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Comment by r0m4n0 | Hacker News Reader

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

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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."

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

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.

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