what developer is paid for. His job is to work together with marketing department to deliver a product that is always a compromise between the business and the user, a product, that is just good enough, in a deal, which is good only then, when noone is happy with it, but everyone can accept it.
I refuse to accept that is right, even though it is what seems to be happening everywhere. That's probably the root of my opinion. I'm a believer in the concept of making money through providing value to the customer.
The flaw: In the first step you need to select the amount of heating. Not in absolute numbers but in the percentage of total power (100, 80, 50, etc). So every time you need to calculate how much power each percentage represents.
Sometimes I think users are getting too spoiled and simply refuse to RTFM.
Not to mention the article complains about the UI for an oven, confuses the oven with a microwave and then gives advice for designing iphone apps.
This is indeed something you have to learn though, first time I encountered this kind of microwave it baffled me as well.
I'd give both kidneys if it could then also ping me on my phone when it's done without involving external servers.