Our new washer and dryer have a bunch of buttons and LEDs on their control panels - no knobs to turn at all. Way too complex, I tell you.
Yeah I read a lot of complaints about the AGA after we decided not to get one, seems they look great but thats about it? I touch wood every time I talk about the one we bought, cuz they discontinued the year after I bought it, but its never needed servicing and Iâve not had any problems, it is only 5 years old, but thats a life time in this day and age! /touch-wood
Almost everything can be disabled with wire cutters. In this case, there is an actuator somewhere. Cut off its power, if needed fake the feedback so the controller doesnât detect the fault, and youâre in the business.
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The buttons are in addition to the knob. You turn the knob to one of about 12 possible wash cycle modes, then you start pushing buttons to modify the selected mode. My SO simply glazed over after we installed it trying to figure out how to run it. I sent him out to the garage for a beer and told him not to worry about it. âI got this.â 
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Even worse!
Jeez, the two of us stood over the damn washer trying to figure out what button to push first. The manual is less of a pamphlet and more of a novel.
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The biggest problem people have is the tendency to put whatever theyâre heating in the center of the box.
Put your burrito as far to one side as you can so it travels around the turntable. Also, yes, let it sit for the minute after cooking!
Compare and contrast.
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Original article author here. I just want to say that is is nice to know I am not the only one who canât stand microwave interfaces. Thanks for sharing my post, Rob!
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Yes, off center sometimes helps but not always.
What I do is set the oven to â60% powerâ (which actually means a 60/40 on/off duty cycle for the magnetron) to fold the standing time into the cooking time. Otherwise the damned thing beeps until I take the food out (why do they still shriek? Ffs, even greeting cards have audio chips in them nowadays.).
That helps a lot, but at best turns a cold center into a lukewarm everything if you donât get the time right.
Old story, so Iâm probably not remembering it right, but someone I knew who lived near (or was visiting) the borders was complaining about that (I think in a hire car, not sure) - what was particularly annoying was that the traffic announcements the car was picking up were coming from Radio Wales, so his car was occasionally loudly shouting at him in Welsh.
Also, after living in coastal Georgia, the constant interruptions for thunderstorm warnings got a bit dull given that they seemed to go off several times a day every day, and most of them were for places a long way from where I lived.
Itâs almost as bad as the fucking shipping forecast interrupting Test Match Special on Radio 4 LW.
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How about it continuing its five completion beeps AFTER you have already opened the door? A truly idiot programmer designed that.
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I assume that it all comes down to cost-sensitivity; but given the amount of R&D going into RF beam-steering/beam-shaping (both at relatively low power, for more efficient high speed data transfer, and at high power, for fancy radar); Iâm a trifle disappointed that my microwave isnât using a suit of sensors to analyze the shape and size of the object I insert and then modifying its RF emissions(with real-time compensation for absorption efficiency based on measures of RF strength taken from locations with the food between the emitter and the sensor) in order to ensure even saturation of the target.
Sure, I probably wouldnât like the price of a microwave designed by Raytheonâs military radar division, with some some licensed algorithms from computer assisted radiotherapy dose monitoring; but this is the future and my Pop Tart should reflect that!
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Thatâs a great article on microwave ovens! I had already figured all that stuff out, but I spend way too much time cooking microwaveable food.
The user interface problem is similar to the problem with trying to buy a pair of shoes that just looks like shoes, or a cheap bicycle without front and rear suspension. âFeaturesâ have replaced build quality as selling points. That, and it costs less to make a slab of flat featureless buttons. Itâs an exercise in lithography.
Our $50 Emerson microwave had no button called âTIMEâ. Weird, right? Thatâs the one button you need. I eventually dug out the manual and learned that the button labeled âPOWERâ is really the âTIMEâ button, so I got out my label maker and fixed it.
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My technique as well. Cut the power level and up the time accordingly and I seem to do okay. Other than the Stop and +30 seconds button, the power button is the only thing I find necessary on the device.
Wait, JUST WAIT. Youâre telling meâŚsorry, Iâm choking up a littleâŚthat you putâŚbreath, just breatheâŚPop Tarts inâŚinâŚIN THE MICROWAVE!!!
Okay. Iâll just have to appreciate that your culture has stagnated past the âdeclineâ stage and has gone into âfull cray crayâ because Pop Tarts are built for toaster ovens and if no other oven is available, then it will be eaten at room temperature. That is, it will HAPPILY be eaten at room temperature regardless of the temperature of said room.
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Oven =/= microwave!
Do people really use only a microwave these days? What do you do with the actual oven installed in every kitchen?
This really surprised me.
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I was being hyperbolic, Iâve actually never eaten a pop tart. However, I stand by the notion that, In The Glorious Future, all the RF witchcraft of man should be at my fingertips when I go to do something culinarily lazy.
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When I moved in to my flat, I just couldnât figure out why the sleek, futuristic electric hob refused to heat anything. It took 3 hours of image search and Google translate of a German user manual to find out itâs an induction hob which needs a special magnetic type of pan. So I went hungry. Fin.
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From the point of view of the manufacturer, it isnât good if it doesnât sell. I assume the market has been tested and the customers have been found to gravitate towards the Christmas-tree approach. One of the marks of Steve Jobsâs peculiar genius was that he was able to make elegance saleable and even fun. However, people like that are very few and far between. Many designers can make something elegant that will do the job, but they will be overridden by sales, marketing, and higher management.
This is an interesting facet of marketing. Think about the radio in your car. The radio that comes with the car tends to be very easy to use. Its user interface has been honed by years of experience, dealing with unhappy customers (often older folks) who canât figure out how to use the thing.
Aftermarket car radios, on the other hand, are sold based on the number of features they have. Their face plates tend to have vivid animated displays, and they offer rows of buttons. Using them is a nightmare. but this doesnât matter to the companies who sell them, because thereâs no recourse for the customer. The units move, whether or not they can be used. They also tend to be sold to gearheads who think that the more complicated it is, the better.
I once tried to set the time on the aftermarket radio in a used car I acquired. It was utterly impossible to figure out from looking at the radio. I tried the website, which also failed to inform. I ended up calling the company and talking to a human to learn how to do it! The factory radios in my crs have always had simple âHâ and âMâ buttons to set the hours and minutes. Easy peasy.
The timepieces that I make and sell have one function, and only two buttons. Even so, itâs necessary to read the instructions, especially to learn how to set the tilt angle. Oh, well.
[quote=âgwwar, post:38, topic:60497, full:trueâ]
heat food evenly without a turntable[/quote]
Neat trick; how do they manage that? I though turntables were to overcome hotspots caused by standing waves.
Not so fun when something goes wrong and all you get is a âgeneral failureâ kind of indication.
Give me the startup log messages on the screen, give me all the debug reports, do not hide the complexity behind some pretty but deceptive single-button mask. Design things around failure modes, so the debugging is easy and repairs are straightforward. Itâs cute if you get a brick with round edges and brushed aluminium, but once it inevitably hiccups, all the cuteness goes down the drain. I am not entirely opposed against sleek looking deceptive simplicity - but only as long as the true service data are just an escape key (to banish the animated crap that hides whatâs happening) or latch press and pop (to get access to the internal status LEDs) away. Welding the access panels shut and not providing the documentation is not user friendly.
Steve Jobs sucked and his legacy keeps sucking. Bring back Wozniak.
