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I also love the Breville UI. Unfortunately, my mother who is blind has a hard time with it. I gave her my Breville when her old microwave broke. The knobs on t

I also love the Breville UI. Unfortunately, my mother who is blind has a hard time with it. I gave her my Breville when her old microwave broke. The knobs on the Breville don’t give any feedback about their value as it changes. They also rotate infinitely, making it hard to guess from context clues. The UI is just not accessible. On a regular microwave, she can either feel the buttons or someone can put adhesive landmarks on the number 5 and the start button and she can figure out the rest. And as each button is pressed, the microwave will beep, confirming the value has actually changed. The best UI will be accessible and embody universal design, making the experience better for everyone. I think Breville is on the right track, but they should keep working on it.

robocat 2y ago
> The best UI will be accessible and embody universal design, making the experience better for everyone. That is a beautiful goal but I think that ultimately different disabilities have incompatible goals, and that the engineering costs matter too. All design forces compromises: what is better for one protected group is often worse for another protected group. Obviously a display is absolutely useless to blind users - so do we decide to have displays or not? There's always more than one approach. My mum had heaps of usability issues in her home and generally it took plenty of effort on my part to find a solution that was accessible for her limited strength and limited movement. The New Zealand government helped but there were plenty of issues it never helped with. I imagine it would be really hard to attempt to support someone with various levels of mental health degradation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39749581 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39749581 Yeah, I too dislike jog knobs but they are a design compromise. In my experience the majority of consumers fail to select designs that have good usability. There seems to be little economic incentive for manufacturers to develop products with better UI design. I wish we lived in a perfect world with unlimited resources to support our blind, our elderly, and others with complex needs.

robocat 2y ago

> The best UI will be accessible and embody universal design, making the experience better for everyone. That is a beautiful goal but I think that ultimately different disabilities have incompatible goals, and that the engineering costs matter too. All design forces compromises: what is better for one protected group is often worse for another protected group. Obviously a display is absolutely useless to blind users - so do we decide to have displays or not? There's always more than one approach. My mum had heaps of usability issues in her home and generally it took plenty of effort on my part to find a solution that was accessible for her limited strength and limited movement. The New Zealand government helped but there were plenty of issues it never helped with. I imagine it would be really hard to attempt to support someone with various levels of mental health degradation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39749581 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39749581 Yeah, I too dislike jog knobs but they are a design compromise. In my experience the majority of consumers fail to select designs that have good usability. There seems to be little economic incentive for manufacturers to develop products with better UI design. I wish we lived in a perfect world with unlimited resources to support our blind, our elderly, and others with complex needs.