> IMO there is a very annoying trend in household appliances towards worse and worse UI.
I feel like you could drop "in household appliances" from that statement and still be telling the truth. I'd be willing to bet that anyone reading this could think of examples in software where those making product decisions seem to be operating off of these principles:
* Refine relentlessly (vs stop improving what doesn't need improvement)
* Be heavily state-dependent as a way to minimize presentation of options. But don't call attention to state.
* Minimize any affordances. Rely on implicit interaction patterns you assume the user has already learned.
* Minimize everything. Remove options. Hide what you can't remove. The less the software does, the less the user has to think, right?
> Be heavily state-dependent as a way to minimize presentation of options. But don't call attention to state.
This is one of my least favorite design patterns, and I keep seeing more of it. It feels like half the products I use have bizarre state rules with no documentation. Key features disappear as I scroll, or are only available from certain (unrelated) screens, or are under one of six distinct "options" menus in different locations.
Since I spend a large part of my life dealing with this, I memorize the tricks and find it merely annoying. But I still regularly discover features in products I don't use often, buried behind some utterly incoherent state dependency.
With three things that can be switched on or off there are 7 state permutations (plus all off)
> It's awful.
The alternative being three separate toggle switches.
While this would be easier to scan and make a decision if you wanted granular decisions every time you cooked something, 90% of the time the oven will be set to the same setting; ALL ON. I think that having a single switch, rather than three is a more efficient UI for this.
Unless you know how to cook. Then the analog controls are a godsend because they let you control the rate at which heat is applied to your food to a great degree. The setting you might use to boil water is not the same one you'd use to cook an egg. Ditto for sautee versus cooking a steak.
The problem is that the people designing UIs for products don't actually know how to use the products. They don't have any concept of how a user uses the UI. So they just assume that less is better without stopping to consider why someone would want to control the temperature of their stove.
My oven has a clock that resets to 00:00 whenever there is even the briefest power fluctuation and the oven will not function unless the clock is adjusted with tiny buttons. The stove will work, though.
i have a new blue star range. the oven and burners each have a single knob, one switch for the convection fan, one switch for the light. there are no electronics visible on the unit. no clock, timer, buttons, nothing. the entire thing is made out of iron and steel.
you have to go out of your way to buy this kind of stuff, and it's more expensive, but it's still out there. the low end of the appliance market competes on features and price ("race to the bottom") while the mid and high end compete on component and build quality and reliability.
I feel like you could drop "in household appliances" from that statement and still be telling the truth. I'd be willing to bet that anyone reading this could think of examples in software where those making product decisions seem to be operating off of these principles:
* Refine relentlessly (vs stop improving what doesn't need improvement)
* Be heavily state-dependent as a way to minimize presentation of options. But don't call attention to state.
* Minimize any affordances. Rely on implicit interaction patterns you assume the user has already learned.
* Minimize everything. Remove options. Hide what you can't remove. The less the software does, the less the user has to think, right?