Those buttons hit their maximum disaster level when installed on an induction stove. You know, the ones that are one flat shiny panel with areas that magically turn red and hot at the push of a button?
Of course, said buttons are always next to impossible to press correctly (except by accident), so the standard use case is to mash your finger onto it until some form of feedback occurs.
More often than not, that feedback comes in the form of 3rd degree burns as a result of mashing your finger onto a magically hot stove.
I hope there's a special little room in hell where the guy who designed that stove is forced to repeatedly burn his thumbs on it for all eternity.
Those buttons hit their maximum disaster level when installed on an induction stove. You know, the ones that are one flat shiny panel with areas that magically turn red and hot at the push of a button?
That's not an induction stove. An induction stove uses electromagnetism to heat a ferromagnetic cooking device positioned above a coil. The stove surface only becomes hot due to conduction away from the pot or pan. If you put nothing above the induction coil, nothing gets hot.
The kind of stove you're thinking of is a glass-ceramic resistive cooktop. It's just a piece of glass that sits between a big old resistor and your food. (Annoying about how easy it is to burn yourself, but very easy to clean!)
Small nit, most of the smooth cooktop stoves are not induction stoves, they are still heating the cookware by radiant or direct physical contact transfer of heat.
True induction cooktops require use of iron or steel cookware which is directly heated with an electromagnetic field, not a transfer of heat from a heating element.
Just to be clear, I think that the article is about touch-sensitive buttons that provide no feedback — not about the more-common kitchen appliance buttons which live behind a plastic sheet but actually click when you push them.
Those membrane buttons are more common on ovens, but I did mean capacitive buttons on my oven.
Honestly, I think there are companies and products lines which take the time and care to do the human factors engineering whatever interface is selected for the design, and there are products which don't have that attention paid to htem - blaming the button technology itself is sort of a side show to the actual focus on user experience which may lead you to optimize the interaction - tune the buttons, or speed up the software, whatever. Physical buttons can be just as bad if the user experience is ignored.
Indeed! Our dishwasher has membrane buttons on the front to operate it, and everyone in our house has accidentally turned the washer on by accidentally leaning on a button.
This is a great point. A friend of mine has a calculator, with big, traditional buttons, on his desk. It gets set off all the time (and prints out useless lines of tape) when people lean against the desk, simply because of where the calculator sits.
There is certainly much more to getting controls right than the style of buttons.
Of course, said buttons are always next to impossible to press correctly (except by accident), so the standard use case is to mash your finger onto it until some form of feedback occurs.
More often than not, that feedback comes in the form of 3rd degree burns as a result of mashing your finger onto a magically hot stove.
I hope there's a special little room in hell where the guy who designed that stove is forced to repeatedly burn his thumbs on it for all eternity.