Things I hate about kitchen user interfaces
The natural path in interface design is easy. Use what’s cheap, what’s readily available, and what’s obvious. Obvious paths have the least resistance, they follow simple patterns, and are driven by the tools available instead of the problem at hand. And pile features onto it, and you travel to the land of the entirely unusable.
Useful is restraint. It’s balance. It’s somewhere between the small set of things that need to be done and the physical constraints. Balance is hard too, an insanity of focus on function, and the knowing that it can better. Balance is taking away as much as you add. Balance is good taste, an attribute that’s more art than science. Balance and useful are hard.
Yes, most designers know that design is hard. They know that simple is better, and that focus is fleeting. It’s easy to rant about it too. The really difficult part is the deep understanding of simple, of not good enough, and in seeing how to make it better.
So how do we learn? We think. We dissect. We extrapolate. We write. We do. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
Today I’m thinking about how the simple paths fails us. I was making lunch and was struck by how horrible kitchen appliances are. My range, for example, has 20 buttons and 4 dials (2 of which have multiple modes). It’s a frustrating tool to use, and frustration is a good motivation to think and write.
Look at me!
Both the microwave and stove are needy guests in our house. When their timers go off, they’re loud and incessant. They beep. They wait. They beep again. You have to attend to them before they’ll stop, even if there’s no imminent danger. And even simple conversations are annoying, as each word is an abrupt sequence of beeps and bops. There is nothing subtle or interesting about it.
And while you can hush the hardware, it’s not the default.
Better design would make the conversations pleasant. Enjoyable even. Warnings would feel like warnings, and status would feel like status.
Of course sine waves and little speakers are cheap. Beeps for everything are easy. And configuration options with defaults that avoid litigation are the standard way. But none of these balances are good or artful.
Don’t make me think (about anything other than cooking)
Our cook top is fancy. It’s a vast slab of glass atop a set of magical elements. As the elements are hidden, affordances are made to remind you when their hot. The glass top is a bit of work to keep clean, more than a gas stove or standard element unit, and because it’s easily stained and scratched, it removes a number of cooking techniques from the arsenal. It leaves you thinking: am I going to ruin the damned thing today?
But worse, the temperature controls on the front elements are modal: turn one way for large–and the other way for small vessels. Each mode is on one side of a dial, breaking the standard clockwise-for-hotter design. You have to think each time you use it: which way is hotter for this size of pot? And I still get it wrong from time to time, after a few years of use.
The microwave is no better. It has 16 buttons. 2 sets of cooking and defrost modes, and the standard keypad time and power settings of old.
Want to defrost something? Quick or Easy? Beef? Poultry? Pork? Wait a minute, I wanted to defrost some vegetable matter. Beep, beep, beep-beep, beep beep. It makes you think every time you touch it. I cope with the mess of options by using a single path through the interface: the 30 second button: I press it a few times, regardless of the input, checking the food every so often. And despite the simplest path and the rigor of checking on the food, I still obliterate the contents from time to time.
The microwave is so bad that I hate using it. Enough so that I actually remember to take frozen ingredients out to thaw a few days before I need them. The annoyance beats my sloth, which is no small feat.
Don’t make me program
To use the microwave properly, you need to program it. Beef, press 1. Enter time. Enter weight. Press start. Beep-beep. Turn over. Press start, . Beep-beep-beep. (And now you had better open the door, or it will remind you that you haven’t every 30s until the end of time).
Compare the microwave to the old way of doing things: ten decision points. Defrosting in the fridge? Put the food on a plate overnight. No programming. No thinking. And no half-cooked, mutant beef either.
Dials, buttons, and more
Want to cook something in the oven at 450F? Press bake. Press up 10 times. Press start. Don’t confuse the hour or minute buttons with the temperature up (they’re side-by-side and identical), or it will beep at you sternly.
Once the stove has hit temperature it beeps. Not a sustainable temperature mind you, but air temperature. Once you open the door, you’ll have to wait another 10 minutes before it recovers. How helpful.
Now set a timer. Press the timer button. Beep. Hour-beep. Minute-beep (several times). Start-beep (if you forget the start button, it will wait for you forever). When the timer hits zero? Beep. Beep. Beep. Wait 30 seconds. Goto 10. Does it turn off the oven after a few missed beeps? No, that would be too helpful. Instead, it will happily incinerate whatever lies within (as the downstairs tenant does every week or so). Oh, and how do you turn it off? It’s not cancel or timer-off. You press the same button that starts the timer to stop it. Weirdly inconsistent, but at least they didn’t add another button for that.
And now you want to turn off the oven? Look for the big red OFF. Oh, wait a minute, the buttons all look the same. And there’s no OFF button. Cancel? What exactly does that cancel? Not only is it ambiguous, it’s hidden in the tidy rows of identical buttons. What if something was burning? What if you wanted to turn off the timer? What if was beeping at you sternly while it was blissfully burning your dinner?
Oh, and now the tomato sauce splattered all over the backsplash. Don’t wipe it down, or you might set off the auto-destruct mode. If it had one, it too would be hidden deep within the identical rows of buttons, innocuous and lethal. There is a 5-seconds button, which disables the entire console for 5 seconds (you’d better wipe quickly).
How did we get so far from usable?
Symmetry, cheap, and easy
When you use 20 buttons for 5 basic functions you’ve gone astray. When the automated process is more work than the manual process, the design is wrong. And when it’s annoying, you’ve invaded the space of the people who use the tools.
Both the stove and microwave are a mash of easy, cheap, symmetrical designs. Cheap bubble buttons and inductance switches for every function. Uniform beeps for every action and event. Simple silkscreened controls. Symmetrical button layout (nicely aligned, centered, and mashed into a small space). Every feature and option is exposed at the same level of meaning, cast in the light of what the hardware does. Nothing is stated in the language of what you do with the damned things. It’s lazy thinking, top to bottom.
The funny thing is that the lazy thinking produces more buttons and modes than we need. It should be cheaper to do less.
How can we do better?
We need to learn from what doesn’t work. And we need to admit that it doesn’t work well.
- More features are not better (they’re worse).
- Buttons, beeps, and knobs communicate. What are they saying if they all look and sound the same?
- Whitespace, shape, size, and icons communicate too. DANGER and STOP should be big, and bold, and red. Different functions should actually look different.
- Are there analogs in the real world, or standard ways of doing things? Don’t ignore what we already understand. You’re never smarter than history and natural affordances.
- When doing something, don’t talk about it in terms of how the technology does it. 30% power? 3lbs of beef? You want food, cooked well, not the damned details of how it gets there.
We must build things that are flexible without exposing the underlying details. Tools have to fit what they’re used for, and the long history of the way we do those things. The experience is about making and doing, not about convincing the tools to obey your will. Once a thing disappears into the task at hand, the act of design is complete.