IMO there is a very annoying trend in household appliances towards worse and worse UI.
Basically, it started with light switches already decades ago, at least in Europe. In the past, you had switches that themselves indicated what state they are in, so if you cluster them on a board it's incredibly easy to find the one switched on at the moment [1].
Then, some moron came up with switches that don't show anything anymore [2].
Nowadays you're lucky if you get switches on anything at all. This [3] is how a standard stove looks like in new Swiss apartments nowadays. Good luck explaining this to your grandma. You idiots, it has one job, getting more or less hot!
Recently I took a residential elevator that just had an empty touch field when you came in. No indication of what you could do whatsoever. This immediately gave me anxiety, and I'm just 31 goddamnit. Anyways, what happened was that once the elevator door closed it gave me a selection of floors to go. [4] facepalm
Please, for the love of what's holy, stop improving what doesn't need improvement! In german we have a word for this: "Verschlimmbessern". (a combination of verschlimmern='making it worse' and bessern=improving)
> IMO there is a very annoying trend in household appliances towards worse and worse UI.
I feel like you could drop "in household appliances" from that statement and still be telling the truth. I'd be willing to bet that anyone reading this could think of examples in software where those making product decisions seem to be operating off of these principles:
* Refine relentlessly (vs stop improving what doesn't need improvement)
* Be heavily state-dependent as a way to minimize presentation of options. But don't call attention to state.
* Minimize any affordances. Rely on implicit interaction patterns you assume the user has already learned.
* Minimize everything. Remove options. Hide what you can't remove. The less the software does, the less the user has to think, right?
> Be heavily state-dependent as a way to minimize presentation of options. But don't call attention to state.
This is one of my least favorite design patterns, and I keep seeing more of it. It feels like half the products I use have bizarre state rules with no documentation. Key features disappear as I scroll, or are only available from certain (unrelated) screens, or are under one of six distinct "options" menus in different locations.
Since I spend a large part of my life dealing with this, I memorize the tricks and find it merely annoying. But I still regularly discover features in products I don't use often, buried behind some utterly incoherent state dependency.
With three things that can be switched on or off there are 7 state permutations (plus all off)
> It's awful.
The alternative being three separate toggle switches.
While this would be easier to scan and make a decision if you wanted granular decisions every time you cooked something, 90% of the time the oven will be set to the same setting; ALL ON. I think that having a single switch, rather than three is a more efficient UI for this.
Unless you know how to cook. Then the analog controls are a godsend because they let you control the rate at which heat is applied to your food to a great degree. The setting you might use to boil water is not the same one you'd use to cook an egg. Ditto for sautee versus cooking a steak.
The problem is that the people designing UIs for products don't actually know how to use the products. They don't have any concept of how a user uses the UI. So they just assume that less is better without stopping to consider why someone would want to control the temperature of their stove.
My oven has a clock that resets to 00:00 whenever there is even the briefest power fluctuation and the oven will not function unless the clock is adjusted with tiny buttons. The stove will work, though.
i have a new blue star range. the oven and burners each have a single knob, one switch for the convection fan, one switch for the light. there are no electronics visible on the unit. no clock, timer, buttons, nothing. the entire thing is made out of iron and steel.
you have to go out of your way to buy this kind of stuff, and it's more expensive, but it's still out there. the low end of the appliance market competes on features and price ("race to the bottom") while the mid and high end compete on component and build quality and reliability.
There is a nice book about things like this, but it is a bit dated. The Design of Everyday Things [1].
Devices are produced not to be useful, but to be sold. People want more value for money so they select a thing with more buttons (seeing a button for a function) or more splashing lights. Usually the cheapest devices of established lot are simple, but may be not energy efficient. Probably the flashiest are mid-tier and the most expensive are sometimes like good looking cheapest option, but more energy efficient.
I am thinking of getting big screen display. What I would prefer is to get computer monitor around 40-50 inches connected to my computer and Chromecast. For audio I would like to use separate appliance. Cheapest most effective solution is probably to buy TV (and it seems all of them are to some extent marketed as Smart) even if I don't intend to use most of it. Other option that I consider is to have 24-30" monitor on wheeled stand so I can easily pull it closer to couch.
You can blame Apple... they convinced everyone that design was important, so now every shitty company in the world is ineffectually trying to push the boundaries to create something "iconic."
I know where you're coming from, but Apple is IMO much better at modernising UI. They usually don't just change for the sake of change, there tends to be an advantage over the old way. And the new way is often even more tactile than the old. Only discoverability of advanced features is a problem, but that's IMO less of a problem with a device that you use daily.
> They usually don't just change for the sake of change, there tends to be an advantage over the old way
Did you carefully couch your statement because of iOS7 specifically? Gossamer font-faces and weights, "abstract art" choices for icons and palette really felt like "change for the sake of change" to me, an overcompensating reaction to the "skeuomorphism" backlash.
Yep, that's exactly it. Let's say I fall somewhere in between - I found the old time machine way overdone and I also agree that the old floppy disk symbol needed to go at some point. But giving Jony free range was a mistake as well. Apple really is missing a curator and uncomfortable UX questioner with decision power. But what comes from them today is still way better than the competition - with some (very big) exceptions like iTunes / Apple Music.
I believe you are agreeing with me... Apple does a damn-good job of design -- applied correctly. Their stodgy contemporaries' poor imitation is the problem. (Eg. Honeywell -vs- Nest)
Yeah... because Honeywell produced a product that everyone was talking about with their friends and family? Nope. They've been sitting in a dominant market position for decades without any real innovation. Innovator came along and produced a great product; Honeywell went into full patent troll mode.
I don't think we can safely say that about Apple anymore. Here's a nice analysis of UI decisions Apple has made in recent years that are right in line with what the above states:
I will say this much: that seems totally intuitive to me. You tap the button for the burner you want, then tap the +/- buttons to get your temperature, right? I like having each burner's setting readout all together in one place, as well.
Everything else about it is terrible. Oven controls need to be tactile, they need to be immediate, and they need to not be three inches from a hot pan. That'll cause enough burns just from fumble-fingering in normal use--now imagine that your pan has caught fire and you're trying to select the left front burner and press - 8 times while your hand is showered with flaming grease. Who could possibly have thought this was a good idea?
This is a long-solved problem. Stoves have dials to turn the burners on and select the temperature. Done, solved. This is one of those things that a simple, mechanical control is best.
You need to visit a kitchen showroom. The knobs have vanished and you have stupid bits of glass that don't do anything then go up 3 increments when they finally recognise input.
Well, that's not exactly true. You just need to either buy a very cheap hob(so that touch controls are above the price range) or go for the high-high end where manufacturers understand that knobs are better experience. All Rangemaster hobs have knobs:
Touch buttons are so much better on stoves than rotating knobs. Its not just a design gimmick. I used stoves with both, and with the touch buttons cleaning the stove after cooking it's a matter of wiping once. With the knobs on the other hand it's really hard to clean, you might need to remove them clean them and replace them.
From your post I assume that the stoves you tried had the rotating knobs on top of the stove (where the touch controls in the above picture are?)
That in fact sounds like a really bad idea, but in the European countries where I have lived, the typical "good ol' knob" stove had the knobs placed vertically right above the oven, not on the top of the stove. Like this:
So the problem you mention doesn't exist because the knobs aren't something you have to clean after cooking, you're OK cleaning them once per week.
I personally prefer the knobs because stoves with touch buttons tend to beep and turn themselves off when water or oil gets on the controls, which is a quite common circumstance when they're 2 or 3 cm away from a boiling pot. I don't know who had the great idea of designing controls that don't work when wet and putting them in a place that will very often get wet - OK, if you are careful you can avoid it, but I shouldn't need to be careful with that when cooking. Sometimes (e.g. for cooking a big crab) it's very convenient to fill a pot almost to the brim with water for boiling and just dry the water that comes out afterwards, with the touch buttons you just can't do that.
The real problem with these new UIs is lack of choice. I can live with the touch buttons, but my grandma can't, she's 86 and she just doesn't learn new interfaces at that age. Her stove recently broke and we had a really hard time to find another vitroceramic one with knobs, because apparently they don't make them anymore. We finally found an old model somewhere and probably paid it quite overpriced.
I'm pretty sure the only reason those touch buttons are being put on appliances is because they are both much cheaper to manufacture than knobs or physical switches, while at the same time looking modern.
I do not know if this applies to all stoves with tactile buttons, but the one I have turns itself off if anything hot is put on the buttons. This happens both if you overcook something and boiling water/food pours all over the stove, or if you happen to put a frying pan on the buttons.
But yes, overall I do agree with you. My one major annoyance is that changing temperatures is slower than with a rotating knob.
You'd think it's hard to screw up a rotating knob, but they've found ways to do that as well! When I went shopping for a stove years ago I found out that some have knobs that only go one way, so to switch a burner to max, you have to twist it all the way around. Extremely annoying.
I ended up going to a showroom and twisting all the knobs of all the stoves to find out which ones didn't have that limitation. I must have looked like a crazy person, but I got one I liked in the end.
The stove I ended up buying had one variable-size burner, and that knob had a bounce-back switch at the end, so you have to turn that knob the wrong way around to max it, but I could live with that. Why a regular burner would have the limit beats me. The only thing I could think of would be some sort of extremely crude and ineffective child-protection, but all stoves have a child-lock anyway, so what's the use?
The stove where I live right now has knobs whose full range of motion is a quarter-turn, and the flame goes out if you turn it more than halfway down, so effectively you only have one-eighth of the knob to use. If you try to set it to low heat, you'll usually go too far and put the flame out unless you pick up the pan and watch the burner while turning the knob a millimeter at a time.
It's absolutely amazing what people can manage to screw up.
One integration test should be to take the engineer in charge, bind one arm behind his back and tell him to make Spaghetti aglio olio peperoncini for Gordon Ramsey waiting with a Santoku knife ready for some action.
Edit: To clarify - Aglio olio is what they cook in prison in Good Fellas. It's both the most simplest pasta dish and the easiest to screw up - overcook the garlic a bit and you get garlic chips instead of melting their flavour into the sauce.
Used an 80s microwave for the first time in years, a few months back. I'd forgotten how nice they are.
Power knob (the kind that clicks to exact positions), timer knob. Only interface. Set power (or don't if it's already where you want it), turn timer to where you want it. Done. Pull door to open, not even a button for that. 100x better than the interface on modern microwaves.
Reminds me of many of the first VOIP softwares often mimicking physical phones (some didn't even accept keyboard input for punching the number, you had to use the mouse). Applications skinned like photographs of physical items => horrible UX.
Whenever I see monitors and touchscreens, I keep any eye out for crashes and errors.
It's always interesting to see what should be simple, dedicated-hardware devices taken down by a Windows 10 update or some revealing error message (why does the mall's you-are-here screen use Internet Explorer?!)
My grandmother has a switch like this one [1]. Now the switch is like 60 years old. The scroll under the switch is to dim light, far-right - provides max power to light bulbs, far-left, minimum power, but light bulb still works. Button above it just turns it on and off. It's beautiful, works after decades, shows state from distance, it's practical. I wish it was still sold. Now I need application for mobile device, WiFi to achieve the same...
You can still buy dimmer switches. Most have a rotating knob, rather than a linear slider, but here is one with a slider (which also looks much nicer than your grandmother's):
give that thing a bit of a redesign, put up nice LED lights with a warm color and you have the perfect 'smart' light. In Japan there is a company selling good but cheap LED fixtures with very simple and well built remote controls, temperature setting and three dim modes. It works perfectly with existing switches, you can reset its state by switching on and off twice in succession and the remote buttons are illuminescent. That's smart. Keep your wifi and app interfaces away.
I just moved into a new flat, the temperature markings around the knobs that control the hob had been worn away through overenthusiastic cleaning. You know what I did? I drew some new numbers on with a permanent pen. That's the kind of maintenance interaction I want with my appliances, not wiring up JTAG or sniffing packets out of the air.
We need a movement similar to RMS' for this kind of thing.
What I showed in the pic is induction probably, most new stoves in Switzerland are. It's ok for directness, but nothing beats gas. I don't even need the damn knob to tell me how strong it is, I can see the flame! There's beauty and fun in cooking with something as simple as fire.
Speak with any professional chef and they will tell you that gas is what you want. The direct control is impossible to beat, induction gets close but it's still not ideal - and regular electric hobs are just miserable to use.
+1 for the elevator anxiety. In my case there were no buttons inside the lift!! Really, nothing. One had to select your floor BEFORE entering the lift.
That's called a destination control system, and it works that way because of the massive efficiency gains of letting the elevators work out who should go where.
We had those in the Centre Point tower, where I used to work. They were awful. As you swiped through the security barrier you'd be assigned a lift. However, if you missed the number or the barriers broke (which they often did) there was a good chance of getting in the wrong one.
There was a public restaurant on the top floor, so the lifts frequently contained panicky people riding up and down until they eventually got to the ground floor.
Also the lift systems occasionally crashed mid-journey. The lift would stop, the lights would go out and the LCD screen would blank and run through a boot sequence before everything came back up.
Sounds like you had a really beta version? The ones I've used (n=2) worked fine, and the lift assignments were done just outside the elevator, where you'd usually have the up/down buttons. As the elevators arrived, little screens on the outside showed the floors they would be stopping at.
These were private office buildings though, I can definitely see the public restaurant causing havoc with its endless stream of noobs...
I think they're just really old - I have a vague memory of seeing an engineer armed with a 5 1/2" floppy disk. They definitely didn't do anything as fancy as showing which floors they would be stopping at.
The building's now been turned into posh flats - there's no way I'd consider living there (apart from being almost infinitely out of my price range) without being sure they'd been replaced.
What's with this? You have floor you're on and a floor you want to go to. If some else presses a button before the lift passes, pick them up too. Awfully conventional, but everyone understands it.
Until you're in one of those office buildings where everybody has lunch at exactly 12, meaning first you wait an eon to find an elevator where you can squeeze in, and then you ding-ding-ding-ding your way slowly down to the ground floor, stopping at every floor to show people that this one's also full!
Couldn't you just use a weight sensor to determine whether an elevator cab is over x% of its rated capacity, and make that one ineligible to respond to external calls until after some people exit?
That wouldn't require changes to the user interface, and the doors would only open if someone can actually get on.
That, plus an assumption that most trips are between the ground/garage floors and one of the higher, occupied floors should be sufficient to reduce congestion without requiring someone to push a floor button before entering the cab. Adding a clock to the elevator controller would also help, such as by stationing empty cabs at the exit floors in the mornings, and distributing them among the occupied floors in the evenings.
I can think of a lot of ways to improve elevator scheduling without changing the user interface, and even if I did change that, I could certainly provide some mechanism to select a specific floor without installing a touchscreen GUI. Wave your employee access RFID badge at the button panel to pick the floor where your cubicle is, for instance.
Its a havoc when there is a crowd, like the floor housing the common cafeteria/lunch place in an office building. In a group of people waiting, inadvertently someone misses out to specify their floor and panics!
Also, surprisingly large no. of people make a mistake in selecting the floor they need to go to (visitors, new joinees...)
Efficiency gains are a big deal, too. Consider that even being able to get away with one fewer elevator saves space on every floor of the building. The taller the building, the more valuable it is.
Can't they just make it such that there's still buttons inside, maybe given lower priority and some help text explaining that it's best to choose outside?
I like physical knobs and buttons on cars too. Not only are they easier and safer to use while riding due to tactile feedback, but they also work when they're off so you can, for example, turn down the volume before turning the car on.
This is for example still very much with BMW and Audi. And I'm glad they do keep buttons etc around.
The funny thing is that less prestigious brands like Citroen, go all "futuristic", trying to be fancy, and doing so remove all tactile interfaces. It's one of the reasons I would never buy a car like this.
Listen to the latest ATP. Marco explains how his tesla's turn signal indicators don't click anymore when the central console has a problem - they stay silent until he reboots the thing with some button combo.
That is the worst part of Teslas to me - why the hell is EVERYTHING on this huge display?? Changing temperature or music volume without tactile feedback is the worst thing.
If you haven't read it yet, check out "The Design of Everyday Things" [1], which covers just this kind of annoyance, and is a great 101 on any kind of interface design (be it physical or on a computer).
That stove interface is particularly annoying because it takes a single operation with a knob into ten finger presses - on, select element, power up 8 times. I managed to find a stove with direct access to all power levels for all elements at the cost of less cooking surface.
Regarding your first two examples, most new construction where I live (NYC) has switched over to a similar [0] which from my understanding is for accessibility reasons, and I suspect the second example is for the same reason. They don't require any fine motor skills whatsoever, you can pretty much just press in their general direction to toggle.
Yes, those are alright - but most in Switzerland don't have a tilt (for indicating state). It's like noone even cares about stuff like this nowadays. In the past I thought German/Swiss design to be some sort of pinnacle of function and design, but not anymore.
There's a reason why Germany/Austria/Switzerland don't usually have state-indicating toggle switches and it's because toggle switches make no sense in multiway switching [0] systems where multiple switches control the same lightsource.
I'm not sure how common multiway switching is in the US, but it's certainly super common in Europe and I guess that's why we use non-state-indicating switches, even in circuits with a single switch, because so many circuits are controlled from multiple switches that there's no point in having them indicate state.
Is there really not a good and robust solution to this? Like, say, a condensator that charges for up to 20 toggles and a tiny motor that actuates all the switches that aren't depressed manually? I'd have this over digital switches any day.
Motor inside screams "not robust", "quick to break" and "much more expensive to manufacture" to me. That's probably the reason I haven't seen anyone making such switches. Damn how much I'd like them though.
The method I have seen for some 3 way switches is for the switch to glow when off. This is used for finding the switch in the dark but happens to show state as well.
I think putting a light only is not enough. LEDs at night at home, no matter how weak, are an annoyance. I'd also put in a motion sensor that detects movement around 1.5m from the switch and lighths up the LEDs gracefully. A light sensor to set the strength would also be good. Fallback if any of the sensors are broken: keep them lit on the lowest setting.
IMO you can make things smart, but connectivity is only the answer once you figured out all the other stuff. Otherwise it's like getting the internet on an 8bit Atari.
We have this in the US, but we do it with toggles. Turning the circuit on with one switch and off with another leads to the curious situation of both switches being on but the circuit being dead. It's immediately obvious that this is the case, though.
Isn't that the intended behaviour? Also, on-off state indicating switches don't make much sense in such a circuit. What works is having a small (typically orange-ish) light inside the switches that indicate the state.
Anecdote: We have those in my apartment but they're wired up to be on when the circuit is off. This is implemented in what is likely the worst possible way. We haven't quite figured them out but when off, there's still juice on the line - enough to make some cheap LED bulbs flicker, but not enough to light up a "classic" light bulb or an LED with high resistance. It's great for making electricians cry about the stupidity, as I can take out one of the LEDs in the hallway (when it's off) and the others start to do a strobe effect.
They work nicely for home automation purposes, since you can set them up so that the LEDs on the side match up to whatever the current light status is (dim to bright from bottom to top).
No it's not. I've had kind-of-that "smart switches" in the office. To turn on the light the appropriate button is to be pressed (among 20, it's kind-of a control panel). Once the light is turned on, the red LED is turned on at the edge of the button. So it fits the proposed "turn the LED on when the light is on."
The problem: in the evening it gets dark, you want to turn on the light and come to the dark corner with the panel where the 20 buttons are, and you have no idea which of 20 will turn on the damn light (to add the insult to the injury, it's some in the middle of course, these in the corners are something whatever). And as the punishment, if you hit the wrong buttons you will raise or lower the blinds or change the heating or turn on the fans in the ceiling.
I ask these who installed the system: can you make it having the LED by the button on when the light is off (invert the logic).
"Can't do, the whole module (20 buttons and the LCD display) is made in the factory and can't be tweaked."
A "smart" control panel from hell.
My other favorite comparable bad button is one actual button on the remote controller for one TV-on-computer device. It was probably some generic remote customized by the company for that device. The problem: one button, easy to hit, just blocks the whole device and leaves the software running in the background. Of course, it can't be reprogrammed.
We had something even more frustrating: no switches. Just motion detectors and a web portal. You could only control on/off and brightness through a website if you memorized the room's 16-bit hex code, and you'd only be entrusted with that if you were one of those chosen by management to be a light keeper.
If the light server crashes and the lights reset to maximum brightness while you're the only one in the office... I hope you brought your sunglasses because they're staying like that until morning.
That's not a problem with the basic stateless-switch-with-LED concept; it's a problem with somebody putting together 20 buttons and expecting that to be usable in the dark. It would be no more usable if it was 20 unlit toggle switches in the dark.
To turn on the light, you need something emitting a bit of light when it's dark, not when everything is visible. The major problem with most of the designs are too bright LEDs. They could actually be made to shine so little to be only recognizable in the dark.
That's just bad layout. They should put the switch to control the nearest light on the far left or right. That way you can always turn on the light by the door and control panel in the dark.
It's still sort of a solution to an invented problem, but you could have them wire in a small motion light. Or one of those battery powered stick on LEDs.
I think my solution would be a piece of tape at the top of the control panel, indicating "light switch is directly below". Or possibly replacing the damn thing with normal controls, which I have yet to find inadequate.
The "damn thing" is a "smart" as it controls the light over the network cable -- there aren't even "normal" cables there with which the "normal" light switch would be possible to be installed.
Funnily enough your second example of the switch that has no state would be perfect for my new LIFX lightbulbs (yes, I am aware of the irony of posting this in this thread)
The state of the lightbulb is decoupled from the state of the switch - the switch itself is always on [0].
[0]: Yeah, this isn't great because idle power is >0W. This is where a centralised lighting controller with mechanical switches would help, but that's more invasive than just putting in some new bulbs.
fwiw, stateless light switches are nice in that you can have many light switches controlling the same light. Not saying they're perfect but they have advantages.
Basically, it started with light switches already decades ago, at least in Europe. In the past, you had switches that themselves indicated what state they are in, so if you cluster them on a board it's incredibly easy to find the one switched on at the moment [1].
Then, some moron came up with switches that don't show anything anymore [2].
Nowadays you're lucky if you get switches on anything at all. This [3] is how a standard stove looks like in new Swiss apartments nowadays. Good luck explaining this to your grandma. You idiots, it has one job, getting more or less hot!
Recently I took a residential elevator that just had an empty touch field when you came in. No indication of what you could do whatsoever. This immediately gave me anxiety, and I'm just 31 goddamnit. Anyways, what happened was that once the elevator door closed it gave me a selection of floors to go. [4] facepalm
Please, for the love of what's holy, stop improving what doesn't need improvement! In german we have a word for this: "Verschlimmbessern". (a combination of verschlimmern='making it worse' and bessern=improving)
[1] https://adventurelightingblog.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/li...
[2] http://www.schulungshandbuch.de/WebRoot/Store22/Shops/627847...
[3] http://media3.siemens-home.com/Product_Shots/915x515/MCSA006...
[4] https://www.google.co.jp/search?tbm=isch&q=schindler+touch&t...