- Microwave ovens should have a knob-button combo that I can work in 0.5 seconds without looking or reading the manual
- Ovens and stoves should have knobs I can turn with wet or oven-mitted hands
- Cars should have volume buttons I can twist or smack into silence without thinking about it for more than a moment
- Same with seat heaters, wipers, and anything I might do while the car is moving
Ooh, yeah this is a big one for me now. A few years ago I got a new range and the controls are all capacitive touch. Mitts are a minor inconvenience, but also sometimes cooking is messy and liquid gets spilled here or there. Now imagine how your phone works when you get some rain on the screen... yeah, it's not great. I've learned enough tricks to live with it since it's honestly the only thing I don't like about that range, but next time I'll probably shell out a little more for knobs if I have to.
In 1996 that was changed to require new dryer circuits to be 4 wire. Two hots wires, one neutral, and one ground. Existing 3 wire dryer circuits were allowed to remain in use.
Particularly if you operate rentals, the legal liability is perhaps almost as much as NOT retrofitting GFCIs into baths/kitchens.
SRC: not your electrician
it's an absolute failure of product design in my eyes
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WHXlXwYWETA/UbHwdsgx5dI/AAAAAAAAA_...
You know what's funny? The 2024 Dacia Duster, still a cheap but functional car, has 4 physical switches to control the windows, unlike the mess that's the VW ID.4 which went full cost cutting mode to the extreme.
How did VW fall so low? If a budget Franco-Romanian brand can school them on UX, then the Chinese will eat them alive.
Knob 1: A rotary timer. Twist it so the little arrow points at the time to cook (+/- 30 seconds)
Knob 2: Nobody knows. This was some sort of a "mode" selector that wasn't touched in eight years as far as I remember.
Button: More similar to a space bar on a mechanical keyboard - push to start cooking.
The door was just a simple "pull to open", there was no "eject" button to open the door.
When it was done cooking, there was a single "ding".
When I was car shopping a couple years ago I immediately disqualified at least half of the ones I looked at because of garbage features. Now I'm looking for a new fridge and that market hasn't gotten as bad yet, but it's already bad. I have no interest in a fridge that has a camera and a wifi connection, or needs an app to change the temperature.
Alas, a knob is no guarantee of a decent user interface. I have a higher-end GE microwave with a knob that is completely inert until you know what you're supposed to press first. Granted, "cook time" is not an entirely unintuitive prerequisite, but why the designers didn't at least consider that this would be the 95% use case and simply default the knob to that function is beyond me.
Breville has, in my experience, nailed the interaction between physical knobs and digital input.
I’m minutes away from replacing my instapot purely because I feel like it’s ui will cause an explosion one day and the Breville won’t.
I really like the climate controls on my slightly older Jetta, with three knobs: temp, fan, and position. The left- and right-most knobs have a button in the center that controls the heated seats. VW had a perfect system and I hope more automakers rediscover knobs and buttons soon.
It also shows the power of a good vendor. My uncle had a dealer he knew well and trusted, so bought them sight unseen when his old ones broke. Probably paid extra for the commercial line rather than the consumer line, but I assume they will last way longer too.
Stoves with touchscreen buttons that become completely unusable as soon as more that 4 water molecules get within a 2 metre radius are infuriating beyond belief.
I sometimes had to disable the fuses to turn off the indiction stove. I kid you not. It would beep incessantly if something spilled near the controls (it was all one flat surface, so easy thing to do when e.g. boiling anything) and I just couldn't turn the fucking thing off.
I genuinely wonder if the people who designed this have ever tried using it themselves in any real-world conditions. It's just broken.
The benefits in ease of cleaning outweigh the negatives in my opinion. And I use that stove a lot.
Saying that, I suspect there's a whole load of manufacturers who put different levels of thought into their capacitive controls. I only gave my example because I'm really happy with it - and so in my opinion it's not a universal problem with touch controls on stoves. Every time I stay in an AirBnB I'm surprised by just how bad a lot of cooking appliances are though - really unintuitive timers, poor quality knobs, very primitive technology (precisely controlling temperature really isn't that hard!)
One of the difficulties of these sort of things is that it's really hard to know if something is any good unless you've actually used it in real-world conditions a few times.
We have a microwave with a knob to set the duration and another to set the clock, with two small buttons (one is 12/24 hours, the other I can't remember).
Every guest we had who tried to use the microwaive failed it, because it was so not intuitive to just turn to set the duration ... and then wait a couple seconds before heating starts automatically.
I wish there was a physical start button.