Mis-design of Everyday Things
2005 was a pretty crazy year. My wife got pregnant with our second child, we moved to a new house, and she went on bed rest 2 weeks later. In about 8 weeks (hopefully), we'll start that 2-3 month experiment in sleep deprivation that comes with having a baby.
One thing I've noticed with our new house is that the oven has quite possibly the worst user interface ever. You would think that designing an interface for an oven would be a solved problem, but apparently it's not. Two big irritations: first, to set the temperature, you press the "on" button for the oven, which starts the temperature selector at 350 degrees. From there, you press the up or down arrow to raise or lower the temperature. The temperature moves in increments of 5 degrees Farenheit. You know what's dumb about this? I've never seen a recipe that calls for anything other than increments of 25 degrees Farenheit:300, 325, 350, 375, 400, etc. So why not move the indicator in 25 degree increments? My irritation with the timer is similar: it moves in 5 second increments for the first minute, then 10 second increments up to 10 minutes, then in 1 minute increments. I timed it today: it took 10 seconds to get the timer up to the 1 hour setting. Compare that to the microwave, where it's 3 keystrokes to do the same thing. The oven is very nice, but I grind my teeth in frustration every time I go to turn it on.