wtf? how else are our Silicon Valley overlords supposed to check in on us, how else do they prematurely wear down our gadgets so we have to pay expensive money for their tech team to un-glue and then re-glue a battery inside, or to replace the gadget entirely (with various components still functional, but turned into e-waste due to their fundamental black-box proprietary nature?
Everything with a battery should have an off switch
261–270 of 613 posts
Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
Get Vernier calipers! The scale is easy to learn and use and measurements will be at least as precise as electronic calipers. With no batteries required the tool has much less of an environmental impact and you never need to worry about whether the calipers will work or not.
> Get Vernier calipers! The scale is easy to learn Yep. > and use Nope, not once you get old and tiny things are increasingly difficult to read with or without assistance.
Fair enough, usability will obviously be poor if the scale is difficult to read. My eyesight is terrible but at least it is still all myopia so I can compensate by putting the calipers extremely close to my eyes. Looks awkward and people call me Mr. Magoo but it works!
Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a book actually: The Design of Everyday Things
That's such a godawful book. In my view it epitomizes everything that is wrong with design today. And the worst part is that comments like these make it come off as the go-to reference to actually solving these problems. The reasons it's the worst design guidance out there is that it teaches: 1) that engineers should NOT be entrusted/involved with user design. 2) to conceptualize users as blissful idiots. 3) that obs…
This is such a weird take.
First off, Norman wasn't schooled at Apple, he basically created the HCI guidelines with Nielsen. Apple's design guidelines have long been based o years what Norman worked on so you have it the other way around.
In no part of the book does it say that engineers shouldn't be part of the design process. What the book advocates is that if engineers are entrusted with design, they should at least understand the users and design their products based on their needs and for the users. Anyone can be a designer, anyone can apply design thinking. No one is excluded.
And your comment about error codes, I would always say that an error message is more useful than an error code. You say that you would Google the code, wouldn't it be more useful if you could just read the actual error code and figure out what went wrong without habing to look it up first somewhere else?
What Norman advocates for is to help the users help themselves, show the state of the application and don't hide things behind error codes.
Again, silently failing is definitely not recommended by the book or anyone really so if thats been your experience with Apple, it's not because they follow the teachings of Norman's book, it's because they _don't_ follow it.
Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch
#264Counter-example: quartz wristwatches don't have off switches. And that's completely fine with me.
Counter-example, or exception that proves the rule?
Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch
#265If it beeps, blinks, moves, or makes noise, it needs a kill switch!
Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch
#266Counter-example: quartz wristwatches don't have off switches. And that's completely fine with me.
Interesting philosophical idea. I would argue that the position of the OP is really that things should have an off switch for when they're not being used. A watch is expected to be correct every time it's worn or looked at. It's never not being used.
Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Yeah I wish we could get those prices. You might enjoy [1] about a microcontroller that's ~3 cents, in quantity 10. Of course it's only one-time-programmable, and generally pretty basic. And that's a pre-supply-chain-crisis price - these days prices have risen to 9 cents [2]. Still very cheap though! [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYhAGnsnO7w [2] https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/Microcontroller-Units-MC...
Have you developed anything with that microcontroller, or tried to use that datasheet? An ATTiny10 or PIC16F is so much better documented, so much better supported, so much more featureful, and so much better in every way that the average small-volume product design house will never make up the 40-cent price difference per part. How many development hours or support hours can you bill before you're penny-wise and pou…
Even at a higher level than microcontrollers, i've worked with arm chips whose only documentation was random posts in chinese characters on sites i had never heard about before. They were cheap, but for the small volume devices i was working on dev time became significant.
Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch
#268> Oh, great, this debate again! I shall use this post as ammunition next time I am arguing with our stupid design team about why we need an off switch on the stupid product we are designing, because it is a giant pain to live with devices you cannot turn off. I increasingly subscribe to the thesis that many designers and design teams design primarily in an effort to impress other designers . They don't have to use th…
> I increasingly subscribe to the thesis that many designers and design teams design primarily in an effort to impress other designers. They don't have to use the things. They often don't even really care if the things work at all. They care that other designers - their artistic peers - are impressed.
To put things in perspective, this is how we get stuff like the Eiffel tower.
Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch
#269If he read the manual he'd know the off-switch for Switch controller is clicking the pair button one time.
Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regarding Kitchen Scale: I recently bought this [1]. It works with friction - you turn the nob once or twice and you're good to go for a couple weigh ins. It feels rather cheap - so let's see if it really lasts. I love the idea though. I wish we had more energy harvesting gadgets like this. [1]; https://caso-design.de/en/p/caso-kitchen-energy-design-kitch...
Since scales inherently involve putting weight on them it should be possible to use that weight to push down a plunger generating enough electricity to run for the weigh-in. A spring would then reset it for the next time.
If there's a plunger resisting the scale going down to harvest energy, that would prevent all the force from being on the load cell, giving you incorrect readings.