I’m not a professional chef, but I do know my way around the kitchen and its machines. The dishwasher, the fridge, the freezer, the stove and the oven all works as expected in many homes. Could you start the dishwasher, my friends might say, but they never say – heat this in the microwave oven. Probably it’s because they are programmable these days, and have plenty of buttons with arbitrary non-standard, non-conventional icons and no explanatory text to help. Fortunately there is a trend among microwave oven manufacturers to add a panic-button at the lower left of the control panel. It’s the button that starts the microwave oven at max effect and runs for 30 seconds.
But I wonder why that is. All other kitchen machines could be operated fairly well if you give it a little time, but the microwave just doesn’t. There can’t be different designers, but maybe more options where microwave oven UI designers had to invent new symbols for new features and add a note in the manual?
Micah Wittman has even made an effort to start a “Microwave Oven UI Standard Project” to overcome this problem. I’d be happy to join if it is still running. So far this is his suggestion:
Still one wonders, why do Microwave UI fail?
Answer
One UI is analogic, the other (the failing one) is digital, that is, the appliance is a microwave-computer mongrel.
Alan Cooper, in his book "The inmates are running the asylum", teaches us that when you mix a computer with anything else, you always get a computer no matter what the anything else was.
Thus, mixing an oven with a computer, the outcome is a computer.
If you don't happen to have the Inmates book, you can read the chapter online opening the Amazon link above and following the Look inside the book link. After scrolling a lot the chapter is available, it's a highly recommended reading, somehow humorous, enlightening.
Then, back to the reasoning that tends to answer the question, IMO there are two main issues:
The first issue is that digital controls are less intuitive than analog controls. For example when you operate your mother's microwave, even for the first time, you know that turning the knobs clockwise you set a higher power level or a longer time. This is not so with the digital UI.
The other issue, an important one, is feature creep. The designers (usually engineers) try to give us more, because it's rather inexpensive, so they can solve us problems that we don't actually have.
Consider a digital UI made up of two button pairs, one pair to control power and the other to control time.
The effect of the buttons appears in a display, changing the power level gauge or the displayed time.
The UI completes with a [start] and a [stop/reset] button.
A digital UI such as this would be perfectly usable, even for everybody's grandmother (given that the labels are printed in a suitable font size).
This UI is usable by anyone because such an UI is aligned with the user's mental model.
Because, ultimately, the usable UI is the one that's aligned with the user's mental model (this concept is explained in another book by Alan Cooper, "About Face").
And an anecdotal story. I work for a software development factory, in locations populated by hundreds of people in their twenties, mostly of the nerd type.
At lunch time they avoid those microwaves of the digital type. Some kids really loathe them. The analog ones have a greater audience.
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