Best User Interface Award
October 29th 2005
This should get an award for the best user interface ever devised for a microwave. I mean, look at it: it’s a dial. It’s accurate, obvious, intuitive, usable in a single motion, looks like a clock (our standard mental model of time), and it’s really friggin’ simple.
Why in God’s name did they ever switch to numbers? Someone in the home appliance industry please read this and bring the dial back to the microwaves of the world. People will think it’s genius and they’ll buy your microwaves, I promise.
It really is better, in case you’re skeptical. It is so easy just to turn the dial, there’s nothing to think about. Want to add more time? Just turn the dial more. It makes so much sense it scares me sometimes.
I agree, but being old enough to have used microwaves with dials, they were great and easy, but not very accurate. Microwaves are so picky with certan foods that you know that you need to run it a 50% power for 12 seconds to soften butter without melting it, etc… and the dial was full power with 30 seconds pretty much being your range of accuracy. So… I agree the dial should return, just have two, a power dial, and a time dial (only more accurate), so a dial with a digital display would be cool.
Mmmm.. dial with digital display, I like that. And a power dial too. Gracefully added extra required complexity.
So the microwave does not need 15 buttons, but actually only two dials. Wonderful.
It just so happens that we threw away our broken microwave that had a dial. It wasn’t very old. It just developed a problem where it wouldn’t heat things.
At any rate, they do make microwaves with dials still. You just have to hunt for them.
Incidentally, it was replaced with a digital pad microwave.
Let’s go crazy and have a one button microwave. Taggle-button of course, start and stop.
Hehe, but it’s so true, they pulled analog dials from all the places they were needed—and now with retro electronics, dials where buttons here needed.
Not sure one button would be enough to do the task there Levi
The iPod is a great example of using a dial-like interface where it’s needed. My iRiver’s 4-way buttons just don’t compare in speed or usefulness… but I still like the iRiver better.
Take a look at http://www.keywheel.com
There is a sample of dial control
for microwaves and other stuffs,
including text input
Our Microwave has exactly what you want, and its new. It has two dials, power and time. But it sucks, its not accurate because you cant get it to do exactly 20 seconds, its a just a guess.
Best interface for a microwave I have seen is a single button/dial. The dial when turned adds more time, an LCD displays how much. It even scales the time, 1 sec, 2 sec, ...10 sec, 20 sec, 1 min, 2 min, ... 10 min etc. Once you start turing it the dial lights up yellow, pressing it makes it work and goes green. If you open the door it goes yellow again (as it has more time left) and when its done it flashes yellow to let you know something is inside and done. Also it has a nice feature where when its done the ping is repeated after 30 seconds just in case you forgot and missed it…
Basically it works for both hard of hearing and the sighted…
Tristan! Blame Jarys for this (because it was his Facebook add that spawned this madness): Facebooking leads to profile reading- leads to web-browsing- leads to interesting article browsing- leads to comments…
So the Microwave’s digital pad… Just thought you’d like to know it was invented by the current President of USC, Dr. Steven Sample. (I won’t admit that he is not alum… in fact, he went to the cal extension campus known as westwoood high…) Fact for the day.
Hope all is well!
Greatly complexified an otherwise perfect interface… sounds like a U$C type of guy!
The only problem I see is: “How long is ‘A’”?
Well, 15 seconds obviously
I totally agree.
I think this design was changed and the dial removed so as not to look like the old dial tvs. In those we don’t need a dial. Remotes work great.
I HATE micros with 50 buttons and mine had a keypad that to have to mash to get to work.
I dial would work great.