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small essential microwave oven improvement
Thursday, February 5 2009
Trivial user-interface imperfections cause me more consternation than they cause most people, perhaps because I know how easy they are to fix by a product development department that actually cares. Here's an example of a user-interface imperfection that has long infuriated me: the behavior of the "end of cooking" alarm on a microwave oven. I've never used an oven where this alarm didn't sound like this: "Beep, Beep, Beeeeeeeeeeep!" That's all well and good, but sometimes you're standing there as the alarm sounds, and you pull the door open just as it begins. A truly well-designed microwave oven would immediately cancel the alarm at that point. Perhaps, after all, you're trying to retrieve your food before the alarm awakens your roommate. But no, in all microwave ovens I've used until recently, the alarm insisted on playing all the way through to the end of its final Beeeeeeeeeeep. Recently, though, I was amazed and delighted to find that our new microwave, the one I bought from Sears back in mid-January, cancels its final alarm the moment you open its door. It's such a tiny improvement, just a conditional somewhere in its microcontroller code, but it makes me feel a lot happier about the oven. It makes me think the oven is one of my kind, that it thinks the way I do. That's very important in a kitchen appliance and will become ever more so as robots take over the world (assuming their conquest isn't throttled by the ongoing economic collapse and/or Peak Oil).
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?090205 feedback
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