Hacker News Reader

Comment by somat | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

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.

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"

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.

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."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com