

The "A Bit More" Button - mgunes
http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2010/07/interaction-design-classics-3-the-a-bit-more-button-on-the-breville-professional-800-collection-4sli.html

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hapless
I'm sure the "A Bit More" button does what every other crap toaster does when
you depress the lever: takes your toast from "cool" to "warm," or from "warm"
to "blasted in nuclear hellfire."

I don't know what happened, but it's very difficult to find a decent toaster
any more. Buy a $10 Great Value or a $100 Kitchenaid, it's all the same
useless trash. The only differences are cute design touches -- the guts are
all terrible. The only brand left seems to be Hobart, and those suckers are
$300. As a result, I buy the same lousy toaster every three months when I get
tired of my toast being uneven, untoasted, or charred. The new toaster starts
out with mediocre performance and invariably slides downhill from there.

I'd happily do without the "A Bit More" button, brushed metal accents,
sculpted cover, and every other elaborate design measure if I could just _get
some decent toast._

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shalmanese
This kind of design (task oriented vs process oriented) is appealing but
incredibly hard to get right. The problem is that any time the user goes "off
the rails", the experience can become incredibly frustrating since you start
fighting what the device thinks you should be doing.

For most items we interact with in the world, while it turns out the majority
of interactions we do with them might fall into neat little buckets, the
inherent human messiness means that we all end up needing to bounce off the
rails at some point and what once was wonderful now becomes a nightmare.

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Qz
What I love about these things is that we tend to go 'ooh look at what that
clever designer did!' when the reality is that anyone who has ever used a
toaster has invented the "A Bit More" Button and then stuck it on the shelf
with all the other minor improvements we come up with and then never act on.

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krolley
Yes, the toaster (and the designers involved) are definitely worthy of praise.
I'm sure all of us have used our toasters to toast 'a bit more' which makes
the feature all the more striking. It seems so obvious, but only in
retrospect, and that is a hallmark of great design.

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Qz
Maybe it seems obvious in retrospect to you, but I was dealing with the same
need for an A Bit More button with the toaster at my old place, so there's
nothing retrospective about it for me.

Now if only they can figure out a way to add the "A Bit Less" Button.

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mey
<http://www.breville.com.au/products_detail.asp?prod=448>

Then they turned around and trade marked their button....

Edit: Also that button appears to add $20 to the total.

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extension
Reminds me of an automatic door I once saw, with a sign over the button that
said "activate switch to operate"... or "operate switch to activate", I can't
quite remember.

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parallax7d
"A Bit More" is a little too wordy, unless of course there was a "More" button
as well, to put it in context.

This would also open the possibility for the "Just a Tiny Eency Weencie Bit
More" and "A Heck of a Lot More, Son" buttons.

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mgunes
That's a strictly technical way of looking at it.

The thing that speaks to people in this is the human-like uncertainty of the
statement "a bit more". It's almost certainly not the case that the machine
has a concept of "a bit", or introduces randomness for the interval to be
human-like; technically it's simply heating the bread for a fixed amount of
time. The trick is in observing the usage patterns of people using toasters
(wanting their bread toasted "a bit more" is a common goal), and naming the
feature in a way that corresponds to the goal very directly, and creates
emotional engagement.

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calcnerd256
sounds too British for my tastes; I'd prefer "a little more"

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kalmar
It has a crumpet button. I don't think you're in their target market.

