Engineer vs Designer - Sacrificing Device Usability for Design

Introduction

Have you ever gotten mad because you couldn’t figure out how a device works? If so, you understand the importance of good user experience for a product success.

Most users may not know much about how hardware is built or functions, but they can quickly tell whether it’s easy to use or not.

However, creating a device with a good user interface isn’t easy. Engineers must make their designs convenient for a broad range of potential customers while addressing multiple, often conflicting constraints—from visual design and technical requirements to project deadlines and production cost reductions.

Unfortunately, instead of following best practices and leveraging the wealth of experience accumulated over centuries, product creators often sacrifice convenience to meet other project demands

As a result, customers are left with clunky, frustrating devices, express their dissatisfaction on social media, and may never buy products from that company again.

Microwave Oven

You don’t have to go far away to find examples of poorly designed device user interface—just look around. Let’s take this microwave oven.

It looks nice, doesn’t it? But it’s far from nice when it comes to usability. If you’re seeing this model for the first time, it’s not immediately clear how to start food heating cycle—oven’s main function. It is not obvious for most users, that big rotary knob should be pressed. To help users figure it out, the designers added a small icon nearby. However, most non-technical users won’t notice it, let alone interpret it correctly. Frustrated, people start pressing all the buttons they can find, only to discover the oven seems to do everything except its main purpose: heating food.

So, how can we fix this problem? Instead of placing the rarely used timer button to the left of the ‘Stop’ button, why not put a clearly labeled ‘Start’ button there?

Such button is found in many household devices

and other equipment and software

so most users should already be familiar with it. Pressing this button should start the heating process immediately, giving users quick access to the oven’s most used feature. And for more advanced features, users can always refer to the manual—it’s normal.

The rarely used timer button could be moved to another spot. Adding an extra button wouldn’t be a big problem for this device. There are already many buttons on the control panel, and the cost of adding one more would be very small.

Electric Oven

Ok, we couldn’t find, how to heat up our food, and we’re still hungry. Let’s cook apple pie instead. Luckily, we have the right device here—this electric oven.

This device also has a great visual design, doesn’t it? Let’s see how good its usability is.

How do I turn it on? The buttons don’t seem to work. Okay, it looks like the oven can be switched on by rotating the left knob. This knob selects multiple heating modes, but there’s no indication of which mode is best for us. But we’re living in the 21st century, right? I thought this oven should know better than me how to cook my apple pie.

And here we are, this dish and spoon icon seems to be a guide.

How can we select it? Let’s try pressing knobs. No, it doesn’t do anything. It looks like we should “Ok” button to select this mode. Well, mixing a touch switch with mechanical knobs isn’t the best user experience, but we can deal with it.

Now let’s choose the right program for our pie… Wait. What’s this? Numbers? Seriously? We’re hungry, and now we have to look for the oven manual just to figure out how to cook my food?

How can we avoid searching through the manuals every time we want to use this oven?

A high-resolution display that shows detailed information about each cooking mode could help. However, due to the oven’s design needs, the high temperature it operates, and cost limits, adding such a display might be challenging task. So, are we out of options? Actually, no.

Even a low-cost seven-segment display installed in this oven, if used smartly, can show much more than just numbers.

For example, we could add labels like “APPLE PIE” next to the program number. This could help users quickly remember the right settings. After all, most users only use a few features of the devices they own.

Favorite Mode Button

Another possible solution is to allow users to create a few favorite modes, which are much easier to remember than dozens of features this device have. In fact, we can find a good example of such approach right here, in this kitchen—a dishwasher.

Remembering the correct program for a dishwasher is much easier than for an electric oven, as users usually operate them much more frequently and stick to only a few programs. Still, the dishwasher’s designer added a ‘Favorite’ button, allowing quick access to the most-used programs.

Adding such function to the electric oven would be inexpensive, requiring just one additional button—or even might be implemented using the existing controls.

Conclusion

The problem of sacrificing device usability for design is very common today and can be found everywhere.

For this video, I used household appliances as examples, because the none-professional device users are often more sensitive to such issues and tends to quickly give up when faced with user interface challenges.

However, even for professional equipment, it’s crucial to understand your product users, their needs, and how to leverage the wide range of modern and legacy hardware and software solutions effectively. By doing so, you can deliver a great user experience without compromising on product aesthetics, cost, or development speed.