The oven vs the microwave
Either our oven is wrong or our microwave is wrong. They can’t both be right. Why can’t they just get along?
Pushing their identical-looking buttons produces exactly opposite results.
We moved last year into a new (to us) home. The kitchen had been remodeled a couple of years earlier with matching stainless steel Frigidaire appliances: refrigerator, dishwasher, microwave and oven/stove.
You can tell that all four appliances were designed to be a family. The visual design of their controls is identical, based on a single industrial design language.
For example, these are from the microwave.
From the oven/stove.
And from the dishwasher.
There’s no mistaking this is a family of products. Words inside identically-sized circles. White line or gray field against a dark background. Same typography. From little details like these, you can gain a lot of insight into how well a company is working internally. Typically, each of the industrial design teams for major appliances work as separate units. The dishwasher team designs dishwashers. The microwave team designs microwaves. People don’t often cross teams because they develop expertise in a single area.
So when you see that all the different appliances have the same branded feel, that means that somehow they have coordinated internally to work together from the same visual platform. Their designs all begin from one overarching vision that defines their brand, and probably documented in a single set of design guidelines. This is not an easy feat, requiring incredible internal intertia to evolve business processes that have possibly been entrenched for many years.
Sadly, they stopped there. They didn’t design the different appliances to behave in the same way, so that when you interact with the microwave, it should behave the same as when you interact with the oven/stove. They didn’t create a set of interaction design guidelines. My microwave and oven/stove are a perfect example.
I can push the exact same sequence on the microwave and oven/stove and get opposite results. I can stand in the exact same spot, never move my feet, and do the same thing twice and get different results.
In specific, I’m complaining about the most basic function, the timer.
I use the timer a lot. Dump the Barilla in the boiling water, set the timer. Put the squash in the oven, set the timer. Put the popcorn in the microwave, set the timer.
On the oven/stove, I push TIMER, set the time and wait. After a hesitation, the timer begins to count down. On the microwave, I push TIMER, set the time, and then push TIMER again to confirm the time and start the timer.
This difference doesn’t sound too bad, except on the oven/stove, if you push TIMER while it’s counting down, the timer toggles to shut off.
To recap:
- On the microwave, the sequence {TIMER, set time, TIMER} starts the timer.
- On the oven/stove, the sequence {TIMER, set time, TIMER} stops the timer.
This really confused me when we first moved in because I first learned to set the timer on the microwave. Then when I used the timer on the oven/stove using the same logic, it wouldn’t work. Eventually I settled on using only the oven/stove timer to make life easier.
There is a subtle logic why these are different. On the microwave, you have to press TIMER to activate the timer because you are punching in numbers for your time. The microwave doesn’t know when you’re done pressing numbers, so you have to tell it you’re done by pressing TIMER. That’s the difference between getting a time of 1:20 and 12:00.
On the oven, you only push UP and DOWN to add or subtract minutes at a time. When you stop pressing UP or DOWN, the oven/stove can safely assume you’re done and start the timer on its own. However, pushing TIMER again will turn the timer off, creating the above confusion.
This is a simple example of the challenges facing interaction designers. How do you create consistency of behavior when the controls are different? It’s a subtle art, but thinking it through makes the difference between annoying and delightful.