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Nobody needs a faster dishwasher – solve real user needs
- tastyfreeze 4y agoI would settle for a dishwasher that doesn't have some part break in under 5 years.
- GeneticGenesis 4y agoA more energy efficient dishwasher would be nice though...
- tempest_ 4y agoThey are already pretty good. Like 1 to 2 kwh, probably substantially less if you dont use heated dry.
- morsch 4y agoThe worst dishwashers sold in the EU still use less than 1 kWh on the eco program. https://www.coolblue.de/en/advice/energy-consumption-dishwasher.html https://www.coolblue.de/en/advice/energy-consumption-dishwas...
- kchandra 4y agoAnd indeed, the author mentions exactly this: > An engineer with no such customer awareness and instead an incessant obsession with optimizing everything that can be optimized, might try to optimize for speed… when it’s likely the consumer cares more about: cleanliness, energy rating and capacity.
- krono 4y agoYour children, if you have any, should make for rather efficient dishwashers at no additional cost if you play it smart.
- yurishimo 4y agoExcept for the drastically increased amount of water usage. The cost is negligible to run the dishwasher compared to the additional hot water usage.
- krono 4y agoThat is a fair point, although I wonder how long this will hold true considering the ever increasing prevalence of heatpumps, sun-boilers, and other such equipment.
- xeromal 4y agoStuff you should know did an episode on dishwashers and I believe if you washed your dishes for a minute, you've already used more water than a dishwasher. It was pretty mindblowing. They did, though, go through some studies that made it seem that dishwashers were too sterile and getting a little leftover or germ from your handwashed plates was better for your immune system.
- randomdata 4y agoThere is an opportunity cost. Time spent washing dishes means time not doing something more productive.
- krono 4y agoThat is precisely why you should let your $0/hr spawn pick up this menial task rather than doing it yourself - assuming your time is worth more than theirs, obviously :)
- randomdata 4y agoIf your spawn is only worth $0/hr., they won’t have the capacity to handle it. If they are worth anything more, they would be more productive elsewhere. The income they produce for you will more than pay any dishwasher costs.
- colechristensen 4y agoI don’t want more energy efficient things. I want more clean energy so that the things I use can work better by using as much energy as they need instead of cutting corners for efficiency.
- shellfishgene 4y agoThat's the current tradeoff in dishwashers (and washing machines), more energy efficiency means lower temperature, and then the detergents take longer to work. This is why we have 3:30 eco programs.
- eetus 4y agoI'm sure that some restaurants could use a faster dishwasher.
- nemo44x 4y agoThey do which is why they have special industrial dishwashers. I worked in a restaurant many, many years (decades?) ago. There was a room dedicated to dishwashing. There was a manual pre-rinse area and the washer itself would blaze through a rack of dishes in minutes. A guy manned it full time during the busy hours. This wouldn’t be practical in a home.
- dosinga 4y agoRestaurants use faster dishwashers. Those things are a sight to be seen
- fernandotakai 4y agoyup! i used one once in my life and the amount of pressure they create is absolutely crazy. the one i used could clean + pre-dry everything in like, 90s.
- chpatrick 4y agoI think they already use professional dishwashers that blast the dishes clean in about a minute. This guy has one at home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnKAVFBIH1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnKAVFBIH1c
- abricq 4y agoThis french company sells 'Bob', a miniature restaurant-like dishwasher: https://daan.tech/ch/discover-bob-mini-dishwasher/ https://daan.tech/ch/discover-bob-mini-dishwasher/
- chpatrick 4y agoThere's an interesting project about refilling their proprietary detergent cartridges here: https://github.com/dekuNukem/bob_cassette_rewinder https://github.com/dekuNukem/bob_cassette_rewinder
- akskos 4y agoI'd love a faster dishwasher. So annoying when there's something in there i need and it'll still wash for another 40 minutes
- thiht 4y agoPro tip: you can open the dishwasher at any time during the cycle. It's not a washing machine. There's not a lot of water in it, it'll just fall at the bottom of the dishwasher, and you can take whatever you need (or add things you forgot)
- anticensor 4y agoSome dishwashers actually lock the door.
- NikolaNovak 4y agoHappens frequently ; I just take it out and resume the cycle for the rest.
- thebigspacefuck 4y agoAlways feels like it’s releasing a soapy steam cloud into my face
- NikolaNovak 4y agoIt does; but it still not a particularly big deal to retrieve that one clean glass or plate if much needed :-)
- rvz 4y ago> Or they’re only better ideologically, and in that case, only valuable to those who share the same ideology. Which is fine if the market for that ideology is big ... But other markets, like decentralized social media, make no money, because very few people care about their social media being centralized. They care a lot more about it being entertaining and insightful. He's perfectly described Mastodon. A magnificent solution in search of a problem aimed at catering to ants. Hence the dominoes of instances shutting down one after another.
- dale_glass 4y agoI don't know, Mastodon seems to do what it intends to do quite well. I don't find the fact that it's not taken over the world that big of a problem. Mastodon is in my view ideological in the design and of course most attractive to people who share that particular ideology. And that's quite a lot. I find it very refreshing compared to Twitter: it doesn't want to maximize engagement, it doesn't want me to follow more and more people. It's a boring tool that does a job quite well, which is exactly what I want from it.
- bradleyjg 4y agoDishwasher cycles have been getting longer and longer and it’s a pain in the neck. Give me back my hour long cycle and actually clean dishes, please.
- h2odragon 4y agoBut that would require phosphates and those are bad now
- ROTMetro 4y agoOnly bad for residential users. They are actually totally OK for commercial users (in America rights and restrictions get split into different classes for different groups of users now).
- krisroadruck 4y agoYou can blame detergent regulations for this. About a decade or so back phosphates were banned from detergents. The problem is that was the thing that made them work really well. In order to compensate for less effective detergents, cycle times have gotten longer. Phosphate detergents are still available in commercial soaps, but I don't recommend skirting the regs here as they had some solid reasoning (algae blooms). Instead you can get away with shorter cycles by doing 2 things. First - run your tap until the water is hot before starting the cycle, and second, use a booster powder instead of only using a pod or the main detergent door. These 2 things will get significantly more gunk off your food during that first rinse phase. As a result you may be able to get away with the "quick" cycle.
- shellfishgene 4y agoI think the long cycles are more related to energy efficiency regulations, most dishwashers default to a 3h 'eco' cycle with 50 degC, but also have a 1h 65 degC cycle. The hot water tip does not apply in most parts of the world I think as the heating is done in the dishwasher (hence the temperature settings).
- goblinux 4y agoMy dishwasher has a beeper for when it’s done like a microwave. It drives me up a wall!! I don’t care when dishes are done, I don’t need to attend to them urgently. They can sit there clean until I’m ready for them. There is no way to disable this beeper and it goes off every minute after the cycle is complete. Thank god the dishwasher has a wall switch to the circuit so I can just kill it but oh man. Never buying Bosch again (Edit) I say all this to say my dishwasher was engineered by the same kind of engineer who 1) has obviously never used the product or washed dishes and 2) optimized for “dishes are clean out them away RIGHT NOW” even though nobody uses a dishwasher like that
- dkresge 4y agoInteresting. I recently admired the creative engineering of my neighbor’s dishwasher which simply, and quietly, projects a small status light on the floor. It’s a Bosch.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kwhitefoot 4y agoMy wife had a saying that applied to almost all of this kind of thing: Designed by a man!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kardianos 4y agoMy dishwasher has a setting that finishes in 1 hr. I always use it and would use a faster setting if available. First order reasoning often fails in light of actual experience. It isn't that the reasoning was faulty, it was the underlying knowledge of reality was incomplete.
- dsr_ 4y agoI use the 1 hour setting when I have too many dishes for one load and I would like to solve the problem today instead of tomorrow. It uses about 4L more water than the 3 hour 'eco' setting. All winter long my house uses hot water anyway, so this is only a technically measurable savings in summer. In practice it is swamped out by other variations.
- nemo44x 4y agoPro tip about your home dishwasher: Run hot water out of your faucet until it’s extremely hot before starting your dishwasher. (Considering the faucet and dishwasher use the same plumbing to pipe water in) The reason why is dishwashers line to do a rinse in the first cycle and for most people the water isn’t hot enough. So it fills up with lukewarm water and isn’t as effective. Another option is to have a hot water circulator installed so you always have instant hot water.
- Macha 4y agoDepends where you live, houses here usually have separate hot and cold water feeds and the dishwashers take only a cold input, relying on an internal heating element if they need hot water.
- nemo44x 4y agoNot according to Maytag: https://www.maytag.com/blog/kitchen/do-dishwashers-use-hot-water.html https://www.maytag.com/blog/kitchen/do-dishwashers-use-hot-w...
- Macha 4y agoThe world is bigger than the US, which was my point: https://www.diy.com/ideas-advice/how-to-plumb-in-a-washing-machine-dishwasher/CC_npcart_400224.art https://www.diy.com/ideas-advice/how-to-plumb-in-a-washing-m...
- iso1631 4y agohttps://www.bosch-home.com/mt/service/get-support/connecting-dishwasher https://www.bosch-home.com/mt/service/get-support/connecting... > Water temperature: cold water. > If water is warm: max. temperature 60°C.
- maccard 4y agoThis assumes your dishwasher is hooked up to the hot water feed in the first place, most aren't. Most have a cold water intake and a heating element that heats it up internally to the correct temperature, so actually your tip is just wasting water (potentially hot water) for anyone who has a modern dishwasher.
- Pxtl 4y ago"people need their dishes clean by next meal" Sadly, modern dishwashers are not only are slow, they also suck at this too. I don't mind the slower performance since I get why, but the number of times i open the dishwasher to find half the detergent in the dispenser and all the bowls with stuff cooked on kills me. The HP-ificaton of major appliance brands is so infuriating.
- eru 4y agoYou might be using yours wrong? See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rBO8neWw04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rBO8neWw04
- Pxtl 4y agoI've watched that actually. I since started using the pre-wash dispenser, and done routine cleanings (and if your appliance requires routine cleanings, making you disassemble the thing to access the filter is inexcusable). It's improved things a little, but not enough. Considering that all 3 Maytag appliances I bought at the same time are defective in various ways, I'm treating it as another instance of a major brand strip-mining their reputation by selling cheaply built garbage until consumers finally give up on them.
- eru 4y agoFor the record, we are still extremely pleased with our Miele washing machine and dish washer that we bought about five years ago. A bit pricey, though. Never heard of Maytag. If I saw it in a store, I would probably guess it's a brand from China. But given your description, it sounds like you are in the US or so? At least that's whence I usually hear the complaints about brands selling out.
- Pxtl 4y agoCanada. Maytag is one of those ancient 19th century American brands, like Westinghouse or Ford, except now they're apparently just a sticker for low-quality garbage since they got swallowed up into the whirlpool appliance business family.
- jonnycomputer 4y agoMost of the comments here are basically explaining why they actually would like faster dishwashers. Choose your motivating examples carefully.
- yetihehe 4y agoIt doesn't matter how carefully you chose your examples, internet is so big that exceptions will happen and people like to voice their contrarian opinions (nothing wrong with that).
- jonnycomputer 4y agoActually, no. Because you see, we have many discussions here on HN where a substantive post doesn't get sidetracked by it. The article isn't even about dishwashers!
- D13Fd 4y agoNo surprise it sparked these comments, it's a terrible example. Plenty of people (myself included) want a faster dishwasher, and many people (restaurants) need a faster dishwasher.
- yen223 4y agoMost people here don't want faster dishwashers, they want an argument =)
- SilverBirch 4y agoA funny way to look at this, is to go the other direction in the logic. The logic in this article is basically all these products have this property, oh and he's a reason would result in this. Well let's apply the same to web3 social media start ups. As the author correctly points out, for the average user these products are pointless. So what's going on? It's as if an entire industry has sprung up of super fast dishwashers (ignore the fact that this exists for commercial businesses). What is actually happening is crypto/web3 is a scam, and social media is a great fake product because your "customers" think you're trying to get them onto your new social media site whilst what you're actually doing is selling them worthless tokens with the promise of some future value that'll clearly never come. >Businesses exist to make money by serving customer needs. Yeah, and that's really hard, which is why they're not doing it!
- dale_glass 4y agoI think this is going a bit too far. Sometimes it's perfectly legitimate to serve an ideological need, because there's enough people with that particular ideology. Eg, things like Mastodon are great if you want to find a community that best fits you, because you have a rare interest or some characteristic controversial for a reason or another that makes existing on some place like Twitter difficult. So you can find a community that enforces standards that are very close to your ideal, and delegate that to them, and just do your own thing. Not everything has to be like Twitter or Facebook, aiming to swallow the entire planet. There's room in the world for places like Hacker News that are only relevant to a small segment of the population. What's important though is to have a good sense of perspective about what need you're serving and how many people are there who need that. If you're aiming for something like decentralization that will have some costs to it that means you're unlikely to ever go world-wide. But so long you're happy enough with that, there's nothing wrong with it.
- hanifc 4y ago> I think this is going a bit too far. Sometimes it's perfectly legitimate to serve an ideological need, because there's enough people with that particular ideology. The author would probably agree. > Or they’re only better ideologically, and in that case, only valuable to those who share the same ideology. Which is fine if the market for that ideology is big.
- ryangittins 4y agoThis is a fantastic analogy for something which has bothered me for years! One example which comes to mind is pushback received on a pull request for a cron job. This script did some heavy lifting so it took a few minutes to run. The reviewer suggested all sorts of minor optimizations so a script which runs once per week in the middle of the night with no one waiting on it could run tens of seconds faster. A complete waste of time and effort to my mind, and one understandable as the OP describes: a technical challenge which, when solved, equates to zero consumer upside.
- louison11 4y agoGlad you liked the analogy! Yes, keeping this in mind is useful for developers, not just product people. It's tempting to fix or automate things that don't need it. I think there is a meme that goes "I could have done this in 2 minutes, but I chose to spend 2 days automating it instead." Sums it all up :-)
- Overtonwindow 4y agoAfter nearly destroying a General Electric we got a Kitchen Aid dishwasher. Quiet, works well, and quick. I've never given my dishwasher much thought. If it cleans then it works. Right?
- karmakaze 4y agoQuiet is my #1 requirement for dishwashers. I've used Kitchen Aid, Miele, and Bosch and wouldn't buy a noisy one after not hearing these.
- goldcd 4y agoMost people probably don't need a faster dishwasher - but it's a handy feature to have to sell dishwashers. "Cleans just as well, using the same water & power, in half the time?" - well that sounds like you've just created a premium dishwasher you can sell to people who want to own a premium dishwasher. I think it's much the same with all the wifi-enabled, app controlled appliances. Their purpose isn't to be sold as useful features - they exist to add a half-dozen bullet points next to that item, that the other nigh-identical products you're comparing it against (or god-forbid, already own) don't have. $5 of extra parts that can be sold to you for $100 Decades back all appliances where white powder-coated. Then we decided they should all be built in and hidden. Then we decided they all needed to be brushed -aluminium feature appliances... except we didn't all decide this. The manufacturers are just always looking for differentiators. Of course you can opt out of this obvious cash grab, and kit out your kitchen with Miele 'quality' and the like (Did you know Miele is one of the few remaining brands that doesn't outsource manufacture to a Turkish third party? I did, I'm special) Or reject all this modern stuff and buy a Speed-Queen (When pick-up truck owners get to decide what laundry brand to buy and maintain with the same set of spanners)
- bborud 4y agoIt depends on what "faster" means. My dishwasher takes about an hour. If it took 50 or even 40 minutes, that wouldn't change things materially. But if it took 10-15 minutes, it would change the way I plan and execute work in the kitchen quite a bit.
- verinus 4y agowell if I tell you that here in Austria dishwashers, washing machines and dryers (some of most energy hungry systems in a household) get a separate input that allows them to run when lot's of cheap energy (read solar power) is available - that might change again :)
- marcjuul 4y agoThe author seems to be making an assumption that the average person cares as little about preventing centralization of power and having any semblance of online privacy as they do about the speed of their dishwasher and that the projects that focus on improving these things fail to gain a large user base because users don't care. That's simply not the case. Talk to most people and they'd prefer that their entire digital lives weren't dominated by a few megacorps with access to all your private data. It's true that a lot of people have no idea how to begin achieving that, but that's not the same as not caring. The problem is that when you develop a new system, privacy and decentralization generally aren't things that can be easily added in as later optimizations. If you care about those things then you need to build them into the design from day one, and they are hard problems to solve. Something as simply as resetting a forgotten password can turn into quite the challenge when there is no centralized authority. Getting to the point where your basic decentralized and secure platform works well enough that you can build stable, user friendly apps with all the expected niceties takes a lot of time and thinking by highly skilled developers and many projects never fully get there. This doesn't mean that it isn't worthwhile to attempt to develop such technologies. There is also a weird fallacy going on here around building stuff based on a shallow perception of what consumers* supposedly care about. Looking at the current social media landscape and thinking "this exists because it's what people really want" betrays a particularly narrow way of thinking about the economics and power dynamics of the modern internet. This type of willfully naive thought process would have us optimize toward a highly profitable software skinnner box. The wetware equivalent would be to suggest that we design the most profitable and addictive drugs. After all, consumers are consuming them so that must be what they want, right? Why are you building something that isn't optimizing for maximum consumption? You must be blinded by your own weird ideology or blinded by interesting but irrelevant technical challenges. Then there's the weird comment about exciting technical challenges not necessarily all being businesses. The author seems to have an underlying assumption that if it's not a viable business then it shouldn't be worked on. *Thinking about participants in a two-way global communication system as simply "consumers" seems in-line with the rest of the author's thought processes
- eternityforest 4y agoI'm not sure anyone truly is attempting that kind of tech. Making a private communication platform that people would actually use goes against the hacker mindset. People who care about privacy like simplicity. Every Instagram filter is a GPU accelerated vulnerability to them, to the rest of us, it's a feature. The ability to use selectable centralized relays for better performance like BitTorrent, so it doesn't eat 100GB a month of DHT traffic is absolutely critical to me, but needless complexity to someone who's priority is elegance. Being free as in beer is critical. Sure, I'll donate to wikipedia when I can, but I'm not paying $8 a month for privacy unless I get a way higher paying job, and that job happens to involve privacy concerns. That generally means ads. Open source can do ads, but open devs don't like them. Self hosting is completely out unless it's P2P running in the background on phones when charging or some equally zero effort platform. I'm not doing unpaid sysadmin work at home and non-technical people certainly aren't. It has to work well on hardware, that has to be cheap. Generally that's only possible because it's spying supported, although stuff is getting easier to make as tech improves. With Google keep I can tell my watch to add something to my shopping list. With YoLink my backyard motion sensor batteries last years. With Tile I can find my stuff if I drop my wallet in the street. It has to work in all conditions. As in, if my phone is stolen on vacation I need to be able to replace it and get everything I need working. It can't involve heavy custom setup of any kind, it needs to be so incredibly boring you could trust your life to being able to set it up quickly, which you basically are if a cell phone is your only emergency communication. There can't be any unreversible transactions for fraudsters to use, password reset has to work, there can't be anything that would make someone fire me for choosing it over a commercial provider if it decides to break. . Finally, I'm not going to literally argue with anyone to get them to switch. At most I'll be like hey check this cool thing out. And if the thing isn't cool enough that they want it, I'll give up and go back to Facebook, because a platform is useless if nobody I want to talk to is on it. I have absolutely no idea where to even start building a replacement for anything I use. Nobody seems to even be trying to make a full ecosystem, aside from badly performing Blockchain projects, that rivals the scope of Google and Facebook, and many privacy first devs don't even want such things to exist, they want separate small parts only connected manually or by custom end user scripts. I'd love it if there was an open replacement for some this stuff. But I'm not sure how you'd attract interest or fund building it.
- taylodl 4y agoAnd then when the "better engineered" product doesn't do as well in the marketplace, because it didn't address actual customer needs, the engineers cry that the product addressing actual customer needs only succeeded because of "better marketing."
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y agoTo be fair, we needed to do two round of dishwasher yesterday and I wished we had a faster one (we were out of dishes and stuff). Yes we could have washed by hand but it was one of those days where we didn't want to do anything...
- karmakaze 4y agoThe truth is that products are made to make money for the business first and meet customer need/wants second. For the dishwasher example, most dishwashers are far too noisy. Unless you live in a large place with many rooms, it will matter. The problem is that quiet isn't a highly visible/marketable and cheaply made feature, so isn't prioritized. After purchase, many would want a quieter dishwasher but very few will bother to uninstall/return/exchange it.
- louison11 4y agoMost businesses make money by answering customer needs. I actually believe that when shopping for kitchen appliances recently, dishwashers had a sticker advertising noise levels.
- karmakaze 4y agoI suppose it depends on the market--inkjet printers isn't one of them[0]. Brother printers however have quite user-friendly policies. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35063208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35063208
- garyrichardson 4y agoYes, I actually do need a faster dishwasher, thank you. Last 3 dishwashers I've owned have taken between 2 and 2.5 hours to do a load. Between my large family and frequently hosting people I am constantly waiting for the dishwasher to finish.
- drewcoo 4y ago> coming out with products that are faster, more private, more decentralized, more this, more that. This isn't just another Howl-like lament. Quite the opposite! https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/06/12/click/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/06/12/click/ > But in no clear way do these products actually improve on what’s existing in a significant enough way that users may consider a shift This article is apparently shaming engineers for making products that are being sold, but aren't selling well enough. Don't improve products. Don't be concerned with privacy if consumers are not. Just do whatever is going to sell. This kind of thinking would have prevented the seat belt. Seat belts weren't going to sell more cars, they were going to raise costs. And why? Only to save human lives! Waste!
- Brian_K_White 4y agoI don't care about more private or decentralized? Better yet, my mom doesn't? I in fact do, and she in fact should!
- eternityforest 4y agoIt doesn't matter unless you can convince people to use it, )or legally force it on them, causing them to hate all technology because you didn't make it good enough people chose willingly). Private and decentralized stuff needs to get feature parity, be free as in beer like Google is, and then get a killer app that makes people want it. I've always thought p2p offline lan messaging would be it, but Blockchain trashed all research on that aside from new tokens for like 10 years. Maybe they'll figure it out, but I suspect AI filters and random games will be more important. Unfortunately, people who like making private apps hate most features, and think privacy is enough of a killer app for people to switch, but it doesn't seem to be.
- Brian_K_White 4y agoI do hate most features everyone else loves. Some I would be neutral on and have no problem with if they weren't just candy coating to deliver lock-in and data collection.
- l0b0 4y agoThere are market opportunities at all axes: - Some people genuinely need a faster dishwasher, because having clean dishes in a timely fashion is important. - Some people need cleaner dishes than others. Cleanliness isn't binary. - Some people need a more energy efficient dishwasher. - Some people need a smaller/bigger/more corrosion-resistant/quiet/heavy duty/etc. dishwasher than the market norm. The trick is figuring out which of these axes have a high ROI.
- toss1 4y agoAlso key is HOW MUCH of each of these properties. The article's main point stands only to a certain degree. Speeding the dishwashing cycle from 120 minutes to 60 minutes, or even 30 minutes will almost always be a "who cares?" feature; None of those scale of speed-up change that basic work cycle of load, go away, and come back at another mealtime. But speeding it to less than 5 minutes or 5 seconds per dish could be a very attractive feature, because it would change the entire work cycle such that the whole meal and kitchen could be cleaned up and put away in minutes. Now, can you do that feature and have a great ROI is another question, but it's often nonlinear.
- Tor3 4y agoI generally agree, except for the "Some people need cleaner dishes than others". I can't imagine someone actually accepting "washed" dishes with food stains on them. Either they're clean, or they're not. Presumably you could do a scientific test to figure out the amount of bacteria left, but I assume we're not talking at that level.
- zamnos 4y agoI think it depends on how you feel about water spots and streaks. Some people can't stand them, others don't even see them. Each side thinks the other is wrong.
- l0b0 4y ago> I can't imagine someone actually accepting "washed" dishes with food stains on them. A charitable reading of my comment would find no such assertion. "Clean" is not binary. A restaurant might get in trouble if 1/100 plates have a smudge on them, but that might be perfectly acceptable in a home. Or not.
- mhb 4y agoThere's a touch of irony that TFA leads with the obscure, unexplained acronym "JTBD framework". Jobs-to-be-Done: A Framework for Customer Needs [https://jobs-to-be-done.com/jobs-to-be-done-a-framework-for-customer-needs-c883cbf61c90 https://jobs-to-be-done.com/jobs-to-be-done-a-framework-for-...]
- RangerScience 4y ago> In the same way, people don’t buy a dishwasher, they buy clean dishes before their next meal. Ironically, this tells me some... awkward things about how the author relates to their kitchen. I cook - a lot. I host parties - usually dinner parties - and I use cheap Ikea plates & etc instead of disposable anythings. And like (most?) millenials-ish, the kitchen is where we tend to hang out. My dishwasher isn't so that I have clean dishes before the next meal. It's so that I have a clean kitchen after. (If I wanted only clean dishes before my next meal... actually I'd probably want as fast a dishwasher as possible.)
- wheels 4y agoYeah, I often also do parties, where I cook for 20-ish people, and often have 3-4 dishwasher loads after a party. Speed does matter some. Where it matters a lot more is that I live in an condo where officially I'm not supposed to run my dishwasher after 10:00 p.m. The difference between 1 or 3 hours is significant there for running it after dinner. (I basically only run it after 10:00 p.m. after parties; got a very quiet model for that reason.) Particularly since I have some stuff I'd like to have clean before the morning. This is a pretty terrible example for the author's point.
- phkahler 4y agoImagine a dishwasher that cleans a single dish in a few seconds. You could wash and put away in similar time to loading a regular dishwasher, and capacity would no longer be an issue. Taking something from being a process to being a single step in a process can have huge impact to how we do things and what is possible.
- FooBarWidget 4y agoSlow dishwasher is a huge pain. When relatives visit and join dinner (and they do so often) I end up with more dishes than I can fit in the dishwasher. I can wash the remaining dishes the next morning, but this wastes energy and water because the dishwasher is not full. I can also "preventatively" turn on the dishes in the afternoon, to wash the breakfast and lunch dishes, so that it's completely empty for the dinner dishes. But this too wastes resources (not full, but better than the "wash remainders next morning" scenario), and I have to turn it on early enough in the afternoon so that it finishes before people start cooking (around 16.00). It's a pain to have to wait for 3 hours. I would absolutely want a dishwasher that finishes in 1 hour.
- hdhrufjdi 4y agoHow does a faster dishwasher help here? Also: you can't cook without the dishwasher running everytime before you cook?
- FooBarWidget 4y agoIt helps with the "wash in the morning" strategy. Right now I manually wash big pans because they don't fit in the dishwasher when there are also dishes. But I need those pans tomorrow morning as well. If the dishwasher finishes before I need to go to sleep then I can just put those pans in the dishwasher. The "wash in the afternoon" strategy also becomes more viable. That way I don't have to turn on the dishwasher before 13.00 in order to have it finish before people start cooking. Relatives often visit unannounced, or maybe they change their minds around 16.00 and decide to join for dinner anyway, so I can't always plan for this. A fast dishesher lets me "batch dishes" (maximize efficiency, save resources) without worry. Cooking with the dishwasher running is a huge pain. Most of the utensils and chopping boards are in the dishwasher right when you need them for preparing a meal. And when you're done eating, the dishwasher still isn't done so your kitchen and dinner table are left dirty for an hour or two.
- verinus 4y agoWell there are several ways to tackle that problem, but from that aside I would not buy a dishwasher for less than 5% of my use-cases, where it would be much to resource consuming in 95% of all others...
- sixstringtheory 4y agoFast. Quiet. Actually cleans. Pick two.
- analog31 4y agoI want a faster dishwasher. I want to load the dishwasher after supper, and be able to unload it before bed time, so it's empty in the morning.
- sbaiddn 4y agoMy only problem with my dishwasher is that it's too slow to setup two loads before going to bed.
- ElijahLynn 4y agoIf you pre-rinse, ALWAYS use the fast cycle. If you are lazy, and want to see MAGIC, then leave your food all over the place and use the long cycle. It works great if it is same day, not so much past that.
- bravoetch 4y agoReal user needs no longer pay the bills. Subscription models and the anti-patterns that fuel them do.
- egypturnash 4y agoI have a small counter-top dishwasher. It gets water by hooking hoses to the sink's faucet. When it is in use, the faucet is unavailable for something like two hours. It is better than having to do all the dishes by hand. But we have to make sure we've done things like refil the water pitcher before running the dishwasher. And there's only so much hot water in the hot water heater before it runs out, so we need to make sure nobody's about to take a shower before running the dishwasher, too. I would love to have a larger one that connects directly to the water pipes, but there is no room in this apartment's kitchen. So I deal with the dishwasher blocking other uses of the kitchen sink, and the shower, for a couple of hours. If I had a small counter-top dishwasher that somehow got my dishes just as clean in a half an hour, that would make a few low-level annoyances go away.
- eternityforest 4y agoWhy is it using water the whole 2 hours? Doesn't it recirculating it for a while with a pump? Can you get one that does?
- egypturnash 4y agoI dunno, man, I just plug it in and hit the button and it runs. I'm no plumber, I just got the one that got the best reviews on Wirecutter. I would describe it as a black box that I put dishes, detergent, and water into, and usually get clean dishes out of, except its housing is white. It's probably not actually pulling in water for the entire two hours. But it wants to be able to pull in water at several points during its cycle, as well as squirt it back out into the sink, and I have absolutely no interest in trying to guess when it would be safe to disconnect the hose and risk having it piss a bunch of water all over the kitchen (because the hose got left somewhere) or having it error out because it can't get water when it needs it.
- justsomehnguy 4y ago.... just get a plumber. You need a water line splitter and a faucet or even just a spigot. Dishwasher, especially countertop, wouldn't use more than a couple of liters of water in the run, but it needs a pressure in the hose/pipe to be able to do so.
- SCUSKU 4y agoWhile I agree with the author that engineers tend not to solve customer problems, but technical ones, what I was hoping he would get to is how to actually go about finding problems to solve in the first place. In my personal journey, this has become the most difficult point in doing any sort of side project development. Sure, I can build prototypes, but for who? And why?
- dfxm12 4y agoI think dogfooding (where applicable) and actually talking to other potential customers is most important. It helps in context of spending your resources to make more impactful improvements for your existing project (like building a cheaper dishwasher instead of a faster one). With that in mind, it really helps to find your niche and converse with others in that niche. If you go to a niche forum like arcade museum or arcade projects, you might find people saying "I wish I had something to enable auto-fire on my arcade cab" and also people with the knowhow to build it and turns that into a product, or people having an interest check for a product they've developed for themselves to see if it has a wider audience.
- Meph504 4y agoSorry this is way too narrow a viewpoint it doesn't actually relate to users and is literally proven false by countless people buying endless parades of goods they don't need. People don't buy what they need, they think they need, they buy what they want, what they can, what others influence them to, etc... I.E. it is complex to tell what the market will bare out. And for the record, I would be a lot more for a dishwasher that actually dries my dishes, you know with heat, like they use to, and does it quickly. Instead of spraying a chemical on them to make them dry, and it still taking ages.
- intellix 4y agoI don't put dishes in the dishwasher until I need them now. Yeah I know I'm filthy but just incredibly busy where I don't have time for basic things. Not everyone eats and then instantly washes up
- niccl 4y agoThese comments seem to make a gloriously meta confirmation of the article's point. The article is saying that engineers (among others) have been known to optimise for the wrong thing. He uses a possibly inappropriate example of faster dishwashers. Then many of the commenters (quite likely engineers) optimise their comments on the thing they know about -- desirability or otherwise of faster dishwashers -- rather than considering the merits of the main thesis And it's made even better by some commenters saying things about areas they appear not to know about, like the desirability of faster dishwashers for restaurants
- jiggawatts 4y agoHalf of all engineers also cook at home(1) and nearly one hundred percent use plates and cutlery.(2) 1) I pulled this number out of a hat. 2) We likely don’t care about the opinions of people that eat food raw out of the garden using their hands only, at least with respect to dishwasher design.
- barrysteve 4y agoMaking a faster dishwasher is exactly what engineers are trained to do. They get paid handomsely to optimize and improve existing forms and problems. Sure it's good to say engineers optimize the wrong stuff... but what's the solution? Be someone else? Start the dishwasher again from first principles? I love opening up the discussion with awareness, but a suggestion on the next step is helpful too.
- louison11 4y agoauthor here. Next steps would be to define with great details what the actual customer needs are, through diligent customer research, and identifying untapped opportunities. I don’t know if those currently exist for dishwashers. But in general, you’re looking for pain points that have been ignored by the market because nobody has fully grasped the picture of the customer needs before. In that way, frameworks like Jobs-To-Be-Done or customer personas, while they may seem very “mechanical” offer deterministic disciplines to maximize the chances of encountering fresh insights and thus build innovative solutions.
- 4y ago
- barrysteve 4y agoI would love to experiment with a dishwasher that can accept single items and deliver them cleaned on demand. And scale up to full loads with the same mechanism. Like dropping dishes into a river, with a cage at the start for stacking up dishes waiting to be automatically cleaned. On a related note, at some point, computer vision models could probably help classify and typify incoming crockery and their target stains for a more accurate clean...
- readthenotes1 4y agoIs the JTBD framework another reinvention of customer use oriented requirements? What's the special sauce other than new lingo?
- DubiousPusher 4y agoThe big one for me in a large consulting business has been watching the account people try to sell enterprises on Blockchain for various use cases. It's just funny because it's like, these customers don't need a zero trust structure for their transactions. They have a directory usually AAD they implicitly trust because they hire the people they put into it. And companies don't want decentralization. The entire purpose of most conglomerates is conspicuous centralization. It is funny that we see corporations strictly as competitive actors. But often when one company buys another, they are trying to realize efficiencies through cooperation. Therefore, much like being an government bureau, corporations are trying to create cooperative centralizations.
- bni 4y agoWithout having read the article, I want a faster dishwasher.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y agoI'm reading this as I listen to my noisy ass dishwasher in my small apartment running for over an hour now while I'm trying to go to bed. Yes, I very much wish it ran faster. It also matters when I have to run 2 loads because I let the dishes pile up.
- ithkuil 4y ago> Yes, I very much wish it ran faster. Or more silent.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y agoThat would also help. But then I probably wouldn't trust it to be blasting the heck out of my dishes. But if they came out clean, I certainly would not complain.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago> An engineer with no such customer awareness and instead an incessant obsession with optimizing everything that can be optimized, might try to optimize for speed… Bugger off with that. No one is optimizing anything these days. Please do optimize for speed. Speed is a feature. I don't want to wait for more than 200ms to do anything. In a world where we can render video games at 100 FPS at 4K...yes, I want my websites to load in under a second. And I want my IDE to be responsive. And I want my autocompletes to complete before I've finished typing the whole thing out. The computer responding to my inputs should never be the bottleneck. It should always be faster than I can think. I hate to stop and wait for 60 seconds twice today as my computer choked while trying to render a chat app. Chat. Really messes up a conversation.
- Tor3 4y agoWhen my dishwasher still worked I did actually care about the speed. Of course cleanliness is the number one priority, but I also cared a lot about how long it took. Having a dishwasher going chunka-chunka for three hours in the kitchen, which is next to the living room (open solution) is absolutely unacceptable.
- dsego 4y agoThere are silent dish washers out there, I have one, turn it on and there is just barely noticeable hum.
- codeddesign 4y agoI have never understood people who place dirty dishes in dishwashers. You have to rinse first. Dishwasher essentially sanitize, rather than clean food off your plates.
- xiconfjs 4y agono, you don't
- bradwood 4y agoSo true. The main use case to solve is unpacking the damn thing - a cause of a lot of friction in my household. A great solution to this was created by a firm called Fisher and Paykel who made a 2 drawer dishwasher designed to permanently house your crockery. While one drawer is washing, you fetch your stuff outa the other drawer. https://www.fisherpaykel.com/uk/dishwashing/all-dishwashers/?prefn1=configuration&prefv1=Double%20Drawer https://www.fisherpaykel.com/uk/dishwashing/all-dishwashers/...
- sixtram 4y agoIf you have the money, you can buy an industrial dishwasher. It can still be under your countertop. The price is about 5x-10x and it can finish in a few minutes. You can usually see these machines in coffee shops.
- rpmisms 4y agoExcept that if a dishwasher was significantly faster, people would love it. 20 minutes would be enough to make people go "wow, that's really nice", and that would become the new "cool" dishwasher.
- shalmanese 4y agoThere are plenty of dishwashers faster than 20 minutes, they're all in restaurant kitchens which do have a speed requirement. Several bleeding edge people have installed restaurant style dishwashers in their private homes but the requirements (in terms of energy use, danger of the chemicals involved, noise, temperatures reached) make them not a good fit for almost all homes.
- verinus 4y agoeven image one that does not require water, electricity or chemicals! ;)
- ggm 4y agoA good example of "nothing gets faster engagement than wrong facts" social media. "Nobody" the author knows. Lots of people, not all of them didactic contrarians actually do want this one thing. I am a little from box A and a little from box B on this, myself. If the dishwasher is too fast, I'd suspect it does a poor job, or I would face revaluation of the relative worth of shared work: if cleaning declines in burden then more of it may have to be done.
- k__ 4y agoDidn't Hillel Wayne write about how he made some software faster? His co-workers first thought it was a waste of time, but when they actually used it they didn't want to go back anymore. I think, the moral of that story was something like: When you make a software process faster by an order of magnitude, it lends itself for new use-cases.
- Jaxan 4y agoIt’s interesting how this thread shows how differently people use their dishwasher. From multiple times a day to only in the night and everything in between. So the take away is that dishwashers should not be optimised for a single type of usage!
- Ekaros 4y agoI'm lazy have huge amount of dishes for single person. So I do them rarely. And then I would like to do multiple cycles back to back, maybe on Saturday or Sunday... 1h vs 3h at that process would add up and faster would be better.
- f_allwein 4y agoOk, so everybody wants a faster dishwasher and nobody wants to discuss the article. Fine with me, so I can add my 2 cents: In Germany, dishwashers (and washing machines, but let’s not go there) fall into two categories, either Miele or everything else. Miele has amazing quality, so it feels like the dishwasher might outlive you. Mine has a „quick power wash“ programme that takes about an hour and gets the job done, but uses more energy and is maybe more aggressive to dishes, so I usually use other programmes, between 1 and 3 hours. There’s also a timer for starting the machine in n hours, operated by a single button. User interface is also brilliant in that there are no strange symbols, but reach light/ button clearly says what it does (in German). I like it.
- ErikHuisman 4y agoCan vouch for Miele dishwasher. The rollers on the racks are not comparable to any other brand. Sooo smooth.
- thecopy 4y agoSwiss V-ZUG makes good appliances as well.
- frankreyes 4y ago“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” (sometimes attributed to Henry Ford)
- jhoechtl 4y agoI have fairly old dishwasher, probably not very energy efficient. It finishes it's job in about 1:30. If I would have a more modern, energy efficient but slower dishwasher, in a four person household I would need more dishes. Now the fallacy is, more dishes (if you have the space to store them away) are far more cheaper on the long run but sticking to your old dishwasher. Take-away: Get a new dish-washer.
- alias_neo 4y agoNew dishwashers are incredible. I had a Bosch in the home I moved from, I picked out the best I could afford and was very happy with it, but decided to leave it behind for the new owner. Moved into a place that has a Kenwood thats a few years older, maybe 5+ and I hate everything about it; not only does it not clean my dishes as well, it takes ages to do it, and it will beep forever until I switch it off after a cycle finishes. We intend to replace it with another Bosch as soon as we can, but we just moved so, priorities are elsewhere right now. Take-away: Get a new dish-washer as soon as possible.
- asimpletune 4y agoPeople don’t even need dishwashers.
- Xcelerate 4y agoI think most customers would like a dishwasher that actually works, which—having used quite a few of them—appears to remain an unsolved problem. First, there’s the mystery of “wet dog smell” on glasses that has persisted across multiple apartments in multiple states for us (and appears to be a well-known phenomenon across the internet). And then there’s the issue that despite their claims to also dry dishes, most dishwashers do no such thing as the plasticware remains soaked despite many interesting but ultimately unsuccessful hacks by dishwasher manufacturers.
- nopassrecover 4y agoI’m sure you’ve tried it all, but as someone who also dislikes odours in glasses that have been through the dishwasher we’re pretty attentive to only ever putting glasses in their own cycle, and minimising cleaning dishes with eggs in the washer (hand cleaning or at least washing off). Agree with you on the challenges of finding issue-free appliances (feel the same on vacuums, stick blenders, and probably a half dozen other examples).
- XorNot 4y agoIt does strike me that to really dry dishes you basically need to incorporate a dehumidifier into the system. Which actually surprises me that no one's done it, because small dehumidifiers are quite cheap, and if it would be a hell of a premium feature. I've never had any problems with weird odors though.
- ianvisits 4y agoI would love a faster dishwasher -- not because I need the dishes washed faster, but becuase I live in an open-plan flat with the kitchen and living room in the same space, and anything to reduce how long I have the dishwasher churning away would be wonderful. Fortuanately, I tend to get away with a 30-min wash for most days, but someone please invent a 10-minute dishwasher please :)
- barnabee 4y agoDishwashers in commercial kitchens are rapid, much less than 10 mins. I have always wondered why, exactly, we can't have that at home. A dishwasher so fast that it's done while you're still clearing up from dinner and you can put stuff away immediately would be fantastic and is clearly absolutely possible.
- actionfromafar 4y agoIt is possible, but I think the market is tiny.
- tomn 4y agoFrom my limited understanding: - the mechanism is large compared to the capacity - they are noisy - they require lots of power - they need to be pre-heated (so only make sense if you're running more than one load) - they require more chemicals for the same load sizes People have done it, but it's not that practical for most people, especially if you're only washing up for one or two people.
- actionfromafar 4y agoAnd you ideally would have one of the large sinks and huge water hose to pre and post rinse the dishes if need be. From having used one of the commercial kitchen dishwashers, I think the amount of work is actually more than for a home appliance dishwasher, but the benefit is speed. There is no waiting around. (The chemicals are probably also dangerous to the intestines, as seen on HN.)
- 4y ago
- barnabee 4y agoI really dislike this article and fundamentally disagree. Sure, some engineers need to be looking at the problems people have or the products they're trying to buy or whatever, but that's not why I'm here. The goal, especially when starting out, is to: 1. Obsessively understand, improve and optimise everything, knowing that many of the results will not make it into real products or if they do will flop; and 2. Invent things that nobody asked for. Things that are weird and ideological and unlikely and confusing and just plain cool, knowing that many of thee too will fail. Why 1? Because sometimes the things in 2 only become possible by mashing together a bunch of the things in 1 that looked like they weren't really worth it or useful. Why 2? Because noone can really predict what people want or need, or would like, once you get into the realm of new technology and ideas that are sufficiently different from what we have today. Many things about life in the future will and should be radically different than they are now (this is not something special about now, it has been true on generational timelines at least since the beginning of the industrial revolution and on longer timelines forever). Experimentation and ignoring business cases and customers is that future happens. If you want to think about "consumer challenges" and worry whether your idea is a viable business rather than just giving it a go, iterating rapidly, and having an idea about when to stop if it doesn't work out, be my guest, but to me this is an incredily dull, mercenary view of the future.
- cj 4y agoThis is where YC's motto "Build something people want" is helpful. You can live by the advice you're giving, but if it doesn't end with you having built something people actually want, you won't have a viable business (if that is indeed your goal)
- barnabee 4y agoI agree. For me the journey has definitely been that learning about and working on things that interest me and I care about eventually presented the opportunity to have a shot at a viable business, rather than some innate desire to create a business that works no matter what (which, rightly or wrongly, I look down on a bit!)
- 4y ago
- college_physics 4y ago> Businesses exist to make money by serving customer needs this is both correct and inadequate as a principle. Leaving aside the excessive focus on money and the convenient blindness around externalities, customer needs are not static but evolving. What fraction of today's customer "needs" existed 10, 100, 1000 years ago? Needs are shaped in collective feedback loops that identify and match "desirable" new facets of consumption with deliverable technologies. That non-linear game is much more complex than identifying and serving true customer needs. While physical tech (hardware) places real world constraints on what can be created (popular culture has a flying car "need" but they are not deliverable), software has almost no such constraints. It is closer to the business nature of movie making or book writing. You use information and code to create an almost entirely pure cultural artifact. That is why people engage in "faster dishwashers". While it is hard to read the mood of the times and engineer a blockbuster movie, it is much easier to work on a more predictably successful sequel. Of course at some point people tire of sequels.
- bborud 4y agoThe “people don’t buy a quarter inch drill, they buy a quarter inch hole” thing is a catchy phrase, but it isn't always true. Or even a useful way to think. It is a very limiting way of looking at products. The reason it isn't always true is that sometimes focusing on what you think the customer wants leads to lost opportunities. It reminds me of a Neal Stephenson quote from Zodiac: "Most of my colleagues go on backpacking trips when they have to do some thinking. I go to a good hardware store and head for the oiliest, dustiest corners. … If they're really good, they don't hassle me. They let me wander around and think. Young hardware clerks have a lot of hubris. They think they can help you find anything…. Old hardware clerks have learned the hard way that nothing in a hardware store ever gets bought for its nominal purpose. You buy something that was designed to do one thing, and you use it for another." If you build stuff you will sooner or later realize that when tools that can do new tricks turn up, it provides you with new opportunities that perhaps you didn't think of before. If you own equipment to make holes you know that there is a vast difference between a spade bit and a forstner bit. They are two very fundamentally different ways of making a hole. Both make holes, but one will make an absolute mess of certain materials. If all you have is a spade bit, then for some tasks, you have to come up with a different strategies for achieving what you want. You have to design yourself around the limitation. If you use a forstner bit, its ability to make clean holes may mean that not only can you use it for making holes - you may be able to use it in situations where you are not primarily making a hole, but removing a curved bit of material. I want a faster dishwasher because a faster dishwasher would solve actual problems for me. But it is a bit more nuanced than that. My dishwasher spends about an hour on one load. Getting it down to 50 minutes or even 40 wouldn't change anything. But if you can get it down to 10-15 minutes, it really starts to matter. It means the way I sequence tasks in the kitchen can change. And that's for everyday use. If I were to have a dinner with a lot of guests it would also mean that I'd need fewer plates because I can wash plates between courses. I've been to a few design thinking workshops, and the thing that always gets me is how arrogantly stupid a lot of these workshops end up being. They pretend to be about learning the customer's needs rapidly, but more often than not what happens is that people try to replace actual insight with ceremonies and suppositions only to arrive at either the wrong conclusions or be in such a hurry to demonstrate cleverness that you miss most opportunities. But hey, there is good money in teaching ceremony.
- jmtucu 4y ago3 hours? Mines has up to 90 min, and I always use the 30min program which is enough.
- scotty79 4y agoRecently I was wondering why vacuums with metal pipes don't have them grounded. After vaccuming a lot of fine dust from synthetic rug the static electricty was enough to create almost 2 inch (5cm) spark to grounded metal element I put the pipe close to. EDIT: One use later apparently static electricity fried circuit that was used to control the vacuum cleaner from the handle. The button on the body of the vacuum cleaner doesn't work either. The funny thing is the system is stuck in ON position so I can no longer turn off the vacuum. So the fresh new almost $200 vacuum from Hoover brand lasted about two cleanings because of serious design flaw.
- cudgy 4y agoCustomers don’t always know what they want until they experience it. The overall point of this article might be true most of the time, but in order for there to be advancement of products beyond the obvious pain points, teams must sometimes move forward with novel features that customers are not asking for yet.
- EricE 4y agolol - just read the reviews for most modern dishwashers and the biggest complaints I regularly see (although I do agree it seems silly) is the length of the dishwashing cycles.
- wizofaus 4y agoA dishwasher solving a real problem would be one that was capable of preventing arguments over how best to stack them.