How Not to Design a Microwave

Re:How Not to Design a Microwave by tobr on Sunday January 07, 2018 @04:20AM (#16090029)

In my experience almost every microwave oven has terrible usability. It’s as if the design problem is so simple and the “correct” design (two independent, labeled, mechanical dials for time and power) is so obvious that everyone has to make their own version of it to look cool or sophisticated or something. I guess they never user test these things, because that doesn’t help sell more of them.

There really ought to be a usability certification for products like these, a verification by an independent organization that a typical user is able to operate the most important functionality with few or no errors.

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Re:How Not to Design a Microwave by Johnny555 on Sunday January 07, 2018 @04:24AM (#16090041)

The button I use the most on my Microwave is "add 30 seconds", I use it for almost everything, hitting it repeatedly to get more than 30 seconds.

I rarely want more than a few minutes of heating time, and I rarely need more than 30 seconds of granularity so that one button handles most of my microwaving needs.

Though I agree that dials would be better -- I wish cars weren't moving toward touchscreens, in my old car I could adjust pretty much everything in the car - radio, climate control, etc without looking. In my current car, there's a touch screen for pretty much everything except radio volume which is on the steering wheel.

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Re:How Not to Design a Microwave by Thlom on Sunday January 07, 2018 @05:06AM (#16090174)

Yeah, I have a gazillion buttons on my microwave, but the only button I really use is the Start/add 30 sec button.

If I want to adjust power I can adjust from 150 to 600, and then there's a "Jet" function, but I have no idea what that is. More than 600? 750 maybe? Who knows.

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Re:How Not to Design a Microwave by Grue3 on Monday January 08, 2018 @02:39AM (#16095255)

Dial is a bad design for time, because most of the time people want to heat something up for a short time: 15, 30 or 60 seconds. On many microwaves this involves slightly turning a dial and then counting the required number of seconds in your head (because the exact angle is too small to select right away). A log scale dial would solve this problem, but then it makes adding another 30 seconds a non-trivial operation, because the angle is no longer constant.

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