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Comment by eimrine | Hacker News Reader

> During the recent home device project I mentioned earlier, one of the biggest supporters of a touchscreen-based solution was the team’s marketing specialist.

Why am I not surprised?

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I don't buy it tbh. Most home appliances are sufficiently complex that physical buttons are not intuitive. Ask someone to change the clock on their oven vs on their phone. Most could do it on the phone but not the oven. And there are countless more practical examples of this issue.

My Breville coffee machine only has buttons and knobs, which works fine for the basic flow since everything has a dedicated button. But once you want to do something like run a cleaning cycle you will have to read the manual every time because there is nothing intuitive about holding double shot + single shot and then power for 3 seconds. Or holding program and then power to open temperature adjust then clicking one of the buttons to set a temp which isn't labeled and needs the manual to decipher.

While on the touch screen model, the basic flow might be slightly less nice, but the most complex flows are also reduced to about the same complexity and can be intuitively worked out while using the device. Combining physical buttons for basic flow with a touch screen is the best of both imo. I have used some ovens which use a normal knob like it would on an older oven, but if you want to do something like start a self clean cycle or adjust steaming, its done via the touch screen.

> change the clock on their oven

it's really easy. grab the clock. turn the hands to the desired position. optionally wind it up. put back on the oven. the only thing i dont understand why would anybody put his clock on the oven?

How else would you know if the clock on the micro is not correct if you don't have the oven to use as reference?

> Combining physical buttons for basic flow with a touch screen is the best of both imo

This. But if I have to choose, then I'll have physical buttons over a touch screen. Why? Because I use the "basic flow" every damn day. Whereas I only need to set the clock every few months.

> Ask someone to change the clock on their oven vs on their phone. Most could do it on the phone but not the oven.

I'd argue that's not an example of touch screens being better than buttons but rather the button interface in question being poorly laid out, and as for the phone, it's not the lack of physical buttons but rather the on-screen guidance that makes life easier. My grandparents' cooker is a button-free wonder and I couldn't work it out the first time I tried to turn it on.

For the coffee machine, it would be shitty UI if every function had a physical button. You don’t need a dedicated button to run the descale cycle since you do it twice a year, but it’s also a bit crap to have to pull out a manual to work out which order of buttons to press and for how long and what all the blinking lights mean. A touch screen executes this perfectly. It doesn’t have to blink led 2 to tell you of an error, it can just show the error on the screen.

Yeah a hybrid setup can work well although the decision is not necessarily between lights and a touch screen - a non-touch display with navigation buttons is also perfectly reasonable.

The absurd part is the one where I have to set the clock on the oven in the first place

If one is going to go into the effort and cost to put an SoC onboard that can run a touchscreen, one should just have the device communicate with the touchscreen computer in your pocket instead.

Common basic functions: knobs dials switches.

Extended functions: there's an app for that, or suffer through modal button changes like you describe.

Save on BOM costs, less points of failure, and does not require an SoC with display controller and a software stack running a (usually janky and slow and non-standard) UI.

This does happen on a lot of devices. It’s ok for stuff you expect to last a few years but anything longer and the app stops working before the device does.

I have a bike gps which has some functions as a phone app but the phone app no longer works.

Yeah, this is a potential downside but also an argument for open protocols and specifications for managing and controlling these kinds of devices.

This is an awful idea in practice. For example, an update to my Anova precision cooker required I logged in with a Facebook account to continue using it.

I came to write my official paper letters with vi :hardcopy in 70ies RFC typewriter style.

Helps to focus on the content. That's exactly what marketing dreads.

meanwhile found the template: https://darknet.mro.name/pub/brief-dina4.txt

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