The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

Everything seems to be done for looks rather than utility these days. Appliances have to 'look good' and 'fit' in the kitchen scheme. Knobs are apparently too 'protrudy'.

But you could put the knob back on, right? I mean, it slides off to make it easier to clean or replace, and you just need to slide it back on...?

These ideas aren't born in the actual product design teams, where "don't put touch control near things that get hot" or "no unprotected touch controls on surfaces where spilling can occur" are not concepts that need to be explained. The way this usually happens is that product management hands down the requirement from down top, either on their own or after contracting some expensive industrial design agency (i.e. a mixed team of engineering and art majors who never had to sell, service and especially provide tech support for, any of the products whose outside they designed) to help "refresh" their product line.

Then, when in a shocking twist of events it's absolutely miserable, the tests are slightly mangled to highlight the usability gains ("easier to wipe", "looks modern and integrates well in a modern kitchen") and ensure no one's yearly bonus is endangered.

Surprisingly, it works out really well despite competition because everyone's doing it pretty similarly.

If your next question is "but why on Earth is it done like that!?", well, there are many reasons for that. But the tl;dr is that making kitchen appliances with universal, "boring" features, which last for 20 years, would spell disaster for a lot of companies in a lot of industries, from home appliances to furniture, and for smaller, specialized suppliers in these fields. The market has fine-tuned itself for frequently replaceable junk that's just good enough to that someone can plausibly say "well ackshually" when I refer to it as junk. Anything better would inherently result in much longer growth cycles, which Western management and stakeholders are not capable of handling anymore, and would disrupt "fashionable" trends, which would further prolong growth cycles in both home appliances and connected industries (furniture, home decor, cooking vessels believe it or not, and so on). It would also make it difficult to outsource mass production to cheap factories with poor quality control processes, thus driving prices up even more than the better materials and design would warrant, but that's more of a second-order effect than a cause by now.

Sauce: I used to work on consumer products years ago -- not kitchen appliances specifically but I know people who did those, too. Attending meetings was a lesson in cognitive dissonance and doublespeak and it's one of the least rewarding tech jobs you can imagine.

Before I transferred to the University of Pittsburgh, I was pursuing a minor in graphic design. I could have taken one of the last darkroom photography courses offered at La Roche College, but chose to take a digital course since I had extensive experience in that area dating back to saving snaps on floppies at the Duquesne Multicultural Computer Academy in the City of Pittsburgh.

I agree with you WRT tactile interfaces, the only reason things like the iPhone work are a combination of text prediction and over-reliance on rare ingredients like rare earth minerals to make that super strong glass and super thin, long lasting batteries.

(China controls a lot of those mines now, because Obama was a weak leader who handed Africqa and SE Asia over to totalitatians.)

I hate how many things were taken digital rapidly, classic example being I read about Nordic countries ditching AM/FM radio.

It is cool and good to be able to buy a twenty dollar radio and set of rechargable double AAs, and then have access to news via folks like NPR + some classical or whatever to flood a room with noise when you need to go full cyberpunk at the library, but the library was closed due to COVID.

I can't tell if the generation after millenials are all what that hentai loving sci fi guy from boing boing warned us about: unable to use the command line or understand the value of general purpose computing, but on my end I'm about to go stand outside with a sign and a cup rather than waste energy and resources standing up a website, writing out a bunch of "creative nonfiction", and then having folks pretend that if they send me something like "Monero" (that might be secure in a technial sense, but is literally sold only in one physical location in my city.)

(A long time ago, I considered being a designer, but that's subjective, and it seems like the field is structured so they mostly invent ways to steal ideas from the technical folks who make it possible for them to have the serenity first to think up cute designs.)

So many designers forget that "low tech" designs were planned after years or generations of iteration and shouldn't be changed lightly -- that might be a load bearing lorus ipsum ;)

(For context, the reason you're getting this type of reply is that around 2010 I offered to work for a major FFRDC codeing up custom forensics tools that would be more usable so they wouldn't need to pay millions for training and licenses, but I never even got a reply to my email despite being referred to that person by someone who founded an entire conference on my area of research.

Then again, we were also discussing whether I should join the FBI at the time.

(My take was they hadn't figured out how to navigate the conflict of interest between the counter intelligence mission and the criminal division, just like the NSA hadn't figured out how to navigate offense and defense or the secret service never learned to navigate the dual mission of offense and defense)

Later on, at Defcon an SS agent (using THAT acronym on purpose) told me if you want to know what it's like to be in the secret service, go stand in a suit on your front lawn in 80% humiudity for twelve hours, but to be fair I didn't check if I could apply and ONLY focus on things like counterfeiting, since I've made it clear for over a decade I won't kill the president, but I'll absolutely pull out my phone and arch my eyebrows at the corpse as I take a photo if someone else does.

This poster paid 150 dollars on a nonprofit salary to go see Obama gaslight him on encryption after.

This is like the fall of the USSR.

Post better.

Be Better.

TL;DR: Great article, thanks for sharing Marban. I agree that low tech interfaces are cool and good.

I'd rather have some physical knob that I can use to turn something off, even if I have to bust out the pliers. Good luck shutting off some touch control that's on the fritz.

The stove at my parents place has some touch control to activate another heating ring(?). Not only is that hard to activate with wet or greasy fingers, but after a couple of years of use it keeps turning itself off now. Thank god that thing fails "closed" and does not (yet?) spontaneously activate effectively doubling the heating power.