By Peter Cochrane, 11 August 2005 15:40
COMMENT Written from a Cambridge, UK coffee shop on free Wi-Fi
As an engineer I have a fairly sanguine attitude toward technology. All I ask is that it affords me some advantage in a straightforward and easy manner. But every now and again I run into a device and/or an interface that baffles and bemuses me, and yes, I have to shout for help.
'So what's new?' I hear you say. Well, I never expected to get my comeuppance at the dictate of a toaster. Worse still, two different toasters!
During my summer vacation I ran into the toasters from hell. The first had six controls and an alpha-numeric display. 'Hmm, this should be easy,' I thought. Wrong! Insert bread, press down lever, click, select level of browning - but now what? How about randomly pressing all the buttons? Ten minutes later my bread was still white and I transferred to the oven grill in disgust.
Whilst the grill was doing its job, I searched for the toaster handbook but no joy. Then it struck me, how about rebooting? Unplug, replug, insert bread, press down lever, click and - voila - hot toast.
A couple of days later a new destination saw a toaster with just one control - browning. That was it - no lever to click down. Hmm, this looked like a challenge! Out with the bread, insert into the slot - and nothing. Try two slices - and still nothing. Search for handbook, shout for help - still nothing.
Hey, I'm an engineer, I can almost walk on water. I'm not going to be beaten by a toaster!
About 15 minutes of experimentation later, I had mastered the toaster. Drop bread into the slot from precisely the right height, and it gently sinks to the bottom. Then without an audible click, on comes the power and - voila - toast is browned within minutes.
Now for some coffee! I don't believe it - a programmable coffee pot that looks as though it might be capable of cooking a chicken. After another random button-pressing episode, I resorted to rebooting. Unplug, replug and - voila - coffee is on the way. What next I wonder, the programmable tea cup?
Somewhere on this planet there is the devil's own design department, especially set up for and staffed by people whose sole purpose is to stop the rest of us getting hot toast! Unless, god forbid, we have GUI designers moving into the appliance market.
Whatever happened to the KIS (Keep It Simple) principle? Or is it just me that is losing it?
Comments
There are 12 comments. Join the discussion
1. Simon
It's just an extension of the grotesque web sites phenomenom - the "we can therefore we will" approach to applying new technology with no regard to whether "we should" !
A bit like when the Mac came out and suddenly people have 10 different fonts to choose from - and newsletters all around the world suddenly came out using every font in the system, "because they're there".
2. Antony Norris
I still find getting in to various clever packaging far harder than technology related issues. However brute force always wins through with the packaging, whereas electronic items don't respond well to a pair of scissors or being hit repeatedly.
3. Nick Cole
Complicated means big marketing and design budgets, complicated looks good and is intended to fool the consumer into thinking that they can't live without it. Complicated is a way for designers to say look how clever I am. Complicated and change is a means of marketing departments justifying their existence. Marketing is all about propaganda, and too many executives are not prepared to stop for a reality check.
If only corporates realised the profit lines that are wasted in futile and repetitive marketing exercises, with the consequent need to build up customer services to try and assuage consumer disappointment and anger!
4. Peter Baron
We are not dealing with malice here, nor even with incompetence: we are dealing with Art. The designers of these devices sincerely believe that they are building a better mouse trap. They are eliminating, for example, all that tedious lever pressing and the associated moving parts that go with it. They are aiming for what they would describe as "purity" of design.
A more common example of the same phenomenon is the mixer taps that have become the norm in washrooms, the ones where you lift the lever to turn on the water and move it from side to side to change the temperature. The first one of these I ever saw was a smoothly sculpted poem in gleaming chrome. There was nothing to indicate how to make water flow and the clue to the temperature function was a red dot on the left of the hub and a blue dot on the right. Did this mean "move the lever left to get hot" or did it mean "move the lever so that the red dot is at the front to get hot"? Either interpretation could be justified.
The device was a work of art, but the artist had not realised in his enthusiasm that I wouldn't understand the message straight away.
5. Paul Tanner
The guys at Redmond always said that Windows would power everything. Hopefully Peter's next culinary appliance will be powered by an OS requiring fewer re-boots.
6. Mark Lowe
Peter,
I think you should put your toaster design related questions to Don Norman, the author of 'The Design of Everyday Things' and 'Emotional Design'. Both well worth reading in the context of your rant. I'm sure he will be delighted to respond!
He has a Q&A page as part of his site that you may enjoy!:
http://www.jnd.org/askdon.html
Yours in sympathy,
Mark Lowe
; - )
7. Mike
Last month's Which? report failed to find any toasters that could brown both sides of the bread by the same amount.
Nobody seems to make a toaster with independent elements for the two sides, each controlled with a photo device for detecting "browning". There does of course need to be an over-riding smoke detector and a panic button for times when the technology fails. Plus a cour based lever to select browning level.
8. Bob Leschhorn
It's the triumph of martketing and bean counters over logic. In architectural terms, the triumph of "Venustas" over "Firmitas" and "Utilitas". Rest assured that the guy in the marketing dept. that dreamt up this Frankenstein toaster uses a simple but expensive "Dualit" in real life.
I despair when I read articles about waste bins that will read barcodes and make sure that we have the right amount of baked beans in our kitchen cupboard.
9. Ruprecht
Talkie Toaster (Red Dwarf) to become a reality??
Bagel anyone?......
To be fair Peter it's an age old man vs. toaster story. I'm the only one in my household can operate my faithfull Duallit. You know, big on off switch, lever operated pop-up and a bloody great clockwork dial!
;o)
10. Peter Cochrane
Thanks - I know Don really well - and how he would agree with me for sure!
11. Peter Cochrane
That Red Dwarf Toaster is one of my favourites of all time. Gradually, we sure are getting there...a positronic brain in a toaster!!
12. Mary Freeman
For three days over a long weekend I had no signal on my mobile 'phone. An eventual call to the now open help desk ... yep, you guessed it - turn it off and turn it back on again.
Reminds me of the joke about the three engineers travelling through a desert in a car when it broke down. One was a chemical engineer, another a mechanical engineer and the third was a computer engineer...