I wonder the percentage of consumer (and business - have you ever used a POS in a pub?!) electronics this applies to? It's gotta be high 90s. I've lost track of the number of times I've lamented "did anyone actually use this?"
We have a combination oven and microwave (yes...) that seems to have been designed with the primary purpose of enraging the owner.
The microwave can only be set in 15 second increments. But you can fine-tune it, in five-second increments, by spinning a dial. Except that you can't do that while the oven is on.
The microwave makes a noise while it's operating. When it's finished, it will beep unobtrusively and then continue to make the operating noise. You can stop it from making the operating noise by opening the door.
The microwave can't be replaced, because it's part of the oven.
Mine is similar, also a combi. You spin the dial and it will go up in 10 second increments to a point, then in minutes, then in 5 minutes, then ten minutes, etc. Fine, I get it, it's like floating point. But it starts doing 5 minutes at the 10 minute mark! So you can't do 11-14 minutes. Which is actually about right for some things in an oven.
You also can't add more than 10 minutes to a short time without stopping the oven (this, I assume, is intended to be a safety thing to avoid being able to accidentally add hours of cooking without positive user intent).
And I do wish it would just stop the fan once it stops cooking, but I suppose the electronics next to the hot oven don't suddenly need less cooling just because the hot metal box doesn't have food in it.
I do like it though because it's much more efficient for small things than a big oven and I don't have space for a toaster oven and a microwave. And it has a much better UI for setting a delay start than the 6-button interface of the big oven.
> I do like it though because it's much more efficient for small things than a big oven and I don't have space for a toaster oven and a microwave.
You may have gotten the wrong idea. This isn't a combination where the same box functions as an oven and a microwave. This is a microwave that is for no reason physically attached to a separate oven - it takes up all the space of a big oven plus a normally sized microwave. The only thing they share is the display panel. And yet that didn't stop anyone from disabling microwave functionality while the oven is on.
There is absolutely no advantage to this compared to having an oven and a separate microwave, and many, many, many disadvantages. It continually boggles my mind that anyone ever designed, manufactured, or purchased this thing.
Perhaps the actual audible alert on yours should be louder.
Actually I guess they both shave off weight/cost and design for built-in model first (that are naturally more heat-constrained) and make standalone variant as an afterthought.
I would happily invest in kitchen appliances that have a silent mode for apartments and shared living spaces.
My microwave beeps at the end, and then beeps again 10 minutes later once the food has been removed. My old toaster beeped 5 times when the toast popped, which is unnecessary when the popping action is loud on it's own.
When we moved into our current house, it had a microwave like that. When we replaced it, my primary requirements were 1. multiple fan speeds, and 2. a nice, simple touch pad for entering the time; preferably one where you didn't need to press a button before starting to enter the cooking time.
The dial thing is... infuriating. It never once found a situation where it made using the device better, and in most situations it made it worse.
Digital dials can be nice in some cases.
My parents had an oven with a dial for the temperature. Spin it either way to increase or decrease the temperature by extra 5 degrees. I loved it. It was so much better than the touchpad design. The range of actual temperatures in an oven is pretty small and I found this much more friendly than punching in the temperature, getting it wrong, cancelling, and punching it in again. It was a “finger tip” dial so it was quick to spin. Probably horrible for people with bad arthritis or other hand mobility issues, though.
I wouldn’t mind a microwave with a similar dial for time. Again, the actual range of times in typical use (for me) is not that high. The design described with a two tier system for adjusting time seems moronic though.
The range of temperatures you use is about 200 degrees?
For the microwave time, it was a horrible experience pretty much every time I interacted with the device. A keypad is simple, intuitive, and easy to use.
“Okay, I want to cook for 3 minutes.”
‘300’
”Ok, the numbers don’t work until I press something else. Hmmm”
‘Time Cook’ ‘400’
“Shit. I hit the 4. Where’s the cancel?
‘Cancel’ ‘Time Cook’ ‘300’
“Where’s the start?”
‘Start’
It's a bit limited, in the sense that you can't set the time to e.g. 17:27. But who needs that?
When my old mechanical kitchen timer died on me, I bought a digital one with a dial, in the hope that it work the same way as the one on my microwave oven. Boy was I wrong. It kinda increases the interval when you spin it faster, but in a completely unpredictable and impractical way.
So I guess it's easy to make impractical dials, but it certainly is possible to make very well functioning dials as well.
Check out Chesterton's Fence.
So, it wouldn't be a good idea to just rip that part out of the design. Even if it may be annoying. Perhaps a better explanation is needed, like some models showing "cool" in the display. But it's per se not a design oversight.
Chesterton's Fence is about not changing things before understanding what led to the current state of affairs. I think the principle easily extends to complaining as well.
I could criticize cars with combustion engines for having one and being so noisy/stinky/... Then I could go on claiming that they should just turn them off, cause there are cars without combustion engines which are less noisy/stinky/... I'd be missing that there is more to it than just turning off the engine. I'd need to replace it with something else, like an EV. Maybe that did not exist yet when that car was build. So, claiming that this old Ford from 1970 having a combustion engine is stupid because "this is not a problem that other cars have" is missing the point. I could go rip the engine out because I don't like that it's noisy/stinky/... But I'm in for a surprise here. The vehicle won't move anymore. Something I'd have understood had I followed the principle put forward by Chesterton's Fence.
> Chesterton's Fence tells us that there is no cost to eliminating this ridiculously awful functionality
No. It tells you to first understand what you are doing. Blindly claiming something misses that part.
Are you me? Lol. Sometimes I use software where I wonder "am I the only one that bought this and tried to use it?" I think part of the issue is that requirements get written by people who have no experience. They've never done the job the software will be used to augment and they don't know anything about software development. Then the requirements are used to outsource the actual design and development.
Using POS as an example (in a country with tipping culture). Imagine if a requirements document for the payment system said "must include an option to tip", but the design and development was done in a country where tipping culture isn't a thing. You'd likely end up with the "tip" option hidden away in a hard to reach place while everyone who uses the software knows it should be prominent and easy to use and could immediately tell you the design is poor.