Comment by spython
8 years ago
The William is actually quite problematic from the UX point of view, most notably:
- There's a disconnect in space between the space being heated, the diagram of the heating patterns, and the heat control diagram. So you have three points of attention instead of, ideally, one, and traditionally, two.
- The whole interface has no undo. If I remove a heating space, reset clock, recalibrate weight, there is no going back.
- Removal of cookware deletes all associated data and programming.
- Touch interfaces while cooking are horrible and I hope they will never win.
Though, of course, the concept is from 2010 and the idea to add programmable heat curves (or, ideally, IFTTT of cooking) is a nice one.
Can you elaborate a bit on why you don't like touch interfaces while cooking?
Fingers tend to be dirty and slippery while cooking so tactile knobs are extremely nice, beyond the fact that you can use them without looking.
But in general, tactile knobs are always better than touch screen widgets if one looks beyond flexible function (tactile > non-tactile). Touch screens are more like an economy option when you want to fit in a bunch of functionality in a limited amount of space.
I seem to have too dry fingers most of the time, so can't get the touch controller to register. Not what you want if you need to lower the heat NOW.
In addition, a lot of the controllers seem to use the really silly plus/minus design to control heat, which means if you want to go from 8 to 3, you need to press 5 times instead of just one touch/twist. Fortunately my current cooking top has a bar so I can go directly, once it registers my finger that is...
I realize why they went with touch though.