Nobody needs a faster dishwasher – solve real user needs

Ironically, this tells me some... awkward things about how the author relates to their kitchen. I cook - a lot. I host parties - usually dinner parties - and I use cheap Ikea plates & etc instead of disposable anythings. And like (most?) millenials-ish, the kitchen is where we tend to hang out.

My dishwasher isn't so that I have clean dishes before the next meal. It's so that I have a clean kitchen after.

(If I wanted only clean dishes before my next meal... actually I'd probably want as fast a dishwasher as possible.)

I don’t care when dishes are done, I don’t need to attend to them urgently. They can sit there clean until I’m ready for them.

There is no way to disable this beeper and it goes off every minute after the cycle is complete. Thank god the dishwasher has a wall switch to the circuit so I can just kill it but oh man. Never buying Bosch again

(Edit) I say all this to say my dishwasher was engineered by the same kind of engineer who 1) has obviously never used the product or washed dishes and 2) optimized for “dishes are clean out them away RIGHT NOW” even though nobody uses a dishwasher like that

When relatives visit and join dinner (and they do so often) I end up with more dishes than I can fit in the dishwasher.

I can wash the remaining dishes the next morning, but this wastes energy and water because the dishwasher is not full.

I can also "preventatively" turn on the dishes in the afternoon, to wash the breakfast and lunch dishes, so that it's completely empty for the dinner dishes. But this too wastes resources (not full, but better than the "wash remainders next morning" scenario), and I have to turn it on early enough in the afternoon so that it finishes before people start cooking (around 16.00).

It's a pain to have to wait for 3 hours. I would absolutely want a dishwasher that finishes in 1 hour.

Sure, some engineers need to be looking at the problems people have or the products they're trying to buy or whatever, but that's not why I'm here.

The goal, especially when starting out, is to:

1. Obsessively understand, improve and optimise everything, knowing that many of the results will not make it into real products or if they do will flop; and

2. Invent things that nobody asked for. Things that are weird and ideological and unlikely and confusing and just plain cool, knowing that many of thee too will fail.

Why 1? Because sometimes the things in 2 only become possible by mashing together a bunch of the things in 1 that looked like they weren't really worth it or useful.

Why 2? Because noone can really predict what people want or need, or would like, once you get into the realm of new technology and ideas that are sufficiently different from what we have today.

Many things about life in the future will and should be radically different than they are now (this is not something special about now, it has been true on generational timelines at least since the beginning of the industrial revolution and on longer timelines forever). Experimentation and ignoring business cases and customers is that future happens.

If you want to think about "consumer challenges" and worry whether your idea is a viable business rather than just giving it a go, iterating rapidly, and having an idea about when to stop if it doesn't work out, be my guest, but to me this is an incredily dull, mercenary view of the future.

I think it's much the same with all the wifi-enabled, app controlled appliances. Their purpose isn't to be sold as useful features - they exist to add a half-dozen bullet points next to that item, that the other nigh-identical products you're comparing it against (or god-forbid, already own) don't have. $5 of extra parts that can be sold to you for $100

Decades back all appliances where white powder-coated. Then we decided they should all be built in and hidden. Then we decided they all needed to be brushed -aluminium feature appliances... except we didn't all decide this. The manufacturers are just always looking for differentiators.

Of course you can opt out of this obvious cash grab, and kit out your kitchen with Miele 'quality' and the like (Did you know Miele is one of the few remaining brands that doesn't outsource manufacture to a Turkish third party? I did, I'm special) Or reject all this modern stuff and buy a Speed-Queen (When pick-up truck owners get to decide what laundry brand to buy and maintain with the same set of spanners)

Then many of the commenters (quite likely engineers) optimise their comments on the thing they know about -- desirability or otherwise of faster dishwashers -- rather than considering the merits of the main thesis

And it's made even better by some commenters saying things about areas they appear not to know about, like the desirability of faster dishwashers for restaurants

Fortuanately, I tend to get away with a 30-min wash for most days, but someone please invent a 10-minute dishwasher please :)

Bugger off with that. No one is optimizing anything these days. Please do optimize for speed. Speed is a feature. I don't want to wait for more than 200ms to do anything. In a world where we can render video games at 100 FPS at 4K...yes, I want my websites to load in under a second. And I want my IDE to be responsive. And I want my autocompletes to complete before I've finished typing the whole thing out.

The computer responding to my inputs should never be the bottleneck. It should always be faster than I can think. I hate to stop and wait for 60 seconds twice today as my computer choked while trying to render a chat app. Chat. Really messes up a conversation.

In Germany, dishwashers (and washing machines, but let’s not go there) fall into two categories, either Miele or everything else. Miele has amazing quality, so it feels like the dishwasher might outlive you.

Mine has a „quick power wash“ programme that takes about an hour and gets the job done, but uses more energy and is maybe more aggressive to dishes, so I usually use other programmes, between 1 and 3 hours. There’s also a timer for starting the machine in n hours, operated by a single button. User interface is also brilliant in that there are no strange symbols, but reach light/ button clearly says what it does (in German). I like it.

Choose your motivating examples carefully.

A great solution to this was created by a firm called Fisher and Paykel who made a 2 drawer dishwasher designed to permanently house your crockery. While one drawer is washing, you fetch your stuff outa the other drawer.

https://www.fisherpaykel.com/uk/dishwashing/all-dishwashers/...

Jobs-to-be-Done: A Framework for Customer Needs

[https://jobs-to-be-done.com/jobs-to-be-done-a-framework-for-...]

I think, the moral of that story was something like: When you make a software process faster by an order of magnitude, it lends itself for new use-cases.

Eg, things like Mastodon are great if you want to find a community that best fits you, because you have a rare interest or some characteristic controversial for a reason or another that makes existing on some place like Twitter difficult. So you can find a community that enforces standards that are very close to your ideal, and delegate that to them, and just do your own thing.

Not everything has to be like Twitter or Facebook, aiming to swallow the entire planet. There's room in the world for places like Hacker News that are only relevant to a small segment of the population. What's important though is to have a good sense of perspective about what need you're serving and how many people are there who need that. If you're aiming for something like decentralization that will have some costs to it that means you're unlikely to ever go world-wide. But so long you're happy enough with that, there's nothing wrong with it.

What is actually happening is crypto/web3 is a scam, and social media is a great fake product because your "customers" think you're trying to get them onto your new social media site whilst what you're actually doing is selling them worthless tokens with the promise of some future value that'll clearly never come.

>Businesses exist to make money by serving customer needs.

Yeah, and that's really hard, which is why they're not doing it!

It is better than having to do all the dishes by hand. But we have to make sure we've done things like refil the water pitcher before running the dishwasher. And there's only so much hot water in the hot water heater before it runs out, so we need to make sure nobody's about to take a shower before running the dishwasher, too.

I would love to have a larger one that connects directly to the water pipes, but there is no room in this apartment's kitchen. So I deal with the dishwasher blocking other uses of the kitchen sink, and the shower, for a couple of hours.

If I had a small counter-top dishwasher that somehow got my dishes just as clean in a half an hour, that would make a few low-level annoyances go away.

And companies don't want decentralization. The entire purpose of most conglomerates is conspicuous centralization. It is funny that we see corporations strictly as competitive actors. But often when one company buys another, they are trying to realize efficiencies through cooperation. Therefore, much like being an government bureau, corporations are trying to create cooperative centralizations.

First, there’s the mystery of “wet dog smell” on glasses that has persisted across multiple apartments in multiple states for us (and appears to be a well-known phenomenon across the internet). And then there’s the issue that despite their claims to also dry dishes, most dishwashers do no such thing as the plasticware remains soaked despite many interesting but ultimately unsuccessful hacks by dishwasher manufacturers.

"Nobody" the author knows. Lots of people, not all of them didactic contrarians actually do want this one thing.

I am a little from box A and a little from box B on this, myself. If the dishwasher is too fast, I'd suspect it does a poor job, or I would face revaluation of the relative worth of shared work: if cleaning declines in burden then more of it may have to be done.

this is both correct and inadequate as a principle. Leaving aside the excessive focus on money and the convenient blindness around externalities, customer needs are not static but evolving. What fraction of today's customer "needs" existed 10, 100, 1000 years ago?

Needs are shaped in collective feedback loops that identify and match "desirable" new facets of consumption with deliverable technologies. That non-linear game is much more complex than identifying and serving true customer needs.

While physical tech (hardware) places real world constraints on what can be created (popular culture has a flying car "need" but they are not deliverable), software has almost no such constraints. It is closer to the business nature of movie making or book writing. You use information and code to create an almost entirely pure cultural artifact.

That is why people engage in "faster dishwashers". While it is hard to read the mood of the times and engineer a blockbuster movie, it is much easier to work on a more predictably successful sequel. Of course at some point people tire of sequels.

This isn't just another Howl-like lament. Quite the opposite!

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/06/12/click/

> But in no clear way do these products actually improve on what’s existing in a significant enough way that users may consider a shift

This article is apparently shaming engineers for making products that are being sold, but aren't selling well enough. Don't improve products. Don't be concerned with privacy if consumers are not. Just do whatever is going to sell.

This kind of thinking would have prevented the seat belt. Seat belts weren't going to sell more cars, they were going to raise costs. And why? Only to save human lives! Waste!

After vaccuming a lot of fine dust from synthetic rug the static electricty was enough to create almost 2 inch (5cm) spark to grounded metal element I put the pipe close to.

EDIT: One use later apparently static electricity fried circuit that was used to control the vacuum cleaner from the handle. The button on the body of the vacuum cleaner doesn't work either. The funny thing is the system is stuck in ON position so I can no longer turn off the vacuum.

So the fresh new almost $200 vacuum from Hoover brand lasted about two cleanings because of serious design flaw.

Yes, I very much wish it ran faster.

It also matters when I have to run 2 loads because I let the dishes pile up.

People don't buy what they need, they think they need, they buy what they want, what they can, what others influence them to, etc... I.E. it is complex to tell what the market will bare out.

And for the record, I would be a lot more for a dishwasher that actually dries my dishes, you know with heat, like they use to, and does it quickly. Instead of spraying a chemical on them to make them dry, and it still taking ages.

The reviewer suggested all sorts of minor optimizations so a script which runs once per week in the middle of the night with no one waiting on it could run tens of seconds faster. A complete waste of time and effort to my mind, and one understandable as the OP describes: a technical challenge which, when solved, equates to zero consumer upside.

That's simply not the case. Talk to most people and they'd prefer that their entire digital lives weren't dominated by a few megacorps with access to all your private data. It's true that a lot of people have no idea how to begin achieving that, but that's not the same as not caring.

The problem is that when you develop a new system, privacy and decentralization generally aren't things that can be easily added in as later optimizations. If you care about those things then you need to build them into the design from day one, and they are hard problems to solve. Something as simply as resetting a forgotten password can turn into quite the challenge when there is no centralized authority. Getting to the point where your basic decentralized and secure platform works well enough that you can build stable, user friendly apps with all the expected niceties takes a lot of time and thinking by highly skilled developers and many projects never fully get there. This doesn't mean that it isn't worthwhile to attempt to develop such technologies.

There is also a weird fallacy going on here around building stuff based on a shallow perception of what consumers* supposedly care about. Looking at the current social media landscape and thinking "this exists because it's what people really want" betrays a particularly narrow way of thinking about the economics and power dynamics of the modern internet. This type of willfully naive thought process would have us optimize toward a highly profitable software skinnner box. The wetware equivalent would be to suggest that we design the most profitable and addictive drugs. After all, consumers are consuming them so that must be what they want, right? Why are you building something that isn't optimizing for maximum consumption? You must be blinded by your own weird ideology or blinded by interesting but irrelevant technical challenges.

Then there's the weird comment about exciting technical challenges not necessarily all being businesses. The author seems to have an underlying assumption that if it's not a viable business then it shouldn't be worked on.

*Thinking about participants in a two-way global communication system as simply "consumers" seems in-line with the rest of the author's thought processes

Not everyone eats and then instantly washes up

On a related note, at some point, computer vision models could probably help classify and typify incoming crockery and their target stains for a more accurate clean...

The reason why is dishwashers line to do a rinse in the first cycle and for most people the water isn’t hot enough. So it fills up with lukewarm water and isn’t as effective.

Another option is to have a hot water circulator installed so you always have instant hot water.

- Some people genuinely need a faster dishwasher, because having clean dishes in a timely fashion is important.

- Some people need cleaner dishes than others. Cleanliness isn't binary.

- Some people need a more energy efficient dishwasher.

- Some people need a smaller/bigger/more corrosion-resistant/quiet/heavy duty/etc. dishwasher than the market norm.

The trick is figuring out which of these axes have a high ROI.

If I would have a more modern, energy efficient but slower dishwasher, in a four person household I would need more dishes.

Now the fallacy is, more dishes (if you have the space to store them away) are far more cheaper on the long run but sticking to your old dishwasher.

Take-away: Get a new dish-washer.

In my personal journey, this has become the most difficult point in doing any sort of side project development. Sure, I can build prototypes, but for who? And why?

Sadly, modern dishwashers are not only are slow, they also suck at this too. I don't mind the slower performance since I get why, but the number of times i open the dishwasher to find half the detergent in the dispenser and all the bowls with stuff cooked on kills me.

The HP-ificaton of major appliance brands is so infuriating.

First order reasoning often fails in light of actual experience. It isn't that the reasoning was faulty, it was the underlying knowledge of reality was incomplete.

If you are lazy, and want to see MAGIC, then leave your food all over the place and use the long cycle. It works great if it is same day, not so much past that.

It reminds me of a Neal Stephenson quote from Zodiac:

"Most of my colleagues go on backpacking trips when they have to do some thinking. I go to a good hardware store and head for the oiliest, dustiest corners. … If they're really good, they don't hassle me. They let me wander around and think. Young hardware clerks have a lot of hubris. They think they can help you find anything…. Old hardware clerks have learned the hard way that nothing in a hardware store ever gets bought for its nominal purpose. You buy something that was designed to do one thing, and you use it for another."

If you build stuff you will sooner or later realize that when tools that can do new tricks turn up, it provides you with new opportunities that perhaps you didn't think of before.

If you own equipment to make holes you know that there is a vast difference between a spade bit and a forstner bit. They are two very fundamentally different ways of making a hole. Both make holes, but one will make an absolute mess of certain materials. If all you have is a spade bit, then for some tasks, you have to come up with a different strategies for achieving what you want. You have to design yourself around the limitation. If you use a forstner bit, its ability to make clean holes may mean that not only can you use it for making holes - you may be able to use it in situations where you are not primarily making a hole, but removing a curved bit of material.

I want a faster dishwasher because a faster dishwasher would solve actual problems for me. But it is a bit more nuanced than that. My dishwasher spends about an hour on one load. Getting it down to 50 minutes or even 40 wouldn't change anything. But if you can get it down to 10-15 minutes, it really starts to matter. It means the way I sequence tasks in the kitchen can change. And that's for everyday use. If I were to have a dinner with a lot of guests it would also mean that I'd need fewer plates because I can wash plates between courses.

I've been to a few design thinking workshops, and the thing that always gets me is how arrogantly stupid a lot of these workshops end up being. They pretend to be about learning the customer's needs rapidly, but more often than not what happens is that people try to replace actual insight with ceremonies and suppositions only to arrive at either the wrong conclusions or be in such a hurry to demonstrate cleverness that you miss most opportunities.

But hey, there is good money in teaching ceremony.

For the dishwasher example, most dishwashers are far too noisy. Unless you live in a large place with many rooms, it will matter. The problem is that quiet isn't a highly visible/marketable and cheaply made feature, so isn't prioritized. After purchase, many would want a quieter dishwasher but very few will bother to uninstall/return/exchange it.

He's perfectly described Mastodon. A magnificent solution in search of a problem aimed at catering to ants. Hence the dominoes of instances shutting down one after another.