Fancy cooktops… or something
Have you seen those fancy cooktops with touch controls? Here’s what they look like:
My parents recently moved, and in their new house the kitchen stove has one of these. They look nice and everything, but try using them. It’s hell! See those tiny icons along the bottom? You touch them to increase or decrease the heat. You typically get some kind of audio feedback when interacting with them. The problem is that on many of these cooktops, to set the heat to maximum, you need to touch one of these icons ten times, and they all have an awkward delay in them (supposedly there to make sure you don’t accidentally turn on the heat when you didn’t mean to), so that you need to wait about half a second before touching again. This delay and the small size of the icons, together with the lack of tactile feedback, also makes it really hard to be sure if you managed to touch the icons properly, or if you need to try again. The whole experience turns into one of frustration.
Whoever made these touch cooktops the new cool thing should think again. It’s amazingly stupid that people even try to redesign the way you interact with kitchen stoves. Kitchen stoves have worked the same way for a hundred years — four knobs that turn either way. Simple, learnable and efficient. And very familiar. Is there a problem with the good old knobs that these touch controls actually solve? If so, please inform me.
