Daylight Saving Time is a perfect test for UI designer | Hacker News Reader

Daylight Saving Time is a perfect test for UI designer

tonsky.me

45 pointsmatricaria68 comments

Developer/Designer: so about the time adjustment.

Product Manager: I'll stop you there. Thanks for your input but we don't need it for MVP as it's an infrequently used feature and having spoken to stakeholders [they didn't] and customers [they didn't], they both told me they didn't rank the clock function as important.

(PM proceeds in the rest of the meeting to question every comment and opinion the developer has as if taking part in a PhD defence, while offering zero evidence of their own assertions)

This hit brutally hard. I wasn't ready for this on an otherwise peaceful Sunday morning.

Violence.

Developer: Uh, OK then

This is also why our software is so bad. Developers have no backbone and won't push back against this stuff.

I disagree. You speak up, then the PM gets defensive, it escalates, your boss steps in and tries to defuse but ultimately agrees with the PM.

So now the choice is to do what the PM decides or quit and join another company with the same set up...

It's the man, man.

> This is also why our software is so bad. Developers have no backbone and won't push back against this stuff.

Maybe. But I’d argue it’s more likely that people run out of energy. Or I’d rather save my energy for my personal time. PMs win unless you’re in an engineer-first company. If the hierarchy is structured to favor decisions made by those who can barely operate a microwave, why put the energy into “pushing back”?

I think a good interview test would be “design the buttons for a microwave” and see if they think about the fact that it displays time and needs to be changed every six months. These are the types of things a software engineer would be figuring out and it helps when the designs account for edge cases without them having to drive for this type of solution

Doesn't it seem like a reasonable answer in this age could be to do away with the time function of a microwave altogether?

People often complain about designers making changes to websites/software that simplify the ui and display less information for the sake of improving clarity, but I do think that it might be the right answer here.

Do people really want a clock on every kitchen appliance in 2024? I usually will just turn off the clock where possible now and just use my phone for time. Having no clock isn't a problem but having a clock showing the wrong time is a problem.

> Do people really want a clock on every kitchen appliance in 2024?

As someone who doesn't wear a watch and doesn't use my phone while cooking, I find the clocks invaluable. The oven clock usefully shows the time when the microwave clock is counting down.

You can also just get a dedicated clock, and then it will always show the time no matter what your appliances are doing, and you only ever have to do upkeep on the time and maybe-battery of the one time piece.

I do in fact have a dedicated clock in the kitchen. It sings African bird calls on the hour. But it is less visible from the cooking area, hence my reliance on the appliance clocks.

Use case: Please cook my food for 12 minutes at 600W to be ready to eat at 12:30.

An alternative could be to let the user do the math, and change it to "Please start cooking in 3h27min for 12min at 600W".

Most microwaveable food can't be safely left at room temperature for hours.

Great market opportunity to make a fridge/microwave combo?

I think hot food vending machines do that already.

Its fairly common for the microwave clock to be the main clock for kitchen. Especially since the one on the stove tends to _also_ be super complicated to set correctly (ours was in french for 2 months because we clicked the wrong thing), so when the power goes out it just stays wrong thereafter.

Given everyone has a phone in the pocket and a huge chunk more have a watch on their wrist, what need is there for a "main clock" for the kitchen to be something so awful?

Sometimes I just want to check time without having to fish the phone out of my pocket with hands covered in meat juices

My favorite microwave ui is this.

https://shop.sharpusa.com/medium-duty-commercial-microwave-o...

One rotary knob, that's it. This sort of ui perfection would probably kill lesser designers.

  "Perfection is reached, not when there is no longer anything to add,
  but when there is no longer anything to take away."
  -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

That knob is absolutely crazy. It pisses me off. Maybe it makes sense after you try it and figure out how it works, but just presented like that it's insane. What do the letters mean? Presets you have to look up in a manual? What is the dot inbetween 1 and 1.5? 1.25 minutes? um... so... 1 min 15 s? seems less likely that I'll ever need to select 5 minutes and 15 seconds than the missing 7, 8 or 9 minutes. There is no marker? Does the selection light up or something? Is that also how it displays time remaining? Do you increase the time with 10 minutes for every revolution? Then the placement of the 0 does not make sense to me.

Yea - I've used these in multiple offices, and the only thing everyone seems to like is the "just turn the dial to turn it on" ease. Everyone I run into hates everything else about the UI because it's so vague and imprecise.

Plus this single-dial stuff is really only possible because it only does full power all the time. But nobody microwaves something for 6m non stop in an office because that'll burn even a frozen meal - a more accurate dial going up to 3m would probably be better.

Or, like, just use a regular time display rather than dozens of glowing dots. Turn one way to add time, the other to reduce. Easy and probably cheaper because it's not custom.

The 'start' button doubling as 1:00 and +1:00 is my favourite timesaver microwave design.

I've had one dial, two dial and 'no useful controls' microwaves, they're all garbage, give me a number pad and a start button, that's fine, if power is variable too, let me switch which number I'm inputting.

When we bought our house, it came with a microwave that had a rotary dial on it. In order to cook something for 30 seconds, you had to turn the dial, click, turn the dial, click, and I think turn the dial and click again. And if you didn't know how to use it already, you had to experiment a little. It was the worse design I've ever seen.

We wound up just replacing it with one with a touchpad of numbers. Admittedly, one that did a lot of other things (had all kinds of presets, timer, multiple fan speeds, etc), but "just cooking something for 30 seconds" requires 3 button presses... 3, 0, start.

How do you adjust the microwave power? Microwaves with 2 rotary dials are far more useful and easily intuitive. (See https://www.amazon.in/Bajaj-Solo-Microwave-Oven-White/dp/B0C... and https://www.amazon.in/Godrej-Microwave-Mirror-distribution-s... for example).

"1-Stage Cooking, 100% Power Only"

My fave UI was a single large rotary knob showing a physical colored 'ribbon' that starts at zero and goes up/fills-in on turning. The first 5 mins had higher resolution then less beyond 5 mins. You could also rotate it while on to increase/decrease. It's hard to beat combined input/display using a single continuous mechanism like level faders on an audio mixing board.

Someone will release a microwave with zero buttons. "Hey Siri, microwave for one minute and 30 seconds."

Kitchen appliances don't contain real clocks that keep time autonomously, but simply use the frequency of the power grid. So the solution is not to change the time but the frequency.

During some hours of the night increase/decrease the frequency to let the "clocks" run faster/slower, so they gradually adjust for the next day.

That could even be stretched out over multiple days, maybe two weeks, which would it make much easier for humans to adjust, too.

Wait, what?

There is nothing insane about running the national power grid at 40hz for a week in order to slow the microwave clocks down!

50Hz can be reasonably handled by 'worldwide' power transformers (thanks EU!)

Not by synchrononous electric motors. Like those used in nearly every industrial machine. Those spin slower when grid frequency decreases, which will cause major problems in many cases.

either run those motors for 120% duty cycle, or abolish daylight savings time

both sound equally incredulous for different reasons

TIL. I'm still in shock.

edit: This explains why my oven clock, which I correct frequently, is always WILDLY inaccurate — either too fast or too slow.

In the EU the grid prioritizes frequency over voltage. If production is slightly below load, voltage is decreased, not frequency. If things go really bad and frequency drops, too, they'll fix that by running at a slighly higher frequency later. Clocks that have been fixed in the meantime require to be fixed a second time.

A deviation of 6 minutes was reached and fixed in 2018.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/04/european-grid-di...

I have no idea if that kind of strategy is applied elsewhere in the world.

The frequency of the power grid thing applied to old alarm clocks, but I don't think electronics have generally used this approach for a few decades; RTC's and microprocessors that embed them are cheap.

I think that in my microwave they've even cut costs on that. Both Etna oven and microwave drift a few minutes each month.

I would really appreciate it if my clock actually ticked at one second per second.

In fact, I shouldn't even have to question that.

My bike speedometer is the worst for this. It has 3 buttons. Each one can be pressed short, medium (>3 seconds), or long (>5 seconds). Every action changes something on the display, but god knows what all the icons mean. Most actions are statefull, with a surprisingly deep menu structure. If you do the wrong thing, e.g. press long instead of medium, something surprising happens, and you're in hell finding the way back to the main menu and try again. Easy option is waiting 2 minutes until it returns by itself.

It has a gigaton of functions, but I only need 3: speed to not drive too fast, time to know if I'll arrive on time, km driven to know if I need maintenance. All other stuff in there is unused.

At this point, I've given up. In winter, I add an hour. I know the clock is 2 minutes off and I subtract them myself. If I have to spellunk in the dark dungeons of the menu structure again, I might accidentally drop a hammer on the thing.

Apart from that, it's a great speedometer. The worst is knowing I am the official techie and watch DST fixer for half my extended family, and no other clock has thwarted me so severely, ever...

The traditional solution is to get your time by radio from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCF77 or your regional equivalent. It might take up to 24 hours to update but it will always be correct and requires no manual interaction whatsoever.

> It might take up to 24 hours to update but it will always be correct

sounds like it might be incorrect only(!) for 24 hours at a time, with "how many times" being the wildcard.

It will be incorrect whenever the time changes, so twice a year and maybe once more if you expect your microwave to adjust for leap seconds. Depending on the device it will also lose track of time if it looses power but in that case it should know to resync immediately.

Can WWVB also be used? And does it have the same issue?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWVB

Japan uses a similar system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JJY

Most typical home clocks will use this signal to set themselves up automatically, which is made easier by the fact that Japan does not have daylight saving time.

This weekend was the timezone change ("Standard Time" to "Summer Time" in most of Europe), I remember working with https://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/ and wondering how it would depict events if you want to use local time (and have the timezone change during the day), in theory when switching to summer time it would have to show a 23 hour day, and for standard time a 25 hour day.

I wonder how Google's timeline widget handles it too, on Google Calendar if I try to create an event on March 31, 2:00 AM CET, it will jump to March 31, 3:00 AM CEST. If I create an event starting at 1 AM and ending at 2 AM, it will change the ending to 3 AM (since 1 second after 1:59:59 CET is 3:00 AM CEST). When trying to change the end time, it would show a dropdown with 2:00 (1 hour), 2:30 (1.5 hours), which are incorrect since these times "don't exist". The next option is 3:00 (2 hours), which is also wrong because on March 31st, it took the clock that honored "local time" 1 hour to go from 1 AM to 3AM.

The actual constraint here is that every additional button costs 0.1 cents extra in production. Whatever great UI scheme you come up with, if there’s a ridiculously contrived way to do it with one button less, that’s what will be chosen.

Likewise, text means region-specific models, so symbols it is.

I thought this article was going to be about the ambiguous name, "Daylight Saving Time"--it's not at all obvious from the name which setting is "Daylight Saving Time" and which is "Standard Time", to the point that it's a common crossword puzzle answer to choose either "EDT" or "EST."

The best clock setting UI was (and still is? don't know) in my first car, BMW E46 — just 1 knob. Turning left or right to decrease or increase time. Keeping on the extreme left or right position to increase the speed of changes. To set any time in 10-15 seconds. Super

I like this too. If a knob is too obtrusive/expensive, could do the same with two buttons. One button for forward and one for back. Make them sensitive enough that it's likely that a casual press will visibly scroll multiple minutes, but not too sensitive to prevent setting a specific minute with a quick tap.

> luckily it predates AI by several years

Is this referring to predating the recent LLM hype? Why would that be relevant? It certainly doesn't predate AI in the looser sense.

It's a joke, don't think about it too much.

OMG the dark mode button

My car has a button explicitly for DST on/off in the clock menu. It’s braindead dumb, has no concept of DST and all it does is +/- 1 the hour. I’ve yet to come across a more elegant solution save for an OS that is network aware doing it, but that comes with its own troubles.

Yep, my car (a Mazda) has that feature as well. Of course, this is the same car that has physical buttons that were specifically designed to be recognizable via feel so that you can use them without looking at them. It seems like Mazda actually cares about UX!

Why even have a dst button at that point. Just change the clock time. Assuming both feature are implemented equally well, it should be nearly equally easy to do.

The way I wish it worked is the first part of setting the time let you go up or down 1 hour per tap. Having to go up 23 to go down 1 because you missed by going past is annoying.

Two points for never calling it "Daylight Savings Time."

It's actually incredible how common this error is in everyday speech. I blame The Bloodhound Gang, personally. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xat1GVnl8-k

what are all those stray mouse cursors on the screen? is it supposed to be an absurdist critique of user experience? or is it just screwed up JS/CSS interpretation that's supposed to be doing something for me?

I don't much like the minimal button interfaces that abound today (bluetooth could do so much more if they gave it some interface at all, how about just httpd?) but I do enjoy solving the puzzles of how to reset the time, etc. It usually turns out to be simple, just obscure.

It's other visitors online at the same time, your mouse pointer is sent via websockets every few seconds and received by all other online visitors. I agree it's very distracting

Dark Souls of websites

It's the mouse cursors of everyone who is currently viewing the page.

the irony of pontificating on UI with a bunch of random mouse pointers jiggling all over the article I'm trying to read...

Yeah, I left the page 10 seconds in.

isn't it supposed to be other people reading the article?

A convoluted means of making mouse cursors randomly jiggle all over the screen is still a means of making mouse cursors that jiggle randomly all over the screen.

Not an issue on mobile!

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