Ask HN: What market forces produce terrible appliance user interfaces? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What market forces produce terrible appliance user interfaces?

5 pointsrobocat12 comments

Just about every kitchen or home appliance I use has some hideously complicated user interface.

Example 1: I tried to find an induction cooktop/hob with knobs because the all the touch control cooktops I tested had serious usability flaws. I found one product eventually, and it was also far far cheaper!

Example 2: an expensive SMEG oven, that literally needs instructions to use it. Requires 2 second presses, on the knob which certainly doesn’t have the affordance to say it is a button, and which gets butt-dialed all the time by mistake. Amongst other serious usability flaws.

Example 3: a plain microwave I haven’t used before. I still need to spend 2 minutes trying to set the power to 50% (unique interface I haven’t seen before in decades), and which also had a bug that cleared the power setting the first time I tried using it.

Why are there so few appliances with obvious usability? Why is there no market pressure over decades to improve user interfaces?

I worked for a number of years in the appliance and controls business, doing residential and commercial/restaurant equipment. I'm gonna write some random observations, not in any order or meaning. It could all be bullshit, and your experiences will most likely be different.

- Features sell appliances. More features command more money. But 99% of users don't do more than 2-3 operations with their units, usually no more than the basic unit will perform.

- Some appliances are furniture, literally. People will put $10,000 Wolf ranges in their homes and then eat carryout for years. The wine cooler gets touched once a year.

- A lot of manufacturers have zero experience in controls/electronics. It's shopped out to the lowest bidder and screwed into the unit at the assembly line.

- The manufacturers that do have electronics experience overthink it.

- Nobody tests the usability of the appliances until it's nearly done. Next year's model is the same as last year's with one new feature added.

- I worked with one company that did massive amounts of design and focus group testing on a wall oven. Took years. By the time they had a design they liked and got it programmed, the graphics and layout looked obsolete.

- A decent graphics/UI toolkit like Qt is too expensive for appliance makers, who count pennies. So it all runs on a 10 year old 16-bit CPU with an 8-bit color display.

- There's no market pressure because nobody cares. A radically usable and nice looking UI won't sell any more units than a cheap model with a shitty UI. People buy on price, and if it fits in their kitchen.

All great points. Just to add... Any appliance that uses a blue LED screen (ie 7-segment display) is a total no from me. If they can't even get something as basic as that right, I can't trust anything else about the product.

Blue looks cool and sells units. Just pray your manufacturer uses a good blue LED that doesn't leak UV.

The EU checks this kind of stuff, the US and Asia do not.

Blue is impossible to read from anything more than a few feet away.

Cool != Useful. =)

Due to heat, water damage, rust, mice, misuse, and probably other reasons; appliances tend to break down with time and require service. You want them to be relatively easy to repair by a fairly unspecialized repairman who just figures out that one of a few parts is broken and replaces it and everything starts working again.

Wouldn't appliances with more complicated UIs that are driven by more powerful computers end up being less durable and be harder to repair? Does that factor into it?

Everything is now a module that's just swapped in the field and reworked or junked at the factory or a number of companies that make a good business in troubleshooting them. Nobody is diagnosing burned out FETs in someone's kitchen.

One problem is that people are so used to BS that they will ignore any real innovations in front of them.

For instance most microwave ovens have a gas sensor that does a great job of, say, cooking a potato. For a long time I thought this was something out of Idiocracy that I didn't need because I'd been cooking things in microwaves just fine since my mom got a microwave from Sears in the 1980s. Then I read an article about gas sensors, I tried it out, and I'm like "it does a better job of cooking a potato than I do".

Samsung is going to run one ad about "The metaverse" and they are going to find the response rate to everything they do is going to drop substantially for the next decade and they're never going to realize what happened, never mind why. That's part of the problem, they are suffering from "debt" from prior marketing BS.

People will buy anything, and the market has never been disrupted because software is never going to make you a better cook.

IMO, people are also just dumber. I’ve never owned a microwave and after 4 decades microwave owners don’t appear to be any more capable. In the old days, they had Home Economics for this sort of thing.

I regret buying a bosch oven: I purchased for quality and features to price ratio, and I am sure it had it but the UI is terrible. Both physically and from a software viewpoint. This is the later model. Got an earlier model bosch microwave at the same time and it has a better but not perfect interface.

The mobile industry use to be like this until Apple changed it. Remember how mobile phones use to be named, let alone the design?

It takes an outside challenger with enough resources and business plan to change the status quo.

"let s be different"

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