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The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

uxdesign.cc

161–170 of 410 posts

Re: The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

#161

All the laser printers I have used have a low-tech user interface, with an LCD screen and a bunch of buttons. The problem is that the buttons that the user can press (the "active" buttons) are dependent on context. Imho it would be much better if laser printers had a smartphone-style interface (touchscreen). Same for office phones (which have a plethora of buttons e.g. for conference calls that are not useful in many…

Maybe that's the distinction - if you are making a product that needs to do exactly one thing (or category of things), it should not have a touchscreen, it should have a button and a dial (eg toaster, oven, hob, clock). If you cannot map all common uses of the product to a single button press and instead rely on context, a touchscreen might be the better option

Re: The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ask someone to change the clock on their oven vs on their phone. Most could do it on the phone but not the oven. I'd argue that's not an example of touch screens being better than buttons but rather the button interface in question being poorly laid out, and as for the phone, it's not the lack of physical buttons but rather the on-screen guidance that makes life easier. My grandparents' cooker is a button-free wond…

For the coffee machine, it would be shitty UI if every function had a physical button. You don’t need a dedicated button to run the descale cycle since you do it twice a year, but it’s also a bit crap to have to pull out a manual to work out which order of buttons to press and for how long and what all the blinking lights mean. A touch screen executes this perfectly. It doesn’t have to blink led 2 to tell you of an e…

Yeah a hybrid setup can work well although the decision is not necessarily between lights and a touch screen - a non-touch display with navigation buttons is also perfectly reasonable.

Re: The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

#163
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like these stoves could use an "oh shit" / "Big Red Button" that's easily accessible when this happens.

Is there not the switch on the mains where you are? In the UK we have a quick-off* toggle switch for electric ovens. Usually near the oven but could be elsewhere in a bigger kitchen That'd be my go-to panic resolve anyway * For folks unfamiliar by this I mean it takes almost zero effort to turn the switch off, but takes a little bit of force to switch back on

I’ve never seen this here in the US. Sounds like a good idea!

Re: The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

#164
post #125
post #111

Is "low tech" really cheaper? Curious, because I thought the reason nobody did buttons anymore was that printing a pattern on a touch capacitive surface was dirty cheap. Whereas I assume tactile buttons require a lot work when mounting/building the product. Am I wrong? I guess an 8 digit display is still cheaper than a touch screen :)

Cheaper, how? Are we looking only at production cost, or total lifetime? How much energy does a button use over its lifetime, vs a checkbox on a LED screen?

In this context, I'd imagine cheaper from an R&D + Manufacturing side. But equally this probably is the case - if adding a screen requires adding a much more powerful microcontroller to drive it, it probably adds a fair bit of cost

Re: The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

#166
post #119
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I get that it's better for the producers if everyone agrees to make throwaway appliances that need to be replaced every couple years, but how do they prevent someone from entering the market and selling high quality equipment that lasts? They would have fewer repeat sales, but more of the market share presumably.

It's a combination of factors but the gist of it is that they're not preventing anyone from doing it -- nobody wants to do it because they can't justify it.

Designing and selling long-lived consumer products is a tremendous effort in terms of regulatory activity and logistics. And if you're just entering the market, you're entering a market where established players have been sitting on standardizing committees, lobbying regulatory bodies, and have had special deals with manufacturers, transporters, TV channels and shopping malls since Jimmy Carter was in the White House, and have been able to leverage them when dealing with online shops since the days of the dotcom boom.

Furthermore, getting that "more of the market share" requires actual first sales to happen in the first place. Selling fewer, better, and inherently more expensive products by claiming that yours are really good and last a long time is not very straightforward at all: it's not like everyone else is openly advertising that they're selling cheap junk that's worse than their 1980s versions in every way except maybe power consumption (because we can make better power supplies now). If you're selling kitchen stoves that last for twenty years, it's gonna be at least seven or eight years before anyone really believes you.

So all this requires tremendous initial investment in a pretty hostile environment. Consumer markets are already perceived as low-yield and under tremendous price pressure. But, worse, some segments -- household appliances in particular -- also suffer from a "marketshare = dead market" problem: if you sold someone a washing machine that lasts fifteen years, you're not going to sell them another one for fifteen years. So if you're selling things that last for fifteen years, you gotta convince the folks whose money you're depending on that you can keep selling things at a reasonable pace for fifteen years from now, and you won't really know if you've succeeded at your basic value proposition ("we make better things that last longer") for at least seven or eight years into it.

That's not just pretty risky, it's on a timeframe that's about an order of magnitude higher than companies/investment funds/people willing to throw that kind of money into things that run on electricity are able to work with.

That's not to say no one has been entering these markets. They have, but they've usually done it through other value propositions -- stuff that's even cheaper, stuff that's ethically sourced and so on. New premium brands do pop up but they either target prosumer/super premium markets (slang for "super rich people who want to brag or impress"), where the rules are slightly different, or go straight for the professional market first, where the rules of the game are very much different, and use whatever reputation they can make there to start selling home appliances too.

Re: The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

#167

To anyone designing low-tech user interfaces: I'm all for something simple but please, oh please, use something with a better feedback than the membrane "keyboard" shown in the article. Membrane keys are the absolute shittiest piece of shit ever produced. I use three everyday: my safe has one. My projector's remote control and my LED strip light (I use a LED strip to give a "home cinema" feel to the room) has one. Th…

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Re: The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

#168
post #141

The most important lesson I learned in engineering school: define the problem then look for a solution. Most people have a solution in mind before they even look at the problem, and that solution is usually "build an app", or "slap a screen on it". With bureaucracy, it's "put the form on the internet". There are a few low tech devices I much prefer: - A kitchen timer vs. my phone. I don't need to unlock the phone and…

>Most people have a solution in mind before they even look at the problem, and that solution is usually

"put it on the blockchain"

But to your point, you're absolutely right. If you want to actually deliver valuable solutions, you need to have a good understanding of what unmet need you're trying to address. Otherwise you end up with a bad problem-solution match, and you waste everyone's time. Too often, technically minded people put too much emphasis on what's novel instead of what's valuable.

Re: The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

#169
post #22
post #5

Modern cars seem to be moving towards all controls on a touch screen somewhere. I suppose this allows for more frequent updates, but in my experience it just leads to more bugs and more painful factory updates. Not to mention using a touchscreen to adjust the temperature while driving is incredibly dangerous compared to a dial you can feel for without taking your eyes off the road.

The touch screens are the only thing keeping me on dino juice cars. I want to go electric, but they all have these awful touchscreens! I don’t want to navigate a menu to change the temperature or turn on a seat warmer. I’m just not buying an EV until there’s one that doesn’t rely on a giant touch screen for everything or I can’t buy an ICE vehicle anymore.

I think that's true only as long as the only electric cars you have driven are Teslas. The BMW i3 has pretty much resisted this tendency. Ok, it's already a pretty old design at this point and getting phased out, but it has lots of physical buttons (even for the seat warmer!). And I don't think electric cars that are variants of existing petrol cars (which are more and more common) will eliminate the physical controls just because they put an electric engine into the car. Or, otherwise said: if you buy an electric car from a tech company (or somebody trying too hard to emulate them), you get a touchscreen. If you buy an electric car from a car company, you get physical controls...

Re: The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

#170
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some korean brand was moving to physical buttons again, but I can't find which.

I guess it was Mazda, so Japanese instead of Korean https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-pur... Though I don't know if they followed through

As far as I know they're sticking to it.
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