10 ms·

The worst of both worlds is Touch Buttons. No screen, just a touch-sensitive surface that's divided into areas that activate upon any kind of skin contact, whe

by Dwedit 2y ago

The worst of both worlds is Touch Buttons. No screen, just a touch-sensitive surface that's divided into areas that activate upon any kind of skin contact, whether intentional or not. I always see my dishwasher having some bizarre setting active because of accidental contact with a touch button.

schmidtleonard 2y ago
Don't forget to pair the Touch Button with a Minimalist design that gives no indication if a button has been pressed! Bonus points for a big long click buffer and strange multi-click semantics so that once the computer unfreezes your attempts at diagnostics are redirected into messing up the state in weird and wonderful ways that you will have to unpack over the next week.
- K0balt 2y ago
  Don’t forget the Uber-minimalist aesthetic, where there are no markings or textures to designate the touch regions, but instead you just touch or swipe different parts of the object for different functionality. That’s my favourite, especially after you haven’t used something for a few months. Bonus points if a firmware update changes the invisible control layout.
  - schmidtleonard 2y ago
    Hell yeah! Let's change the active region to the upper left corner of the hamburger symbol and make sure that the hieroglyph itself doesn't reflect this in any way. Dear Satan, I believe now would be a good time to discuss the subject of a raise!
  - glenneroo 2y ago
    Samsung used to do this for some of their cheaper monitors. I remember I bought a couple of them for one of my early dual-screen setups (15+ years ago) and every day I would slowly and gently run my finger along the entire length of the monitor until it would power on. It had to be slow otherwise there was a chance I would power it off again going back the other direction. Even more fun because after turning it on, I would slide past some other button, unintentionally opening some menu and changing some random settings (most commonly changing the input from DVI to something else). If I was lucky, I would power it off after changing something and wonder why it wasn't powering on again (note: it was powered on, but set to the wrong input). How that monitor got past Q&A I will never understand. IIRC the buttons had tiny, nearly invisible (light grey on black) icon labels... I used to keep a flashlight on my table so I could figure out which invisible button to press to get things working again.
  - bqmjjx0kac 2y ago
    I see you also have a pair of Bose headphones.
  - guappa 2y ago
    At work we have a dishwasher that has a single LED pointing downwards. So the only indication that it is running is a faint red glow on the floor. This results in it getting opened while running all the time, and spraying water everywhere. But at least the front panel is not made ugly by things like buttons and a LED!
    - Ekaros 2y ago
      Probably shares same design as "integrated" that is door covered version. Which certainly does look cleaner interior design, but trade offs any reasonable visibility of progress. Style over substance. I would also love to see time counter on front, instead not seeing dishwasher...
      - guappa 2y ago
        In my first times in that office I had to open all of the closets to find the dishwasher.
    - jannes 2y ago
      This type of dishwasher is made to be integrated in a kitchen with other cabinets (i.e. covered with the same door material as your other cabinets). So the entire front of the dishwasher is customizable and can't have any buttons/indicators.
      - account42 2y ago
        There are plenty of kitchen appliances that have a front panel but still let you customize the rest of the front face to match the cabinets.
    - offices 2y ago
      Dishwashers are quite noisy. Honestly, have you had your ears cleaned recently? It could change your life.
      - guappa 2y ago
  - xnorswap 2y ago
    The Sony WH-1000XM4 approach. Taking them off pauses your stuff. Sometimes that's useful, but on a desktop that's most often just annoying, particularly if you're just itching or adjusting them. More mysterious is that tapping them also pauses, but not always, and not reliably enough to actually use to pause and unpause. Even more mysterious though is the "two finger" tap which changes your headphones mode entirely, so that any background noise stops the noise cancellation. (It calls this "Conversation mode" or something). But any background noise seems to cancel the noise cancellation, so it's less useful than just turning that off. But this feature is easy to accidentally turn on, and it took a lot of googling in frustration to work out how to get it back to the normal operation. God knows what other hidden features these things have, because who bothers to read the manual for a pair of headphones?
    - jabbequbs 2y ago
      Thank you! I have a pair of these and they recently started beeping occasionally and switching noise canceling mode on their own. I was not looking forward to digging through search results on this.
    - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
      I had to install Sony's app for my headphones to disable automatically turning off noise canceling whenever it detected speech. I'd be playing a game and say "Dammit" in response to something and my headphones would be like "OH! You're trying to have a conversation! Let me help you with that!" Or I'd be on an airplane watching something funny, I'd laugh, and it'd disable the noise canceling. This kind of automation is a bug, not a feature, as far as I'm concerned.
      - xnorswap 2y ago
        Indeed, that's exactly the problem I had with that mode. The fact you can get into that mode accidentally with no obvious way to cancel it is a UX failure.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
corytheboyd 2y ago
A tiny amount of water getting on these buttons can make them go nuts too… I absolutely hate the electric stove ranges with surface touch buttons… as if those never get water on them…
- lrasinen 2y ago
  Or cats. Waking up in the middle of the night because the stove is beeping is not my favorite thing.
  - fwip 2y ago
    Not as dangerous as a stove, but the Xbox One had a capacitive on-off button. Turns out the dog could turn it off just by his fur touching it when walking by it.
drivers99 2y ago
Same with my apartment’s smart lock. The deadbolt gets extended accidentally while the door is open when someone brushes against the panel from the outside and you have to reach around the door to retract it.
wlesieutre 2y ago
The worst variation I’ve ever seen, courtesy of r/CrappyDesign: My oven uses a touchscreen, so whenever I open it, steam gets on the touchscreen and messes with the settings. http://web.archive.org/web/20210509153031/https://www.reddit.com/r/CrappyDesign/comments/n8ghqj/my_oven_uses_a_touchscreen_so_whenever_i_open_it/ http://web.archive.org/web/20210509153031/https://www.reddit...
- qwertox 2y ago
  Wow, this is definitely the worst example. At least it's not in a security sensitive context.
  - wlesieutre 2y ago
    Makes you wonder if anyone at the company ever even tested it with food in the oven
    - MaxikCZ 2y ago
      I dont mind the fact that they havent tested it with food, but I cant understand how they never recalled every single unit after noticing it for the first time. Its like they see it, and be like "Ah, everyone who bought it got screwed over, and it will hurt our brand, but its still cheaper to quietly ignore it". Despisable
    - arp242 2y ago
      Usually what happens is that it's tested under ideal "lab conditions", so this never happens. In real life ovens get a bit grimy and produce more smoke. Stuff like that. Still shoddy engineering of course. It's the same with designers doing their light-grey text on a white background with their 8K colour-perfect screen in optimal lighting conditions, and then when you point out this is difficult to read they go "I don't see the problem!"
      - lowboy 2y ago
        Do you have a recent example of a professional designer doing “light-grey text on a white background”? Because the designers I’ve worked with would never ship that. But maybe I’ve just worked with competent designers.
rkuska 2y ago
I spent (5y ago) so much time searching for induction stove with physical knobs. The touch interface at my previous place was driving me crazy, a slight misalidgment and the stove would beep like it’s end of the world. Luckily Miele produces some at the premium price (or was at the time) but I considered it an investment in my mental health.
- lolinder 2y ago
  A touch interface on the stove seems like the canonical example of a straightforwardly bad idea. Sure, let's use a capacitive touch interface to control the most dangerous appliance in the kitchen, one which also happens to frequently be the most humid spot and also the most likely to feature splashed oil! What could possibly go wrong?
  - scotty79 2y ago
    I actually love that I can easily wipe everything when it's dirty. I'd hate cleaning knobs and most of the tactile buttons. Some touch controls are incredibly good at filtering false inputs. Unfortunately you can't tell which.
    - rrix2 2y ago
      > I actually love that I can easily wipe everything when it's dirty. I'd hate cleaning knobs and most of the tactile buttons. the knobs on my manually operated range pull right off their posts and go soak in the sink with some soap and hot water once a week while i spray the range's control surface with whatever spray cleaner and wipe it off with every other flat surface in my kitchen. after ten or fifteen minutes of soaking, anything left on the knobs fall off with a dry rag that goes in the cloth washer afterwards.
      - lolinder 2y ago
        Yep, every knob I've ever had on a stove works this way and makes them trivial to clean. In the meantime, during regular use they're guaranteed to never stop functioning because they got wet or oily.
matsemann 2y ago
A peugeot (e308?) I rented for a few weeks had that. Absolutely bonkers. When driving I normally feel my way ("max heating to get rid of fog is the third button to the left"), but with this I would also activate all other kinds of stuff all the time. Recently changed offices at work. The new one has the same kind of buttons for the keypad. Just a flat surface with 9 numbers. I accidentally double press all the time, as it's hard to feel with no tactile feedback what you're doing and it's a bit delayed in the "beeps". So then you have to wait a few seconds and try again. Drives me mad.
- Moru 2y ago
  A friends appartment building had had a keypad lock installed a few years ago. Nice physical buttons. I swear the lock opened before I pressed the last number of the code, that fast. Sadly they changed it to an even newer lock system a couple of months ago. Now it's still physical buttons but the unlocking takes a couple of seconds and is totaly quiet. So you try to open the door and nothing happens. And then you try again and then it works. The friend often gets calls from visitors asking what the code was again because they can't get in. UX seems to be hard even without mixing in touch-controls.
jhickok 2y ago
See the Dell XPS https://imgur.com/KbOXGYa https://imgur.com/KbOXGYa
- sedatk 2y ago
  That's the only reason I didn't buy this otherwise a great laptop. I guess they're "testing the market" for new gimmicks.
  - jhickok 2y ago
    It's pretty much the perfect linux laptop for me, but I will never willingly a laptop with a function row like that. A non-tactile ESC key is especially head-scratching.
    - jannes 2y ago
      Just an idea: remap your Caps Lock key to Esc. I already do that with all my devices anyway.
m463 2y ago
The worst is the dishwasher buttons/lights on the edge of the door so you can't look at them without opening it. What is this stupid trend?
- Dwedit 2y ago
  While my dishwasher has the "buttons" at the top of the door, it puts the light on the bottom, so it shines on the floor. Little red dot. Cats like that dot.
- pants2 2y ago
  My dishwasher has buttons on the top like this, and during the heat dry cycle the steam will activate the buttons and I'll hear lots of random beeps from the kitchen. Ponce in a while it manages to cancel or restart itself, hilariously bad design.
- ziml77 2y ago
  My parents have one like this. My dad got it because it blends in with the cabinets. Purely an aesthetic choice. It absolutely sucks to use though because once the cycle is done it beeps extremely loudly until you open the door since it can't just indicate with a light that there are clean dishes ready inside.
s0rce 2y ago
My induction cooktop has the worst touch buttons that constant beep and sense pots, tongs or other stuff as well. Very annoying.
mmooss 2y ago
Easier to clean - no nooks or crannies.
sedatk 2y ago
I hate my dishwasher's touch buttons (Bosch 800 series) because of that. The amount of pressure you need to press a button is always ambiguous, so sometimes you press it too short and you have to press it again. Sometimes, the button registers, but you think you need to press it again, so you effectively cancel it, and must do it again. Worst UX ever.
marssaxman 2y ago
The security keypads at work use this terrible design: it's just a flat plastic panel with no moving parts. You have to push the numbers to enter your PIN, but with no buttons, and no mechanical feedback, you can't just type the number in: you have to PRESS... EACH... SPOT... AND... HOLD... while the laggy touch system takes its time registering your input. A daily irritation!
- account42 2y ago
  My clothes dryrer has buttons like that. And of course it will ignore button presses if it's not in the correct iternal state yet after you start it up or change modes (which at least is done via a real rotary knob). And you can't just tap the buttons (would be unsafe) but have to hold for 1/2 second. The clothes washer is thankfully still and older model with real buttons.
6yyyyyy 2y ago
These capacitive buttons are actually super cheap, a lot of microcontrollers have this function built-in so the buttons are effectively free, just an extra pad on the PCB.
ioseph 2y ago
This is a big barrier for me replacing our gas stove with induction. I get why they use them (easy cleaning, flush profile) but I just find a knob 100x more pleasant to use.
- jamil7 2y ago
  I can't stand induction stove tops, partially for this reason and opted to put a gas stovetop in our kitchen with an electric oven. I cook a lot and trying to quickly adjust the heat when you have something on your hands makes them completely useless and infuriating. There's the whole sensory feedback side of gas too which I'm so used to but that's a separate topic.
pornel 2y ago
VW ID. cars have the worst fake buttons on the steering wheel. Multiple buttons were merged into a single mushy creaky touch-sensitive plastic face that is inconvenient and unreliable when you press intentionally, but easy to accidentally activate by brushing your hand over it.
- 71bw 2y ago
  Yet another "innovation" stemming from electric "cars". Truly an abhorrent abomination on top of true cars...
  - pornel 2y ago
    They put the exact same faux buttons in their ICE cars. This is not an EV thing. It's a contemporary trend, and it just happens that most newly designed cars are EVs now. The rise of touchscreen technology was just coincidental with the rise of EVs. The first Tesla Roadster, Nissan Leaf, and Renault Zoe had crappy little screens, and real buttons for everything, like most cars of their era. OTOH today EV-hating Toyota keeps making screens bigger. The latest Lamborghini has multiple touchscreens too. This change would have happened even if EVs didn't exist. iPad is more to blame for that trend than an electric drivetrain.
tallanvor 2y ago
My gym got treadmills like this. Stupidest decision anyone could make because a large enough drop of sweat will activate the button, with the stop button being the absolute worst one to hit, because there's no "undo" - you hit stop, and you're stuck with a treadmill that's stopping and your activity is over.
thih9 2y ago
In some cases touch buttons are preferable. At least they are always in a predictable spot and often perform the same function. Compare that to an actual screen where the button label and button position can change.
whywhywhywhy 2y ago
Also the cheapest option which is why it crops up so often, and it definitely feels it.
tivert 2y ago
> The worst of both worlds is Touch Buttons. No screen, just a touch-sensitive surface that's divided into areas that activate upon any kind of skin contact, whether intentional or not. > I always see my dishwasher having some bizarre setting active because of accidental contact with a touch button. My dishwasher has button to activate a control lock to prevent that. But the touch buttons suck so much and it requires a long press to activate that it always takes me two or three attempts and at least 10-15 seconds to push that button. 15 seconds for a button push, WTF were the designers thinking?
peeters 2y ago
My kettle decided to use capacitive resistance buttons (even though they're elevated so they could just be switches). Every time I splash water on them (which you know, can happen sometimes with kettles) I have to dry them off and power cycle the kettle to get them to work again. Innovators gonna innovate I guess.
adolph 2y ago
> The worst of both worlds is Touch Buttons. No screen, just a touch-sensitive surface that's divided into areas that activate upon any kind of skin contact, whether intentional or not. Douglas Adams in 1979 knew the coming future: A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive--you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program. http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1329 http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1329
andrew-dc 2y ago
I hate these and hope they are heading out also. Our hands and fingers are built to receive touch feedback, and these specific kind of buttons negate all of that.

by Dwedit 2y ago

schmidtleonard 2y ago

Don't forget to pair the Touch Button with a Minimalist design that gives no indication if a button has been pressed! Bonus points for a big long click buffer and strange multi-click semantics so that once the computer unfreezes your attempts at diagnostics are redirected into messing up the state in weird and wonderful ways that you will have to unpack over the next week.

K0balt 2y ago
Don’t forget the Uber-minimalist aesthetic, where there are no markings or textures to designate the touch regions, but instead you just touch or swipe different parts of the object for different functionality. That’s my favourite, especially after you haven’t used something for a few months. Bonus points if a firmware update changes the invisible control layout.
- schmidtleonard 2y ago
  Hell yeah! Let's change the active region to the upper left corner of the hamburger symbol and make sure that the hieroglyph itself doesn't reflect this in any way. Dear Satan, I believe now would be a good time to discuss the subject of a raise!
- glenneroo 2y ago
  Samsung used to do this for some of their cheaper monitors. I remember I bought a couple of them for one of my early dual-screen setups (15+ years ago) and every day I would slowly and gently run my finger along the entire length of the monitor until it would power on. It had to be slow otherwise there was a chance I would power it off again going back the other direction. Even more fun because after turning it on, I would slide past some other button, unintentionally opening some menu and changing some random settings (most commonly changing the input from DVI to something else). If I was lucky, I would power it off after changing something and wonder why it wasn't powering on again (note: it was powered on, but set to the wrong input). How that monitor got past Q&A I will never understand. IIRC the buttons had tiny, nearly invisible (light grey on black) icon labels... I used to keep a flashlight on my table so I could figure out which invisible button to press to get things working again.
- bqmjjx0kac 2y ago
  I see you also have a pair of Bose headphones.
- guappa 2y ago
  At work we have a dishwasher that has a single LED pointing downwards. So the only indication that it is running is a faint red glow on the floor. This results in it getting opened while running all the time, and spraying water everywhere. But at least the front panel is not made ugly by things like buttons and a LED!
  - Ekaros 2y ago
    Probably shares same design as "integrated" that is door covered version. Which certainly does look cleaner interior design, but trade offs any reasonable visibility of progress. Style over substance. I would also love to see time counter on front, instead not seeing dishwasher...
    - guappa 2y ago
      In my first times in that office I had to open all of the closets to find the dishwasher.
  - jannes 2y ago
    This type of dishwasher is made to be integrated in a kitchen with other cabinets (i.e. covered with the same door material as your other cabinets). So the entire front of the dishwasher is customizable and can't have any buttons/indicators.
    - account42 2y ago
      There are plenty of kitchen appliances that have a front panel but still let you customize the rest of the front face to match the cabinets.
  - offices 2y ago
    Dishwashers are quite noisy. Honestly, have you had your ears cleaned recently? It could change your life.
    - guappa 2y ago
- xnorswap 2y ago
  The Sony WH-1000XM4 approach. Taking them off pauses your stuff. Sometimes that's useful, but on a desktop that's most often just annoying, particularly if you're just itching or adjusting them. More mysterious is that tapping them also pauses, but not always, and not reliably enough to actually use to pause and unpause. Even more mysterious though is the "two finger" tap which changes your headphones mode entirely, so that any background noise stops the noise cancellation. (It calls this "Conversation mode" or something). But any background noise seems to cancel the noise cancellation, so it's less useful than just turning that off. But this feature is easy to accidentally turn on, and it took a lot of googling in frustration to work out how to get it back to the normal operation. God knows what other hidden features these things have, because who bothers to read the manual for a pair of headphones?
  - jabbequbs 2y ago
    Thank you! I have a pair of these and they recently started beeping occasionally and switching noise canceling mode on their own. I was not looking forward to digging through search results on this.
  - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
    I had to install Sony's app for my headphones to disable automatically turning off noise canceling whenever it detected speech. I'd be playing a game and say "Dammit" in response to something and my headphones would be like "OH! You're trying to have a conversation! Let me help you with that!" Or I'd be on an airplane watching something funny, I'd laugh, and it'd disable the noise canceling. This kind of automation is a bug, not a feature, as far as I'm concerned.
    - xnorswap 2y ago
      Indeed, that's exactly the problem I had with that mode. The fact you can get into that mode accidentally with no obvious way to cancel it is a UX failure.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

corytheboyd 2y ago

A tiny amount of water getting on these buttons can make them go nuts too… I absolutely hate the electric stove ranges with surface touch buttons… as if those never get water on them…

lrasinen 2y ago
Or cats. Waking up in the middle of the night because the stove is beeping is not my favorite thing.
- fwip 2y ago
  Not as dangerous as a stove, but the Xbox One had a capacitive on-off button. Turns out the dog could turn it off just by his fur touching it when walking by it.

drivers99 2y ago

Same with my apartment’s smart lock. The deadbolt gets extended accidentally while the door is open when someone brushes against the panel from the outside and you have to reach around the door to retract it.

wlesieutre 2y ago

The worst variation I’ve ever seen, courtesy of r/CrappyDesign: My oven uses a touchscreen, so whenever I open it, steam gets on the touchscreen and messes with the settings. http://web.archive.org/web/20210509153031/https://www.reddit.com/r/CrappyDesign/comments/n8ghqj/my_oven_uses_a_touchscreen_so_whenever_i_open_it/ http://web.archive.org/web/20210509153031/https://www.reddit...

qwertox 2y ago
Wow, this is definitely the worst example. At least it's not in a security sensitive context.
- wlesieutre 2y ago
  Makes you wonder if anyone at the company ever even tested it with food in the oven
  - MaxikCZ 2y ago
    I dont mind the fact that they havent tested it with food, but I cant understand how they never recalled every single unit after noticing it for the first time. Its like they see it, and be like "Ah, everyone who bought it got screwed over, and it will hurt our brand, but its still cheaper to quietly ignore it". Despisable
  - arp242 2y ago
    Usually what happens is that it's tested under ideal "lab conditions", so this never happens. In real life ovens get a bit grimy and produce more smoke. Stuff like that. Still shoddy engineering of course. It's the same with designers doing their light-grey text on a white background with their 8K colour-perfect screen in optimal lighting conditions, and then when you point out this is difficult to read they go "I don't see the problem!"
    - lowboy 2y ago
      Do you have a recent example of a professional designer doing “light-grey text on a white background”? Because the designers I’ve worked with would never ship that. But maybe I’ve just worked with competent designers.

rkuska 2y ago

I spent (5y ago) so much time searching for induction stove with physical knobs. The touch interface at my previous place was driving me crazy, a slight misalidgment and the stove would beep like it’s end of the world. Luckily Miele produces some at the premium price (or was at the time) but I considered it an investment in my mental health.

lolinder 2y ago
A touch interface on the stove seems like the canonical example of a straightforwardly bad idea. Sure, let's use a capacitive touch interface to control the most dangerous appliance in the kitchen, one which also happens to frequently be the most humid spot and also the most likely to feature splashed oil! What could possibly go wrong?
- scotty79 2y ago
  I actually love that I can easily wipe everything when it's dirty. I'd hate cleaning knobs and most of the tactile buttons. Some touch controls are incredibly good at filtering false inputs. Unfortunately you can't tell which.
  - rrix2 2y ago
    > I actually love that I can easily wipe everything when it's dirty. I'd hate cleaning knobs and most of the tactile buttons. the knobs on my manually operated range pull right off their posts and go soak in the sink with some soap and hot water once a week while i spray the range's control surface with whatever spray cleaner and wipe it off with every other flat surface in my kitchen. after ten or fifteen minutes of soaking, anything left on the knobs fall off with a dry rag that goes in the cloth washer afterwards.
    - lolinder 2y ago
      Yep, every knob I've ever had on a stove works this way and makes them trivial to clean. In the meantime, during regular use they're guaranteed to never stop functioning because they got wet or oily.

matsemann 2y ago

A peugeot (e308?) I rented for a few weeks had that. Absolutely bonkers. When driving I normally feel my way ("max heating to get rid of fog is the third button to the left"), but with this I would also activate all other kinds of stuff all the time. Recently changed offices at work. The new one has the same kind of buttons for the keypad. Just a flat surface with 9 numbers. I accidentally double press all the time, as it's hard to feel with no tactile feedback what you're doing and it's a bit delayed in the "beeps". So then you have to wait a few seconds and try again. Drives me mad.

Moru 2y ago
A friends appartment building had had a keypad lock installed a few years ago. Nice physical buttons. I swear the lock opened before I pressed the last number of the code, that fast. Sadly they changed it to an even newer lock system a couple of months ago. Now it's still physical buttons but the unlocking takes a couple of seconds and is totaly quiet. So you try to open the door and nothing happens. And then you try again and then it works. The friend often gets calls from visitors asking what the code was again because they can't get in. UX seems to be hard even without mixing in touch-controls.

jhickok 2y ago

See the Dell XPS https://imgur.com/KbOXGYa https://imgur.com/KbOXGYa

sedatk 2y ago
That's the only reason I didn't buy this otherwise a great laptop. I guess they're "testing the market" for new gimmicks.
- jhickok 2y ago
  It's pretty much the perfect linux laptop for me, but I will never willingly a laptop with a function row like that. A non-tactile ESC key is especially head-scratching.
  - jannes 2y ago
    Just an idea: remap your Caps Lock key to Esc. I already do that with all my devices anyway.

m463 2y ago

The worst is the dishwasher buttons/lights on the edge of the door so you can't look at them without opening it. What is this stupid trend?

Dwedit 2y ago
While my dishwasher has the "buttons" at the top of the door, it puts the light on the bottom, so it shines on the floor. Little red dot. Cats like that dot.
pants2 2y ago
My dishwasher has buttons on the top like this, and during the heat dry cycle the steam will activate the buttons and I'll hear lots of random beeps from the kitchen. Ponce in a while it manages to cancel or restart itself, hilariously bad design.
ziml77 2y ago
My parents have one like this. My dad got it because it blends in with the cabinets. Purely an aesthetic choice. It absolutely sucks to use though because once the cycle is done it beeps extremely loudly until you open the door since it can't just indicate with a light that there are clean dishes ready inside.

s0rce 2y ago

My induction cooktop has the worst touch buttons that constant beep and sense pots, tongs or other stuff as well. Very annoying.

mmooss 2y ago

Easier to clean - no nooks or crannies.

sedatk 2y ago

I hate my dishwasher's touch buttons (Bosch 800 series) because of that. The amount of pressure you need to press a button is always ambiguous, so sometimes you press it too short and you have to press it again. Sometimes, the button registers, but you think you need to press it again, so you effectively cancel it, and must do it again. Worst UX ever.

marssaxman 2y ago

The security keypads at work use this terrible design: it's just a flat plastic panel with no moving parts. You have to push the numbers to enter your PIN, but with no buttons, and no mechanical feedback, you can't just type the number in: you have to PRESS... EACH... SPOT... AND... HOLD... while the laggy touch system takes its time registering your input. A daily irritation!

account42 2y ago
My clothes dryrer has buttons like that. And of course it will ignore button presses if it's not in the correct iternal state yet after you start it up or change modes (which at least is done via a real rotary knob). And you can't just tap the buttons (would be unsafe) but have to hold for 1/2 second. The clothes washer is thankfully still and older model with real buttons.

6yyyyyy 2y ago

These capacitive buttons are actually super cheap, a lot of microcontrollers have this function built-in so the buttons are effectively free, just an extra pad on the PCB.

ioseph 2y ago

This is a big barrier for me replacing our gas stove with induction. I get why they use them (easy cleaning, flush profile) but I just find a knob 100x more pleasant to use.

jamil7 2y ago
I can't stand induction stove tops, partially for this reason and opted to put a gas stovetop in our kitchen with an electric oven. I cook a lot and trying to quickly adjust the heat when you have something on your hands makes them completely useless and infuriating. There's the whole sensory feedback side of gas too which I'm so used to but that's a separate topic.

pornel 2y ago

VW ID. cars have the worst fake buttons on the steering wheel. Multiple buttons were merged into a single mushy creaky touch-sensitive plastic face that is inconvenient and unreliable when you press intentionally, but easy to accidentally activate by brushing your hand over it.

71bw 2y ago
Yet another "innovation" stemming from electric "cars". Truly an abhorrent abomination on top of true cars...
- pornel 2y ago
  They put the exact same faux buttons in their ICE cars. This is not an EV thing. It's a contemporary trend, and it just happens that most newly designed cars are EVs now. The rise of touchscreen technology was just coincidental with the rise of EVs. The first Tesla Roadster, Nissan Leaf, and Renault Zoe had crappy little screens, and real buttons for everything, like most cars of their era. OTOH today EV-hating Toyota keeps making screens bigger. The latest Lamborghini has multiple touchscreens too. This change would have happened even if EVs didn't exist. iPad is more to blame for that trend than an electric drivetrain.

tallanvor 2y ago

My gym got treadmills like this. Stupidest decision anyone could make because a large enough drop of sweat will activate the button, with the stop button being the absolute worst one to hit, because there's no "undo" - you hit stop, and you're stuck with a treadmill that's stopping and your activity is over.

thih9 2y ago

In some cases touch buttons are preferable. At least they are always in a predictable spot and often perform the same function. Compare that to an actual screen where the button label and button position can change.

whywhywhywhy 2y ago

Also the cheapest option which is why it crops up so often, and it definitely feels it.

tivert 2y ago

> The worst of both worlds is Touch Buttons. No screen, just a touch-sensitive surface that's divided into areas that activate upon any kind of skin contact, whether intentional or not. > I always see my dishwasher having some bizarre setting active because of accidental contact with a touch button. My dishwasher has button to activate a control lock to prevent that. But the touch buttons suck so much and it requires a long press to activate that it always takes me two or three attempts and at least 10-15 seconds to push that button. 15 seconds for a button push, WTF were the designers thinking?

peeters 2y ago

My kettle decided to use capacitive resistance buttons (even though they're elevated so they could just be switches). Every time I splash water on them (which you know, can happen sometimes with kettles) I have to dry them off and power cycle the kettle to get them to work again. Innovators gonna innovate I guess.

adolph 2y ago

> The worst of both worlds is Touch Buttons. No screen, just a touch-sensitive surface that's divided into areas that activate upon any kind of skin contact, whether intentional or not. Douglas Adams in 1979 knew the coming future: A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive--you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program. http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1329 http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1329

andrew-dc 2y ago

I hate these and hope they are heading out also. Our hands and fingers are built to receive touch feedback, and these specific kind of buttons negate all of that.