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I always buy gadgets with physical buttons when possible. - Microwave ovens should have a knob-button combo that I can work in 0.5 seconds without looking or r
by FredPret 3y ago
I always buy gadgets with physical buttons when possible.
- Microwave ovens should have a knob-button combo that I can work in 0.5 seconds without looking or reading the manual
- Ovens and stoves should have knobs I can turn with wet or oven-mitted hands
- Cars should have volume buttons I can twist or smack into silence without thinking about it for more than a moment
- Same with seat heaters, wipers, and anything I might do while the car is moving
- jpk 3y ago> Ovens and stoves should have knobs I can turn with wet or oven-mitted hands Ooh, yeah this is a big one for me now. A few years ago I got a new range and the controls are all capacitive touch. Mitts are a minor inconvenience, but also sometimes cooking is messy and liquid gets spilled here or there. Now imagine how your phone works when you get some rain on the screen... yeah, it's not great. I've learned enough tricks to live with it since it's honestly the only thing I don't like about that range, but next time I'll probably shell out a little more for knobs if I have to.
- FredPret 3y agoThere's a reason the most important controls on phones (which are all about interactive interfaces) are physical buttons!
- kube-system 3y agoI have a clothes dryer with capacitive touch buttons. When the ambient conditions are just right, static will build up when it is drying clothes, and it will change its own settings randomly.
- maximus-decimus 3y agoAren't dryers grounded?
- kube-system 3y agoYes. Although I'm not sure if mine was designed to ground the plastic front panel that the buttons are on.
- tzs 3y agoIf a dryer circuit was installed before 1996 there is a good chance it won't be grounded. Before 1996 the US national electrical code allowed 3 wire dryer circuits. Two hot wires and one neutral. In 1996 that was changed to require new dryer circuits to be 4 wire. Two hots wires, one neutral, and one ground. Existing 3 wire dryer circuits were allowed to remain in use.
- ProllyInfamous 3y agoRegardless of being grandfathered in (allowed), you should update your drier to a 4-prong cord/outlet (which is ACTUALLY grounded). This does not always require stringing an entire new circuit — NEC (US) allows driers to be grounded with just a single 10awg wire. Particularly if you operate rentals, the legal liability is perhaps almost as much as NOT retrofitting GFCIs into baths/kitchens. SRC: not your electrician
- therealidiot 3y agomy washer/dryer also has capacitive touch and will usually pause itself this way during a dry cycle if I forget to put the keypad lock on. it's an absolute failure of product design in my eyes
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y agoI've used a stovetop like that in the past. I don't understand how this crap gets through even rudimentary testing. First time I used it I damn near started a fire because the controls became unusuable at the worst possible time. And false inputs are a real problem too.
- Smoosh 3y agoOne of the reasons we chose our current oven was the simple, easy controls and clear display: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WHXlXwYWETA/UbHwdsgx5dI/AAAAAAAAA_A/EW8jcCRSWTg/s1600/f&p.jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WHXlXwYWETA/UbHwdsgx5dI/AAAAAAAAA_...
- serial_dev 3y agoI bought a Dacia Duster and I love the physical buttons and knobs. It's a cheap brand with tech lagging behind the current by about ten years (guesstimate), which is annoying when it comes to safety features, but I love that I don't need to read the manual back to back to understand all its features and I can control the AC in curvy mountain roads without hesitation. And, big plus, they didn't invent their own silly overly complicated custom OS, you just connect your phone and you are good to go.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>I bought a Dacia Duster and I love the physical buttons and knobs You know what's funny? The 2024 Dacia Duster, still a cheap but functional car, has 4 physical switches to control the windows, unlike the mess that's the VW ID.4 which went full cost cutting mode to the extreme. How did VW fall so low? If a budget Franco-Romanian brand can school them on UX, then the Chinese will eat them alive.
- drewzero1 3y agoYes, that has been one of my biggest gripes with our Ford Fusion. The seat heater control is on the touch screen which is (a) not very responsive or accurate when cold and (b) taken over by the rear view camera when backing up. If you miss the seat heat button, it goes to another view where the buttons move and are only slightly bigger. Almost all of the climate and radio controls are mirrored in touch buttons under the screen that also can't be felt while driving or operated with gloves. I really like the climate controls on my slightly older Jetta, with three knobs: temp, fan, and position. The left- and right-most knobs have a button in the center that controls the heated seats. VW had a perfect system and I hope more automakers rediscover knobs and buttons soon.
- bryanlarsen 3y agoThe best UI on a gadget more complicated than a toaster that I've experienced was on a Maytag commercial washer/dryer combo. Just knobs, no buttons, let alone capacitive buttons or touch screens. Reminiscent of the old dumb machines but a sprinkling of smarts that made it better, not more complicated. It also shows the power of a good vendor. My uncle had a dealer he knew well and trusted, so bought them sight unseen when his old ones broke. Probably paid extra for the commercial line rather than the consumer line, but I assume they will last way longer too.
- vidanay 3y agoThe microwave oven we had in the 80's when I was a kid had two knobs, and a single button. Knob 1: A rotary timer. Twist it so the little arrow points at the time to cook (+/- 30 seconds) Knob 2: Nobody knows. This was some sort of a "mode" selector that wasn't touched in eight years as far as I remember. Button: More similar to a space bar on a mechanical keyboard - push to start cooking. The door was just a simple "pull to open", there was no "eject" button to open the door. When it was done cooking, there was a single "ding".
- jeffrallen 3y agoTeam Amana Radar Range, represent!
- vidanay 3y agoNailed it. The thing weighed like 100 lbs too.
- twisteriffic 3y agoPanasonic I bet, with woodgrain printed metal case. I can still feel the satisfying clunk the door on ours made.
- raisedbyninjas 3y agoSome microwave ovens without an open button develop arcing problems when users open the door while power is on.
- arp242 3y ago> Ovens and stoves should have knobs I can turn with wet or oven-mitted hands Stoves with touchscreen buttons that become completely unusable as soon as more that 4 water molecules get within a 2 metre radius are infuriating beyond belief. I sometimes had to disable the fuses to turn off the indiction stove. I kid you not. It would beep incessantly if something spilled near the controls (it was all one flat surface, so easy thing to do when e.g. boiling anything) and I just couldn't turn the fucking thing off. I genuinely wonder if the people who designed this have ever tried using it themselves in any real-world conditions. It's just broken.
- leoedin 3y agoI have had a couple of AEG capacitive touch stoves, and they've been pretty good. You do need to have a tea towel to hand to aggressively wipe any spills near the controls - but the stove detects if the controls are wet, locks them out and then gives you about 10 seconds before it turns itself completely off - which is normally enough time to dry the spill. The benefits in ease of cleaning outweigh the negatives in my opinion. And I use that stove a lot.
- arp242 3y agoI don't recall what brand I had, it was at my previous rental, and it would indeed "lock up", which is fine but it was damn near impossible to unlock it after that and it just kept on beeping at a it "hurts my ears" volume level. And dealing with the finicky controls while that's inflicted on you while your food is burning ... yeah, I'd rather spend a bit of extra time cleaning.
- leoedin 3y agoIf your food is burning, you can always lift the pan off the stove. It's pretty rare that I'm cooking something that is 10 seconds away from being burnt anyway. Saying that, I suspect there's a whole load of manufacturers who put different levels of thought into their capacitive controls. I only gave my example because I'm really happy with it - and so in my opinion it's not a universal problem with touch controls on stoves. Every time I stay in an AirBnB I'm surprised by just how bad a lot of cooking appliances are though - really unintuitive timers, poor quality knobs, very primitive technology (precisely controlling temperature really isn't that hard!)
- georgeecollins 3y agoMy wife and I just bought a very expensive range, to replace a very nice one that was probably twenty years or older. Every time they showed us something with a touchscreen or display I was like, "next". Imagine how stuff like that is going to age. With most home fixtures I have found the more basic and standard (although not necessarily the cheapest) the more likely they are to survive and be repairable. No fancy faucets please! I can measure water myself.
- rurp 3y agoYeah it's crazy how my process for evaluating expensive purchases (cars, appliances) has changed from looking for what I do want to mostly focusing on what I don't want. So many products have gotten bogged down with anti-features like touch screens, AI nonsense, or shitty phone apps. When I was car shopping a couple years ago I immediately disqualified at least half of the ones I looked at because of garbage features. Now I'm looking for a new fridge and that market hasn't gotten as bad yet, but it's already bad. I have no interest in a fridge that has a camera and a wifi connection, or needs an app to change the temperature.
- JohnFen 3y agoI swear, we've reached the point where the budget models, which lack almost all of that crap, are the best models you can buy.
- mortenjorck 3y ago> Microwave ovens should have a knob-button combo that I can work in 0.5 seconds without looking or reading the manual Alas, a knob is no guarantee of a decent user interface. I have a higher-end GE microwave with a knob that is completely inert until you know what you're supposed to press first. Granted, "cook time" is not an entirely unintuitive prerequisite, but why the designers didn't at least consider that this would be the 95% use case and simply default the knob to that function is beyond me.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> a higher-end GE microwave with a knob that is completely inert until you know what you're supposed to press first Breville has, in my experience, nailed the interaction between physical knobs and digital input.
- mortenjorck 3y agoI have a Breville toaster oven and it has the best UX of any of my kitchen appliances. It really feels like they thought through all the details.
- kasey_junk 3y agoEvery Breville appliance I have feels that way. I’m minutes away from replacing my instapot purely because I feel like it’s ui will cause an explosion one day and the Breville won’t.
- Neikius 3y agoModern induction stove tops driving me insane ... All touchscreens. Everything else is better about them but just can't find any with actual physical controls.
- chrisandchris 3y ago> Microwave ovens should have a knob-button combo that I can work in 0.5 seconds without looking or reading the manual. We have a microwave with a knob to set the duration and another to set the clock, with two small buttons (one is 12/24 hours, the other I can't remember). Every guest we had who tried to use the microwaive failed it, because it was so not intuitive to just turn to set the duration ... and then wait a couple seconds before heating starts automatically. I wish there was a physical start button.