

The world's worst toaster - bdfh42
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/03/the-worlds-wors.html

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dreish
The GE microwave that came with my house is worse than I thought was possible.
It includes an appointment scheduler (!) and has some sort of message button
I've never pressed for fear of being reminded of what my voice sounds like.
Apparently the designers thought there was a large underserved market of
families whose entire lives revolve around their microwaves. All the buttons
to support these extra features mainly make it less convenient to use for
heating up food.

The worst feature by far is its insistence on having its clock set. Every time
I lose electricity, which happens every few weeks in my neighborhood, it
refuses to cook anything until I:

    
    
      1. Press "clock" to set the time (even though all other functions are disabled).
      2. Enter the time in HHMM format.
      3. Press "start" (but don't get too excited about actually "starting" anything yet).
      4. Locate the single-purpose "AM/PM" button and press that either once or twice.
      5. Press "start" again.
      6. Enter the date in MMDDYY format.
      7. And again press "start".
    

What this means is that you can always calculate how long it has been since
the first time I zapped my morning instant oatmeal after the last power outage
by subtracting from the current time and date displayed by the microwave:
2011-11-11 11:11 a.m.

So, yeah, don't design a web site like that.

~~~
rbanffy
If it's a toaster, it probably can run NetBSD.

Since you don't report any crashes, it's a plausible idea.

I don't think it's possible to design a webite as cruel as this microwave.

~~~
jmtulloss
You, sir, have clearly never dealt with web-based course management software
:).

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antiismist
As a counter-point, I have the world's best microwave. There is only one
button that I use - the add 1 minute button.

Put the food in, hit the "add one" button once or twice, and that is it. The
microwave starts automatically. As far as I can tell, it took 40 years of
microwave UI development to get to this point.

~~~
TrevorJ
I had a microwave once that only had one nob that you turned and that was it.
I've never seen another setup that was that simple and effective on a
microwave.

~~~
jmtulloss
That's how my current microwave is, and it's great. Not only that, but the
numbers on the knob no longer have any bearing on actual time increments, so I
don't have to think at all. Just turn the knob an arbitrary amount, and
hopefully I'll take it out on time.

Brilliant.

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brent
So was this "star" marketer fooled by marketing? "It's pretty fancy and shiny
and microprocessor controlled. And it makes toast." Shouldn't the criteria
have been related to function: like 'I only have to insert toast and remove
toast... it's one step shorter than old toasters'.

As an aside, I'd love to post this on his blog, but that doesn't appear to be
an option. Is accepting critical feedback in an open forum a risk not worth
taking when marketing oneself?

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jauco
I guess it's to prevent phishing. If you have to take all the steps yourself
instead of clicking on a link from the e-mail, the chances of someone being
able to hijack a link are smaller.

If it's always (1) click link, (2) enter credit card details. You are teaching
your users to become victims of fraud.

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simplegeek
Irony is that company that sold that Toaster made money. How ironic (and
encouraging) is the fact that companies like eBay, Microsoft makes loads of
money ;-) Feature-laden products sell. At the day end, we all want to acquire
powerful things and you'll find very few _powerful_ products in this world
that were made keeping in mind the _less is more_ philosophy.

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dskhatri
Reminds me of the Plantronics desk phone headsets. I don't know where they get
the engineers to design these. Just a few examples of what's wrong:

\- the base station has a "configuration dial" that requires a flat object to
insert into the slit to turn it

\- There are 2, yes 2, pairs of volume buttons on the base itself, AND one on
the headset..

\- The mute button on the headset has a sharp protrusion that literally pokes
you in the finger when you try to push it..

Seth's post and experiences with such systems make me appreciate sites like
tumblr and slinkset quite a lot.

PDF user guide:
[http://www.plantronics.com/media/media_resources/literature/...](http://www.plantronics.com/media/media_resources/literature/user_guides/Voyager510S_userguide_en.pdf)).

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PatrickMaloney
There are plenty of bad toasters out there. Many products are designed
(destroyed) as this toaster was with lots of extra super duper features in
mind, thinking that users absolutely have to have the ability to do X...and y,
a,b,and c.

Then they hit you with all the options all at once. Yes build in that must
have functionality but don't forsake intuitiveness. Don't mistake
functionality with usability.

By making a simple task more complex you do not necessarily increase customer
safety (or satisfaction) and as henning notes so aptly, "Making it easy for
people to give you more money on a regular basis is a good thing."

In my experience air travel is more akin to the 11 click ebay example than a 2
step toaster.

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tptacek
Man, Seth Godin can't even do a good job of reviewing a bad toaster. When
writing a critical review, the bar is clearly set at what Amazon.com reviewers
come up with. Godin should see where that bar is set for bad toasters:

[http://www.amazon.com/review/product/B00004R92D/ref=cm_cr_dp...](http://www.amazon.com/review/product/B00004R92D/ref=cm_cr_dp_hist_1?%5Fencoding=UTF8&filterBy=addOneStar)

I note, with some smugness, that "DANGEROUS --- SHAME ON TOASTMASTER" is also
a catchier title than "World's Worst Toaster".

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phaedrus
This sort of interface problem is common with clocks too. We have a clock at
work that signals break time; it has four alarms but you have to manually turn
them off. One time I had to be the one to turn it off, and I looked at the
back. Four identical, round buttons - simply labelled "A", "B", "C", and "D".
WTF? I need the manual to look up what the buttons do!

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henning
"It took me more than 11 clicks to send them $6."

Upgrading an account in Backpack, 37Signals' web-based calendar/PIM/organizer
thing, takes 4 clicks.

Making it easy for people to give you more money on a regular basis is a good
thing.

Note that it takes roughly the same amount of effort to downgrade or cancel
your account altogether.

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aneesh
Even better than that toaster, when I tried to reinstall my wireless driver on
Windows a while back (since then, I have seen the light and switched to
Ubuntu), the new driver wouldn't install because a few files were missing.
"Please click here for help [online]."

I kid you not.

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mynameishere
What's the deal with toasters...

And would you believe that the process of air travel is like...two steps:

1\. Go to airport 2\. Get on plane.

My god, if human heavier-than-air flight is simpler than applying heat to
bread, then we are _all boned_.

~~~
ciscoriordan
True, but it takes a couple of minutes to make toast and the whole house-to-
plane process takes forever.

The airlines are still trying out different plane boarding techniques, with
mixed degrees of success.

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jgrahamc
The worst designed telephone: [http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/02/worst-designed-
telephone-in-...](http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/02/worst-designed-telephone-in-
world.html)

