
How Not to Design a Microwave - jordansmithnz
http://jordansmith.io/ui-design-principles/
======
hpaavola
[https://johnlewis.scene7.com/is/image/JohnLewis/233182566?$p...](https://johnlewis.scene7.com/is/image/JohnLewis/233182566?$prod_exlrg$)
One knob for time, other for power. All other UIs feel just wrong after using
this. Microwaves usea to have this kind of UI when those came to market.

~~~
mrob
This is almost a good design, but there's a potentially dangerous flaw.
Although it's not obvious in the picture, the dials have skeuomorphic fake
machining marks. These marks can make reflected light look like lines
radiating from the center. And the indicator mark is only a shallow
depression, which is low contrast under some lighting conditions. The
reflections on the fake machining marks can camouflage the indicator mark and
make it hard to see. If you mostly use the microwave on full power, that's
what you'll expect to see, so it's easy to miss it if the power setting is
actually lower. This could result in food being heated less than you expect.
It might be warmed instead of cooked, resulting in fast bacteria growth.

This can easily be fixed by coloring the indicator mark with a black permanent
marker.

~~~
watt
FWIW here's a perfect microwave. I bought it around year 2000 I think.
[https://imgur.com/JMaM70x](https://imgur.com/JMaM70x)

~~~
mrob
Agreed. The newer Samsung is an inferior cost-reduced version of this design.
The old version is better because the time can be set purely by muscle memory.
The new version uses a rotary encoder, where you need multiple turns to set a
time. The required back-and-forth movement of the hand is too complex for
muscle memory. The rotary encoder skips steps if you move it too fast. The
time dial does not move as it counts down, so you're forced to read the
display to check the remaining time instead of just glancing at the dial.

The only real improvement is the replacement of the door opening button with a
more intuitive door handle.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _The only real improvement is the replacement of the door opening button
> with a more intuitive door handle._

Actually, it's not an improvement. A door opening button is easy to operate
with one hand; a handle needs two in order not to shift the microwave. At
least all the microwaves I've seen have doors requiring noticeable amount of
force to open. My guess is it's to avoid the situation in which a large dish
rotating inside pushes on the doors and opens it.

~~~
clarry
I can open my own as well as family members' microwaves' doors by the handle
with one hand just fine, without shifting it. The trick is a _snappy_ tug.

------
electic
The article doesn't really go into what the perfect UI would look like. It is
more of a buzz feed type article.

That being said, my microwave just broke down and I headed to the store to buy
a new one. I was really disappointed at the new models. The UI seems to be
getting worse on them. I have a feeling they are not even trying to innovate
because it has become a low margin device.

People are still trying if you are interested.

Articles:

[https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/28006/why-do-
microwav...](https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/28006/why-do-microwave-
oven-uis-fail)

[https://medium.com/@bn/this-is-how-a-microwave-should-
work-4...](https://medium.com/@bn/this-is-how-a-microwave-should-
work-4e33b5c38b68)

Art Mockups:

[https://www.behance.net/gallery/15102955/Microwave-
Redesign-...](https://www.behance.net/gallery/15102955/Microwave-Redesign-
Touch-screen-interface-design)

[https://dribbble.com/shots/1309476-Microwave-UX-
Concept](https://dribbble.com/shots/1309476-Microwave-UX-Concept)

[https://dribbble.com/shots/1449210-Microwave-Concept-
PSD](https://dribbble.com/shots/1449210-Microwave-Concept-PSD)

[https://dribbble.com/shots/3249355-Smart-microwave-UI-
concep...](https://dribbble.com/shots/3249355-Smart-microwave-UI-concept)

If you have others, feel free to comment! Appliance UX/UI is a very neglected
area.

~~~
dmitriid
While the StackExchange link is awesome, the rest are just horrible. As with
all these wannabe designers they go for the wow effect. It takes about half a
second of rational thought to see why.

All these art mockups are just that: art mockups. "How do I make a thing look
pretty". A tired mantra of programming smays: make it work, make it fast, and
only then make it pretty.

Touch screens in the kitchen. In the effing kitchen! When you are often up to
your eyebrows in grease, oil, flour, vegetable juices etc.

Oh, look, you have to turn the knob to set the time. To set the power you have
to touch some other area and then turn the nob again. To set the time, you
have to touch that area again to switch modes, and then set the time. BUT WHY?
This is solved with just having two knobs!
[https://johnlewis.scene7.com/is/image/JohnLewis/233182566?$p...](https://johnlewis.scene7.com/is/image/JohnLewis/233182566?$prod_exlrg$)

Oh, look. As it starts, it shows you time remaining, and a stop button.
Because you never ever in your entire life would want to, say, _adjust time_.
Nope? The thought never even occured to the designer.

Oh, look, there are still multiple small buttons (that are already awkward on
a vertical pane), but let's make them touch buttons! Oh, and let's leave them
exactly the same as they are now, because the only reason why people don't
understand how they work is because they are not touch buttons. Make them
touch buttons! They will immediately become intuitive!

Oh, look, the iOS time scroller! Because that's exactly what I need: to be
able to set 23h 29m 31s by scrolling through infinite lists of numbers. I
wonder why is it that the vast majority of microwave uses are around 30s to
5min range on max power?

I could go on

~~~
username223
> Touch screens in the kitchen.

And in the car, where you should keep your eyes on the road. Knobs work really
well for adjusting the stereo and heater; replacing them with a huge touch
screen is a terrible idea, and trying to make it less terrible with haptic
feedback is a poor solution. Hopefully the current touch screen fad will pass.

------
bcoates
I would put up with a hieroglyphic based UI ten times weirder than the one
depicted if it meant the microwave didn't beep.

Seriously, what is it with embedded digital electronics designers and beeping?
Nothing else has a gratuitous noisemaker. I swear if the home refrigerator was
invented after the cheap piezo buzzer it would emit an ear-piercing bleep
every time the door opened, or maybe when the compressor cycled on or off.

Is there some sort of strange subsidy or tax consequence so that adding a
beeper has negative net cost?

~~~
jgtrosh
I'm sure that without that feedback mistakes can happen that might be blamed
on UI (didn't press the start/reheat/&c. button all the way through). Similar
thought process to most touchscreen keyboards which have feedback (sound or
haptic) by default because it's probably going to be a hurdle for users.
Reminds me of the first time I installed a Linux distro which didn't disable
the system beep (Debian w/o X)… surprising how this vastly and immediately
changes UX. It's actually an interesting way to practice making fewer mistakes
but it's a good thing that no UI relies on system beep any more.

A big ol' beep/nobeep switch on ovens would be a nice thing.

------
ProxCoques
UI designer here. This guy's advice is OK-ish as far as it goes. However, he
fails to exhibit the one thing that sets an actual UI designer apart from
somebody with just some opinions about the practice: observational research.

The FIRST thing you do is observe. Watch people in relation to the problem you
are trying to solve. Listen to them. Ask them WHY they do what you observe. If
at all possible, work out what motivates them and what problems they really
have (which they often will not articulate to you). Only then start designing
solutions.

I'm not saying his ideas about the design of the oven are invalid. But the
fact that so few people in design roles even attempt the work of exploratory
research is fundamentally the reason why so much of stuff is shit.

This isn't surprising though. Observational research is often frustrating,
confusing or difficult to interpret. But above all it takes a lot of time.
This is also the reason why, if you have another job like coding or marketing
or whatever then you will not have enough hours in the day to do effective
design.

------
sytelus
That Microwave UX is certainly bad. But the design of traditional microwaves
is also not defensible. If you had never seen microwave before and tried to
use it, you would be quite dumbfounded. Just pressing 1 key starts heating for
1 minute but how do you do 30 seconds? Just press the start key! That's quite
unintutive if you ask me. The reason people don't feel that way because most
people have learned how to use microwave from their parents or friends and
knowledge keeps getting passed on. On those lines, I know of no one who knows
how to use other "advanced" features that most microwaves have today like
thawing and food type specific heating.

~~~
wyufro
I think the key thing that makes my microwave easier to use is that it has a
big dial to choose the function. No clicking through menus, you just turn the
dial to the function you want, then the second dial to adjust the settings, or
press start to start and add time.

------
tobr
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.

~~~
Johnny555
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.

~~~
Thlom
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.

------
drblast
My ideal:

Ten number buttons, 0-9, but each also corresponds to a useful time.

    
    
      0 10 sec
      1 15 sec
      2 20 sec
      3 30 sec
      4 45 sec
      5 1 min
      ...
      Etc
    

Pressing any of those would auto start immediately with the corresponding
time. If you want an exact time like 34 seconds, hit the cook time button and
now the ten buttons act as digits. Then hit start.

Pressing any of these while the microwave is running would add that
corresponding amout of time.

I guess you'd also need a power level button and a clock set button. There,
all done.

~~~
wikibob
FYI this is precisely how commercial kitchen microwaves work. Next time you’re
at a fast food restaurant have a look and you’ll probably spot one.

[https://www.webstaurantstore.com/panasonic-
ne-17521-stainles...](https://www.webstaurantstore.com/panasonic-
ne-17521-stainless-steel-commercial-microwave-
oven-208-230-240v-1700w/609NE17521.html)

~~~
nnq
It works, and it's fast to use. But it's for commercial/professional usage,
where doing a set of standard common tasks with fewer number of actions is
best.

Having home/office-use microwaves work like this is basically akin to forcing
an average office user expecting something like Microsoft Word, to write
Markdown in Vim instead...

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Having home /office-use microwaves work like this is basically akin to
> forcing an average office user expecting something like Microsoft Word, to
> write Markdown in Vim instead..._

If that average office user is going to write something (or use a microwave)
more than a few times in their lives, it's worth to force them, because the
(very small) cost of additional learning is almost immediately offset by
gained efficiency.

Alas, what matters is short-time thinking, so UIs are designed for sellability
instead of helping people do their tasks correctly and efficiently.

~~~
nnq
You're ignoring the "cognitive load" and "attention requirements" of the
mythical "correct and efficient" interface. Sometimes I want to use 99.999% of
my brain for something else and I want to _mindlessly_ use that microwave with
the 0.0001% left. My desired thought process is "woo, woo, monkey-wuga, up-
turny-power, down-turny-time, woo, woop, warmy my banana woop, woop!" or
something simpler than that. And I also don't use it in a regular/predictable
pattern, so auto-pressing one button for one of the "regular" time intervals
might be useless for me since what I do is always irregular and sometimes
irrational ("hmm, I wanna see some fireworks to light up my mood, let's
microwave my colleague's USB stick labeled "bitcoins" for the lulz!").

The problem is not designing for sellability. Is not acknowledging that (1)
some people _don 't want to RTFM!_ and (2) other people are OK with RTFM but
want serious efficiency and correctness gains for it, "I pain, now you gimme
gain!".

So you figure out who your users are and design for your users.

Now, the absolute worst is the parent article's example, where someone managed
to _" design for no possible user"_ by both forcing people to RTFM _and_
providing _zero_ efficiency and correctness benefits in return. But designing
for the wrong user is also bad.

------
XorNot
I remember a Linuxconf AU presentation on building a better microwave - the
idea being to use a low-res automotive thermal sensor array to watch the
turntable, and be able to set it to "heat this to 100 degrees" and have it
actually do exactly that.

There were other things you got "for free" after that - like defrost-without-
cooking by ensuring all pixels remained below a target temp, but got above
some other temp.

Hope that guy builds it.

~~~
ivan_gammel
Typical UX design by an engineer as it is, with wrong assumptions about user
expectations. The users of microwaves do not want to heat something to 100
degrees. They either want warm food or they want to cook. Warming means, that
not only surface temperature measured by sensors has to be comfortable, but
the temperature of the whole meal, which depends on thermal conductivity and
penetration depth of microwaves for specific food and cannot be controlled by
a sensor array alone. People will just hit "start" again, if they feel it's
not ready.

For cooking people will either use recipe from a book provided with microwave
and thus they need just a selection of a program, or they will use more
advanced microwave with oven and will want to set temperature of the oven to
something like 200 degrees for 40 minutes. In this case sensor would be
useful, but it's already not a microwave story.

~~~
XorNot
Isn't this just you projecting the limitations of current technology on an
effort to improve it though?

Users of a microwave currently expect extremely poor temperature control, and
so don't even think about temperature because you get what you get. An
interface which lets me heat something to exactly "drinkable but hot" is a
revolutionary change in how I use the appliance though.

Same story with warming food: sure, you want it warm all the way through - if
you actually know the surface temperature though, then you can model that -
food that is cold inside is going to have different surface temperature decay
rates to food which is warm inside, and some modeling of the observed
thermodynamics means the appliance can know this.

So now we'd really be talking: "warm to safe temperature all the way through"
and we can give a probability / % complete read out of how close we think we
are to it. No more guessing, no more user interaction, also no burning
yourself because some parts went superheated.

~~~
ivan_gammel
Theoretically speaking, you are right, and at some level of technology it
might be possible to implement this. However, "drinkable but hot" setting is
quite far from "surface temperature at 100 degrees", right?

------
dmitriid
Can anyone tell me ,why modern microwaves all have the same useless interface
with a gazillion of buttons and nobs that no one in the world uses?

There's basically just one microwave I'm aware of that is actually proper
design, mentioned here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16090081](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16090081)

------
nateguchi
Most microwaves I've seen now seem to have the same (annoying)
interface/software where you have to first select the power (always 100%),
press start (it doesn't start), then select then time and press start
(actually starts then).

What ever happened to the microwaves where you could key in a time and just
press start?

------
dredmorbius
The point is not the microwave. It's UI.

Though perhaps a metastory might be "how not to write a UI essay".

(I actually rather liked this one. The off-the-rails discussion suggests
either I'm an exception or the point isn't being clearly communicated.)

------
homero
Only button I ever use is the add 30 seconds button. Keep pushing until
desired and it'll start on its own.

A big frustration is not being able to turn off the damn reminder tone though
so I have to wait around to clear it when done.

~~~
prawn
Same. Any microwave that can't start with one button push is a time waster
IMO. That and Cancel are the only buttons I typically use.

~~~
mavhc
Why bother with Cancel when you can just open the door?

I prefer 0-9 buttons, and lots of memories, mine has 3.

~~~
prawn
Cancel time-remaining if you quit cooking early. Leaving 12 seconds on the
clock won't fly with OCD types, surely?

If you wanted a minimalist microwave though, you could have it reset each time
the door is opened or after a minute or two of inactivity.

------
avian
I don't understand the "You are Not the User" mantra. In the past I've worked
in teams where we were actively using the product we were developing.
Dogfooding is a pretty established practice these days. For most purposes, I
was The User - the user finding bugs, performance problems, etc. - but not
user interface problems. For the UI I was Not The User. The Users for UI were
these hypothetical beings only UI experts could came up with.

~~~
ivan_gammel
Developers actively using their product always have expert bias and may not
represent the target audience of the product. Also, in most cases it's a wrong
assumption that you use something exactly in the same ways as others, so
decisions based on developer or designer own experience are usually not
optimal and may actually harm the users that would purchase the product or
service.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Part of the "expert bias" is that you want the tool let you do the job as
efficiently as possible, which is also something the users want. It's,
however, not what the marketing department wants.

~~~
ivan_gammel
There are two wrong assumptions you are making here.

First of all, "Doing the job as efficiently as possible" is not a user's
desire. Users always want concrete things and developer's opinion on what that
could be or how that will be achieved by a particular user is very often quite
far from reality.

Second, it's not a developer's job to create a tool that will help users to
solve some problem in the way he thinks it is right. It is not what developer
is paid for. His job is to work together with marketing department to deliver
a product that is always a compromise between the business and the user, a
product, that is just good enough, in a deal, which is good only then, when
noone is happy with it, but everyone can accept it.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _a product, that is just good enough, in a deal, which is good only then,
> when noone is happy with it, but everyone can accept it._

I refuse to accept that is _right_ , even though it is what seems to be
happening everywhere. That's probably the root of my opinion. I'm a believer
in the concept of making money through providing value to the customer.

------
exikyut
I don't like that this doesn't provide any sort of suggestion for how to
design a microwave oven UI, nor a video of the demonstrated model in action.

~~~
roryisok
The best microwave UI has just two dials. Temperature and time. For years my
microwave experience involved mostly just twisting the latter and walking
away. I've gone out of my way to find microwaves with this control set.
Unfortunately the most recent one I bought has buttons and settings, and I
hate it. I want the dials back.

------
sebazzz
I have a microwave from the Etna brand that has a big flaw in the UI. I
believe the software is reused in many microwaves because the cheap ass
microwave from the Lidl my parents have has the same interface.

The flaw: In the first step you need to select the amount of heating. Not in
absolute numbers but in the percentage of total power (100, 80, 50, etc). So
every time you need to calculate how much power each percentage represents.

------
Svenstaro
But how do you actually use the shown microwave then?

~~~
tenryuu
The instruction manual is 44 pages long
[https://www.fisherpaykel.com/download/user-
guide/Kitchen/Coo...](https://www.fisherpaykel.com/download/user-
guide/Kitchen/Cook/Microwave%20Ovens/590262d-nz-au-gb-ie-microwave-om36ndxb-
guide.pdf)

~~~
rootlocus
Took me 10s to find page 18 which has everything needed to use it as a
microwave.

Sometimes I think users are getting too spoiled and simply refuse to RTFM.

Not to mention the article complains about the UI for an oven, confuses the
oven with a microwave and then gives advice for designing iphone apps.

~~~
kyberias
Do you really think that it's reasonable to require users to read user manual
in order to use a _microwave_?

~~~
rootlocus
It's a multipurpose oven, not a microwave.

------
Doxin
I'd give a kidney for a microwave with at most two dials and a button, and no
rotary encoders.

I'd give both kidneys if it could then also ping me on my phone when it's done
without involving external servers.

