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Comment by 2four2 | Hacker News Reader

In physical UI our group calls this the Microwave Problem. No one uses the 20 extra buttons on the microwave, they mostly just use one or two buttons. But no one will buy a microwave with few buttons.

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I must be no one. Love my Samsung ME82V since a decade now. Two dials. Period.

If you know the model of your microwave offhand, you're definitely an outlier!

"Dial-A-Yield: Not just for nuclear warheads!"

I'm sure that having two dials costs more to produce than a crappy membrane keypad, and that the product manager was nearing retirement.

Hilarious coincidence. I had and loved that exact same model for the same reasons. Until one of the dials broke and I discovered how utterly irreparable the thing is. Had to get rid of it and indeed, it’s impossible to find similarly simple models. Oh well!

I would love a microwave with a slider for power level and a dial for time.

Best I have found so far is the now obsolete Breville BMO734 with jog dials for power and time, plus I use the quick-start and cancel buttons. Importantly you can change power and time even while it is running - very nice. Jog dials are not my favorite but the UI works. Extra feature buttons on inside door jam is a good design although honestly I never use the extra features. Ervery microwave with a keypad has been total shit UI in my experience.

https://www.breville.com/content/dam/breville/us/assets/micr...

I bought a spare second hand one the other day for parts!

I was confused for a moment as to which "no one" you were. The "no one" who uses the 20 buttons, or the "no one" who buys microwaves with few buttons.

same. love it. had to buy a microwave oven last year and went out of my way to find the same one.

two dials is the only ui you need for a microwave.

And none of those 20 buttons can turn off the beep. So 2am sneak snacking means watching your oven like it's 1999.

Some microwaves do have this feature. I don't think you'll ever see it on the box so you won't know until you've read the entire manual.

They can, actually! Your microwave probably has an arcane button combo that will turn off the beep. You'd never, ever stumble across it randomly, you need to read the manual. On mine, I need to hold the "2" button for five seconds.

The real takeaway here is that you should read the manuals for all your appliances. I've learned a lot about them.

High-end blenders too. All I want is speed dial, pulse switch, and on/off switch. And that's all anyone wants, but for some reason every new generation has to have all these functions nobody uses.

No one has ever been paid for keeping a good design the same.

Commercial ones are simple - unless it has a programmable “do the smoothie steps” button.

I actually have gotten free Vita-Preps on occasion by doing events with the company. Most everything Vitamix has made for years has all sorts of that stuff. They thankfully still have a base line that is simple.

> All I want is speed dial, pulse switch, and on/off switch.

Really? I want "quiet". A certain level of noise is inevitable, and blenders are way, way past that point. They're louder than food processors!

You can buy that. That's what's on my VitaMix I bought a few years ago.

There is value in choice. Not won't necessary always use just the same two buttons, so people like have the option to use other buttons. And quite often more buttons also come with better specs.

Apple used to sell stuff that had “curated UIs”: few control, few functions, and excellent UX. I remember the cleanliness of the iPod vs the overfeatured and complicated competitors.

The competitors were too cheap to have any feature, usually they had a big play button, a next and previous button and that's pretty much it.

The settings were usually pretty poor on those mp3 players, on mine you had a microphone mode, language, timezone, some shuffle configuration and that's pretty much it.

The iPod did look much much better and refined but in terms of simplicity, it's hard to beat the single play button of an mp3 player which doesn't know to do anything else. Those things were designed like appliance more than tech products.

I don’t think that’a true. Too many years have passed so I cannot cite makes and models, but I worked in an IT magazine back then and there were mp3 players with a lot of buttons, not unlike those overcomplicated VHS recorders which sold on “features”.

That's true, those also existed but what I've seen, they were not bought as much as the cheap kind. The ipod gave a reason to pay extra, those half way though products really did not.

Those things really didn't have a single real feature beyond playing music and recording with a microphone in the settings (which nobody really used)

The screen and processing power was way too bad to do anything else anyways, even if they wanted to.

Alledgedly simple UI (although I never was a Apple guy, was using iRivers at that time), but building the iPod was hard, probably entailing a flew of difficult, complex hardware and design issues to tackle.

A lot of the competitors had less features, like not being able to select the next song without stopping the current song.

As someone who's owned several non-Apple mp3 players, I've never heard of this problem.

iPod was useless without iTunes, and I wouldn't call iTunes a curated, excellent UX. We can't only look at the beautiful light and ignore the angler fish behind it.

PS: if we include Sony's minidisk in the competion, the overall listening experience, especially the wired remote was just better. The digital walkman was still a better UX on the device side, except it has an even worse horrible PC experience and Sony barriers that made it a non starter.

Just got a new microwave. Panasonic NE 25 F.

One dial.

Built like a tank. Stainless steel. Compact yet roomy.

And there's no stupid rotating platter.

What they do is rotate the microwave antenna instead. But that's inside the guts somewhere so you never see it. (Why don't they do that on all microwaves? I dunno)

So it's easy to clean. Even cooking. Max microwave.

I love it

So they do exist! It's a relief, honestly.

I searched that one up and it's on the "commercial" section of Panasonic's website with a price of "contact sales".

How did you end up with it?

Amazon

oh yeah, it is on Amazon. huh! well I'll keep that one in mind.

> Why don't they do that on all microwaves?

They used to, but the standing waves are formed by the cavity geometry, so it's not nearly as good as rotating the platter.

Well I had a microwave with the rotating platter. And now I have one without. And the one without definitely works better. So that's a strike against your theory.

I literally only ever use the +30 and the cancel button on mine. It'd be hilarious to see a microwave that only had those 2 buttons though.

Popcorn even comes with instructions to not use the popcorn button.

Only because popcorn manufacturers don't want the quality of their popcorn to be judged by the quality of your specific microwave's popcorn button implementation. They have no control over how it's implemented.

Yea, I was emphasizing the point that most microwave buttons are unneeded.

But the button isn't bad. On most microwaves it probably even works well. Of course, if you rarely eat popcorn it's probably an unnecessary extra button.

That figures, my new microwave somehow thinks 90 seconds is perfect for popcorn while the one I am buying requires like 3m 30s.

Technology Connections did a great video on the Popcorn button and why it sucks on most microwaves.

https://youtu.be/Limpr1L8Pss

Has anyone actually tried? I’ve searched for simple microwaves and can’t find any.

The IKEA MATÄLSKARE Microwave oven has 4 buttons, I press one to add 30 seconds and another one to cycle through the 4 power settings. That is their mid-range microwave, it has 750 watts of power and the more expensive models seem to have similar controls.

Their low end microwave TILLREDA has two knobs, but I've never used it.

Our microwave has two knobs… one for the power setting and one for the time

My only criticism of it is there’s no button to cancel the time back to zero and you have to wind the timer knob back

What would be the advantage of a button to cancel instead of turning the knob back to zero? It seems like that would add quite a bit of complexity to the mechanism to provide a UI that's just different rather than obviously better.

This is also my preferred control scheme, and I bought one a few years ago.

To see what's easy to find now, I typed "microwave oven knobs" into amazon.com and got several with the classic mechanical timer and power knob design. Most of those are relatively small, but "commercial microwave oven" found some larger ones.

It's a nice analogy but imagine trying to thaw something for 10s of minutes with the add 20 seconds button. That would be pretty annoying.

A dial should do fine

I've seen many one-button clocks that just either increment faster or change increment to a larger value if you hold.

Honestly, I've had a number of microwaves in my life and I have read the manuals and attempted to use various other types of operation (such as sensor cooking). The reasons why I don't typically use those additional modes of operation are perfectly rational and not due to UI bias as such:

1. I know exactly how to cook something, based on time (and power level), because that's a mental model that's universal across microwaves.

2. I don't know how to cook something and need to follow package directions, which are always expressed as time (and power level).

3. I am iterating towards a desired end state, and want to do so in small step increments. The only possible way to do so is by short bursts of time (at a specified power level).

These are the reasons I've never used any of the extra modes. Technology Connections did an entire hour long video about the popcorn button, and it sounds like at least /some/ microwaves actually implement a very good method, but most don't, and so these types of modes are also generally untrustworthy. Having additional modes has never been a deciding factor in buying a microwave for me, most of the time I bought am microwave based on materials, appearance, and mounting options.

Now, a toaster oven, on the other hand, I want all the modes, and I use them.

> But no one will buy a microwave with few buttons.

Marketing is the king. Spend resources on memeing your way into people minds, then advertise “we removed the cruft to give you <something>” (more space, better experience, whatever you can think of, even if it’s a big stretch) as some sort of revelatory breakthrough and bleeding edge innovation - and they’re gonna buy it and joke about “uncool” others’ microwaves with silly extra buttons are, affirming how cool their microwaves are.

Worked for a lot of crap on the market.

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