The "A Bit More" Button | Hacker News Reader

The "A Bit More" Button

cityofsound.com

47 pointsmgunes13 comments

I'm sure the "A Bit More" button does what every other crap toaster does when you depress the lever: takes your toast from "cool" to "warm," or from "warm" to "blasted in nuclear hellfire."

I don't know what happened, but it's very difficult to find a decent toaster any more. Buy a $10 Great Value or a $100 Kitchenaid, it's all the same useless trash. The only differences are cute design touches -- the guts are all terrible. The only brand left seems to be Hobart, and those suckers are $300. As a result, I buy the same lousy toaster every three months when I get tired of my toast being uneven, untoasted, or charred. The new toaster starts out with mediocre performance and invariably slides downhill from there.

I'd happily do without the "A Bit More" button, brushed metal accents, sculpted cover, and every other elaborate design measure if I could just get some decent toast.

This kind of design (task oriented vs process oriented) is appealing but incredibly hard to get right. The problem is that any time the user goes "off the rails", the experience can become incredibly frustrating since you start fighting what the device thinks you should be doing.

For most items we interact with in the world, while it turns out the majority of interactions we do with them might fall into neat little buckets, the inherent human messiness means that we all end up needing to bounce off the rails at some point and what once was wonderful now becomes a nightmare.

What I love about these things is that we tend to go 'ooh look at what that clever designer did!' when the reality is that anyone who has ever used a toaster has invented the "A Bit More" Button and then stuck it on the shelf with all the other minor improvements we come up with and then never act on.

Yes, the toaster (and the designers involved) are definitely worthy of praise. I'm sure all of us have used our toasters to toast 'a bit more' which makes the feature all the more striking. It seems so obvious, but only in retrospect, and that is a hallmark of great design.

Maybe it seems obvious in retrospect to you, but I was dealing with the same need for an A Bit More button with the toaster at my old place, so there's nothing retrospective about it for me.

Now if only they can figure out a way to add the "A Bit Less" Button.

http://www.breville.com.au/products_detail.asp?prod=448

Then they turned around and trade marked their button....

Edit: Also that button appears to add $20 to the total.

Reminds me of an automatic door I once saw, with a sign over the button that said "activate switch to operate"... or "operate switch to activate", I can't quite remember.

"A Bit More" is a little too wordy, unless of course there was a "More" button as well, to put it in context.

This would also open the possibility for the "Just a Tiny Eency Weencie Bit More" and "A Heck of a Lot More, Son" buttons.

That's a strictly technical way of looking at it.

The thing that speaks to people in this is the human-like uncertainty of the statement "a bit more". It's almost certainly not the case that the machine has a concept of "a bit", or introduces randomness for the interval to be human-like; technically it's simply heating the bread for a fixed amount of time. The trick is in observing the usage patterns of people using toasters (wanting their bread toasted "a bit more" is a common goal), and naming the feature in a way that corresponds to the goal very directly, and creates emotional engagement.

I own this very toaster, and humanity is exactly the right term. The 'A bit more' button was a motivator in the purchase. When I read it I thought, "This company understands how I make breakfast. I should buy from them."

sounds too British for my tastes; I'd prefer "a little more"

It has a crumpet button. I don't think you're in their target market.

Breville is an Australian company.

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