I always see my dishwasher having some bizarre setting active because of accidental contact with a touch button.
http://web.archive.org/web/20210509153031/https://www.reddit...
1. Place pot of water on element to boil
2. Enable boost mode
3. Water reaches boil as I'm distracted with other prep / child / HN post, and overflows
4. All controls (including ability to disable boost, reduce heat, or turn off element) rendered completely inoperable due to liquid on glass surface impacting pcap sensing
5. Dry, repeat.
My two gripes about induction are the touch controls they typically ship with and the inability to roast peppers over an open flame. But the incredible temperature response makes up for both IMO.
My next cooktop will probably still be induction, but it will definitely have knobs.
Solution: Immediately after cooking I walk over to the junction box and turn off the breaker to the stovetop.
I'm hopeful that the tide is turning on these designs as more people have to use them day to day and realize that touchscreens are categorically worse than tactile controls in a number of scenarios.
Two problems:
Buttons stopped working after warranty expired so had to pay for a service call to have it fixed. Luckily no parts were needed. I don't recall the reason right now.
It has a spinny disc, so like a potentiometer but not. It is a flat removable ring and behind it it uses a touch button of sorts
You have to pull it off amd clean it before every use for it to work and when it does work it is very fiddly to use.
I live with my 5 adult sons in a house with a small kitchen. Every hip-level surface gets smacked regularly.
My point is that it isn't always a design failure to use touch controls, sometimes it is an implementation failure that makes them unusable.
It's the same with designers doing their light-grey text on a white background with their 8K colour-perfect screen in optimal lighting conditions, and then when you point out this is difficult to read they go "I don't see the problem!"
Because the designers I’ve worked with would never ship that. But maybe I’ve just worked with competent designers.
They also love to disable the mouse scroll and the scrollbars, so the page has 300 more settings but you have no way of knowing that (this also happened to me on windows 11 btw).
It reached the point where I implemented my own script to bypass the GUI at work.
- Neo4j docs: https://neo4j.com/docs/cypher-manual/current/introduction/cy...
- RabbitMQ docs (esp. that sidebar): https://www.rabbitmq.com/docs/reliability
- Argo Workflows UI (no link, as you need to login).
- CV from "senior UX engineer" I received yesterday in response to a job ad I posted.
- Just now I found https://www.nngroup.com/articles/low-contrast/ when searching for something else – the quote at the top is nigh-unreadable due to the "font-weight: 250" which has the same kind of effect as low-contrast grey text.
- I've also had some discussions with designers over the years. Some view their work as "art" and get incredibly defensive about even minor changes done for real pragmatic reasons. Of course, there are also plenty other more pragmatic and competent designers out there.
- HN does it for downvoted/dead comments and "text posts" such as ask/show HN. Dang said it's a feature. Many disagree.
It's not as prevalent as it once was – it was even worse 10 years ago – but it's still encountered fairly regularly.
Font weight is a crucial factor of readability, and it depends on screen specifics. On my 2020 M1 mbp at ~40% screen brightness, the NNGroup link quote is quite readable. As it is on my phone.
I don't rate any designer or developer very highly if they're too precious about their "art".
The HN dead/downvoted comments is contentious for sure. I don't agree with the choice fwiw.
It's all "readable" in the sense of "I can read it", but not in the sense of "I can read it effortlessly". I have a bit of CSS in Stylus to fix it, and it takes noticeably less effort to read it with a "normal" font. The RabbitMQ menu is just so much easier to scan as well with a more normal colour.
And agreed that readability is a scale and it’s best to be on the “easy” end of that scale.
Its like they see it, and be like "Ah, everyone who bought it got screwed over, and it will hurt our brand, but its still cheaper to quietly ignore it". Despisable
Bonus points for a big long click buffer and strange multi-click semantics so that once the computer unfreezes your attempts at diagnostics are redirected into messing up the state in weird and wonderful ways that you will have to unpack over the next week.
Bonus points if a firmware update changes the invisible control layout.
Taking them off pauses your stuff. Sometimes that's useful, but on a desktop that's most often just annoying, particularly if you're just itching or adjusting them.
More mysterious is that tapping them also pauses, but not always, and not reliably enough to actually use to pause and unpause.
Even more mysterious though is the "two finger" tap which changes your headphones mode entirely, so that any background noise stops the noise cancellation. (It calls this "Conversation mode" or something).
But any background noise seems to cancel the noise cancellation, so it's less useful than just turning that off.
But this feature is easy to accidentally turn on, and it took a lot of googling in frustration to work out how to get it back to the normal operation.
God knows what other hidden features these things have, because who bothers to read the manual for a pair of headphones?
I'd be playing a game and say "Dammit" in response to something and my headphones would be like "OH! You're trying to have a conversation! Let me help you with that!"
Or I'd be on an airplane watching something funny, I'd laugh, and it'd disable the noise canceling.
This kind of automation is a bug, not a feature, as far as I'm concerned.
The fact you can get into that mode accidentally with no obvious way to cancel it is a UX failure.
This results in it getting opened while running all the time, and spraying water everywhere.
But at least the front panel is not made ugly by things like buttons and a LED!
So the entire front of the dishwasher is customizable and can't have any buttons/indicators.
We are semi-unhappy with ours. Our kids will open it to quickly grab a cup or bowl if nothing else is available, and forget to press the "Start" button to restart it. Our old washer would auto-restart after being opened. Oh, and the Start button needs to be pressed for more than a second, and there isn't really a tactile click when it succeeds. Which it doesn't always do. And if you press it twice it can reset and have to re-run the entire cycle.
Dear Satan, I believe now would be a good time to discuss the subject of a raise!
What I really want is for the controls to not be on the cooking surface at all but that only seems to be available for stovetop + oven combinations which have their own annoying limitations.
Still bad design on many levels, but not quite what I would call a safety hazard for this reason alone.
Some touch controls are incredibly good at filtering false inputs. Unfortunately you can't tell which.
the knobs on my manually operated range pull right off their posts and go soak in the sink with some soap and hot water once a week while i spray the range's control surface with whatever spray cleaner and wipe it off with every other flat surface in my kitchen.
after ten or fifteen minutes of soaking, anything left on the knobs fall off with a dry rag that goes in the cloth washer afterwards.
But I gotta say, the ability to just simply wipe the whole stove surface with a towel and be done has more than made up for the touch buttons sucking.
With physical knobs: Take knobs off and soak them, use a towel and wipe a circle around the nub that’s left, try not to leave a circular streak pattern, put knobs back. Or just wipe the knobs with the towel and get close enough on the surface.
Touch buttons: wipe the whole thing in big strokes, you’re done.
I clean the whole surface after every use now, because it’s just so damned easy.
Ideal would be to put the control surface further away from the cooking surface but that won't integrate into semi-standardized kitchen designs.
For medical reasons [1] I had to transition from the induction hob to a ceramic hob, and had to choose the Nef equivalent because it had the same physical footprint. So now I have the same crap controls with much worse response time to the control inputs themselves. The ceramic hob also can't detect when a pan has been removed so will leave a hob dangerously hot but not glowing. I've got used to it now but it is very frustrating and still catches me out sometimes.
[1] I have an implanted defibrillator whose sensor is nulled out by an inductions hob's magnetic fields.
https://media.s-bol.com/qn6AyQBAxA33/lYREMLg/1198x1200.jpg
(https://etna.nl/keukenapparatuur/fi590zwa/)
As I'll be remodelling the kitchen in any case, going to a stand-alone appliance is fine by me.
There are several models with knobs out there now. It seems to have been picked up as a premium feature.
This is a cool one with knobs that can be removed. Never used one, but I liked the idea.
Fortunately by last year the this Café (GE) double oven induction range was available here in the US: https://www.cafeappliances.com/appliance/Cafe-30-Smart-Slide... I have a few quibbles (mainly, that only one of the burners is properly sized for a 12" skillet) but overall I like it.
I don't mind the touch buttons for operating the oven and timers--in fact, they're nice and easy to clean (with a handy "lock screen" feature so you can spray and wipe down the front panel without everything going nuts) but I'm pretty sure trying to fine tune the burner settings using a touch slider while keeping an eye on multiple pans would have driven me nuts. I also have haven't had problems with the knobs getting dirty or being hard to wipe down if they do, to address a point raised in another reply.
Price splits the difference between the entry level ranges and the snobby brands (Miele, Thermador, etc).
The criteria of knobs on an induction oven filters out quite a lot of options annoyingly.
Too bad you have no way of telling how good controls are in a product before you start using them.
It has two heating areas but maybe there's 4 area version.
Well, and after years of searching, friends recommended me the AEG models, like IKE64450XB (here in Europe). And honestly, I was happy with the touch surface ever after: It reacts quickly enough and I can modify every flame at an instant. I don't even get a penny for this, I'm just satisfied. So, yeah, touch can be good, like on a smartphone, even on household devices.
On the other side, it's really hit or miss with these touch UIs: I also have an combined washing machine + dryer from the same brand and there I need to press each touch surface for at least half a second, and not touch the metal case of the machine, otherwise the touch wouldn't register. Then, the UI would sometimes hang, but still register touches, playing them back once it has caught up.
This is not an EV thing. It's a contemporary trend, and it just happens that most newly designed cars are EVs now.
The rise of touchscreen technology was just coincidental with the rise of EVs. The first Tesla Roadster, Nissan Leaf, and Renault Zoe had crappy little screens, and real buttons for everything, like most cars of their era.
OTOH today EV-hating Toyota keeps making screens bigger. The latest Lamborghini has multiple touchscreens too.
This change would have happened even if EVs didn't exist. iPad is more to blame for that trend than an electric drivetrain.
Recently changed offices at work. The new one has the same kind of buttons for the keypad. Just a flat surface with 9 numbers. I accidentally double press all the time, as it's hard to feel with no tactile feedback what you're doing and it's a bit delayed in the "beeps". So then you have to wait a few seconds and try again. Drives me mad.
> I always see my dishwasher having some bizarre setting active because of accidental contact with a touch button.
My dishwasher has button to activate a control lock to prevent that. But the touch buttons suck so much and it requires a long press to activate that it always takes me two or three attempts and at least 10-15 seconds to push that button.
15 seconds for a button push, WTF were the designers thinking?
Innovators gonna innovate I guess.
Compare that to an actual screen where the button label and button position can change.
Douglas Adams in 1979 knew the coming future:
A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive--you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.