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Nobody needs a faster dishwasher – solve real user needs

louison.substack.com

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Re: Nobody needs a faster dishwasher – solve real user needs

#421

Post by kbelder »

raverbashing wrote: post #307
RangerScience wrote: post #156

> In the same way, people don’t buy a dishwasher, they buy clean dishes before their next meal. Ironically, this tells me some... awkward things about how the author relates to their kitchen. I cook - a lot. I host parties - usually dinner parties - and I use cheap Ikea plates & etc instead of disposable anythings. And like (most?) millenials-ish, the kitchen is where we tend to hang out. My dishwasher isn't so that…

Taking one-off examples and extrapolating the average problem is also a tendency of some engineers For most people, most of the time, running for 3h is fine And unless your dishes are really dirty, the shorter and more energy efficient programs run fine and are done in 1h or less

Like cars; you don't buy based on daily needs, you buy based on exceptional needs. If you're ever going to need a car to haul six people, you're going to get a car that holds six people. If you're ever going to need a dishwasher to wash dishes quickly, you're going to buy a fast dishwasher.

It doesn't matter that it's only needed once every two weeks.

Re: Nobody needs a faster dishwasher – solve real user needs

#422

Post by CamperBob2 »

causi wrote: post #403
CamperBob2 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

-------------------- You can cook on your stove when it’s in Sabbath Mode, but additional features and functionality are disabled. Here are some common features and functions of stoves or cooktops with Sabbath Mode: Cooktop burners can still be operated. Sounds such as tones or chimes are disabled. Displays will not indicate temperature changes. Timers are disabled. Cooktop Lockout, a feature that prevents unintended…

Look up the wire around Manhattan island if you want the peak of that nonsense.

Yeah, I've heard of the wire thing. But that's literally confined to a small area of New York, three thousand miles away. I don't expect them to share my culture or my values. But the notion that I might have to add "Sabbath Mode" to a piece of equipment I design just struck me as hilarious, horrifying, and depressing in equal measures.

I mean, I can just picture myself sitting in a cubicle somewhere at the Whirlpool Corporation. This comes up on my Jira. My jaw hits the floor. I pick up the phone, and hopefully I pause before dialing: what I do in the next 30 seconds determines whether or not I will still have a job tomorrow. I honestly don't know what I'd do, and that bugs me.

Re: Nobody needs a faster dishwasher – solve real user needs

#423

Post by nemo44x »

iso1631 wrote: post #316
Tor3 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an American thing. Not world-wide. As others have said, outside America the common way is to connect to cold water and use internal heating only.

I wonder if it's because of the inability to draw significant power from an average American power outlet. See also the lack of kettles.

You can install a 240v outlet. Many people have them for certain appliances. but you wouldn't need that to heat water, silly.

European dishwashers have to use cold water because of the way they dry the dishes. In America hot air is used to dry the dishes so we can hook up to hot water. In Europe you can't do that because of the Kyoto agreement. So you use condensation to dry your dishes by piping in cold water.

There's not really much difference between them today. Because Europeans have very small homes by American standards (especially British people that live in sad, tiny, little things) the need for quiet dishwashers was also needed which means lower power. Also power costs more in Europe so more energy efficient appliances were needed so you didn't have food grinders, etc.

But today it's almost all the same. But the Kyoto agreement forces Europeans to hook up to cold water and heat internally and not use a fan to dry but rather cold water.

Re: Nobody needs a faster dishwasher – solve real user needs

#424

Post by r00fus »

masukomi wrote: post #382
saiya-jin wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've spent 1 summer (in Maine) manning such a dishwasher (Hobart, can't forget that name even after 20 years). Efficiency monster, but you gotta be careful around it. Everything spot clean and steaming hot, it was actually much work around it since plates and cutlery were coming in very fast, and I had to also shelve the results to free up space for trays... a proper sweat shop

and this specifically disproves the core premise & title of the article. SOME people DO need a faster dishwasher. Sometimes the next meal is always "now". Along the same lines restaurants are happy to sacrifice energy efficiency for speed, and they've already got better cleanliness than consumer machines because of those efficiency sacrifices. This also shows why we need diversity in hiring. Only someone who'd never…

This is some person's substack, not a professional news article.

Re: Nobody needs a faster dishwasher – solve real user needs

#425

Post by elabajaba »

bawolff wrote: post #212
ctroein89 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ironically, this tells me some... awkward things about how the author relates to their kitchen. It also says a lot about how the author relates to restaurants, where a faster dishwasher is a selling point. Faster is separately important from throughput, because if it the takes 3 hours to run the dish washer, that’s a lot of plates that need to be washed and stacked all at once for a restaurant, and a lot of dishwas…

Tbf, commercial dishwashers are totally different type of device than home dishwashers.

Even within the commercial dishwasher space, there's some pretty different versions. I worked at a hotel where we had normal smallish cube dishwashers [1] for some of the smaller restaurants, but they also had an ~8foot long conveyor belt dishwasher for one of the busier restaurants, and for the banquet section they had a ~20+ foot conveyor belt dishwasher[2].

They also had multiple dishwasher stations just to deal with pots and pans that were similar to 1, but way bigger. I once fit a huge stainless steel butchers sink in one (iirc it was like 6.5x4ft? They could fit a whole pig, or half a cow in it)

1: Basically an old version of https://www.hobart.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Dishwasher-...

2: Similar to https://sc01.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1DzUTn0zJ8KJjSspk762F7VXav/231... They needed it because they'd have 1000+ people/night for banquets (sometimes even 1000+ people in a single banquet)

Re: Nobody needs a faster dishwasher – solve real user needs

#427

Post by alliao »

halfnormalform wrote: post #418
alliao wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

duralex picardie tumblers are indestructible and cheap, I have a drawer full of them and yet kids can use a dozen plus a day... moving away from bowls to plates really help with cramming too but I'm Asian and have to say it ain't easy to let bowls go

They're indestructible--until they explode into hundreds of glass pieces when you stack a very hot one from the dishwasher on a room-temp one on the shelf.

the 250ml one does this, the 220ml one perhaps due to it's smaller size feels even more indestructible! At least I've yet to broken one... needless to say it's always better to serve 220ml of sugary content than 250ml to the little ones too!

Re: Nobody needs a faster dishwasher – solve real user needs

#428

Post by hinkley »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #330
hinkley wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once upon a time I earned some major brownie points with a husband and wife by disassembling their child's electronic toy, inserting a piece of kleenex between the speaker and the grill, and reassembling it, now 30dB quieter. Initially they suggested I just cut the wire but I figured I could do something a little easier to reverse.

When I was little we just put some scotch over the speaker, no disassembly required!

Scotch tape gets gross after a year. But then I don’t recall how long the toy lasted so maybe I was showing off my pocket knife.

Re: Nobody needs a faster dishwasher – solve real user needs

#429

Post by JohnFen »

RangerScience wrote: post #156

> In the same way, people don’t buy a dishwasher, they buy clean dishes before their next meal. Ironically, this tells me some... awkward things about how the author relates to their kitchen. I cook - a lot. I host parties - usually dinner parties - and I use cheap Ikea plates & etc instead of disposable anythings. And like (most?) millenials-ish, the kitchen is where we tend to hang out. My dishwasher isn't so that…

> this tells me some... awkward things about how the author relates to their kitchen.

Awkward? What awkward things does it tell you?

I think that all it tells you is that you are different people. It also invalidates his assertion that "nobody need..." -- which is hyperbole anyhow. Any time someone says "everybody" or "nobody" or other universal qualifiers, the statement is guaranteed to be technically incorrect.

You are precisely the sort of person who could use a fast dishwasher, after all.

Re: Nobody needs a faster dishwasher – solve real user needs

#430

Post by louison11 »

johnny_canuck wrote: post #321
niccl wrote: post #225

These comments seem to make a gloriously meta confirmation of the article's point. The article is saying that engineers (among others) have been known to optimise for the wrong thing. He uses a possibly inappropriate example of faster dishwashers. Then many of the commenters (quite likely engineers) optimise their comments on the thing they know about -- desirability or otherwise of faster dishwashers -- rather than…

I was surprised to pop into the comments and read the same in the first few top posts. Now I want a follow-up article from the author, haha.

Author here. I don’t know if I’ll write a follow up but the comments prove my point for sure. I sense a lot of the naysayers here were triggered by the argument, which probably shows that I hit the right spot.

Funny thing is none of what I’m sharing is novel, it’s based on the jobs-to-be-done framework, coined by a Harvard professor and used by some of the world’s most successful and innovative companies. It simply works. Beyond this framework, there is overall the idea that products should be problem-focused (customer research THEN development) as opposed to solution-focused (development THEN hoping it solves a real problem). For some reason, a lot of people get attached to their idea, their solution, and their ego prevents them from asking the hard questions (is this really useful to people?). Maybe I’ll write a follow up on the dynamics of denial involved in that. :-)

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