Jeff Chambers: June 2008 Archives

Who doesn't love waffles?

Waffles are golden, fluffy, delicious, and easy to make.  Just pop a frozen waffle in your toaster, and in mere moments, enjoy a tasty treat.

Of course, not everyone appreciates frozen waffles, and who can blame them?

Everyone knows that nothing beats homemade for taste.

These were the thoughts that lead me to:

• Attempt the creation of waffles

and

• the eventual creation of this blog

For more information on the first, read on.  As for the second, only time will tell whether this was a good thing, a bad thing, or will lead to the eventual destruction of earth.

So, I decided to make waffles one fine Saturday.  My wife wanted breakfast in bed for Mother's Day, we had a waffle iron (at that point, unused) which we'd gotten as a wedding gift, and we had pancake batter that included instructions for using it to make waffles.

I carefully read the instructions for using the powdered pancake mix to make waffle batter.  Then I failed for the first time (that day): I did NOT read the instructions for the waffle maker.  They had been misplaced sometime between us getting said appliance, and it actually being used.

This failure lead directly to all the hardship which followed, though it was compounded by (in my opinion) far more serious failures on the part of the designer of the waffle maker.

The controls were simple enough, two lights (red and green) and a single dial, with the numbers 1 through 6 on it.  See for yourself at the right.

I did what intuitively made sense: I mixed the batter, poured it into the waffle iron, smoothed it out over the six waffle-making sections, plugged the waffle iron in, and turned the dial to six.

The red light came on.

A few minutes later, it beeped, and the green light came on.

I tried to open the waffle iron, only to find that I couldn't.  It was stuck.

I'm sure some of you, those who've used waffle irons before, have noted my (many) mistakes:

1. Waffle Irons are supposed to be heated before having the batter added.  The beep I heard was the iron telling me that it was ready for the batter.
2. Pouring batter onto a cold iron is BAD...it causes the batter to act as a glue, sealing the iron shut.
3. The dial wasn't intended for use in selecting the number of waffles (as I had thought), but for selecting the desired level of done.

In the end, the only way for me to get the iron open was to crank the dial all the way up, remove the battery from our smoke detector, and let it bake until it would open.

When it did, I had my world-infamous Choco-Waffles!

What's the point of this long, rambling, and (hopefully) amusing story, you might ask?  I'll tell you.  The epic failure here, the failure that inspired this blog, was NOT my failure.  It was the failure which multiplied my failure, and helped it rise to truly epic proportions: the design of the controls.

Let's look again, shall we?

Two lights, one dial.  KISS at work, right?  No.  I'm going to count, just off the cuff, the problems I see with this design, keeping in mind one simple thing: The user won't read the instructions until something goes wrong.

1. The lights are ambiguous.  A red light could mean many things: the power is on, the heat is on, or (in this case) both.  A green light could mean: the waffles are ready to eat or the iron is ready for batter.  I (at first) assumed the red light meant 'cooking' and the green light meant 'done'.
2. The dial is numbered one through six.  This is not bad in and of itself, it just becomes bad when coupled with the fact that there are six waffle sections in the iron.  This makes the dial's purpose uncertain: is it a heat adjuster?  A timer?  Does it represent minutes?  Number of waffle wells filled?
3. The green light and beep each serve two purposes: the green light turns on when the iron is ready, and turns OFF when the waffles are ready.  Each is accompanied by the same beep.
4. There is no indication as to what the controls mean, they aren't labeled.

All of these together lead to ruined waffles, a long cleanup, potential damage to my waffle iron, and a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, and NO waffles.

The trouble is, this could easily have been averted with three simple changes:

1.  Replace the numbers 1-6 with a visual representation of 'heat', using the accepted blue to red gradiant.  If the colored ink would drive costs up
   too much, just make it solid black.  This removes any ambiguity as to what the dial represents: the 'heat scale' has been in use for years, and I dare say it's something close to an appliance industry standard for analog controls.
2. Add another button to indicate when the waffles are ready. This button being lit should be accompanied by the aforementioned beep.  With three lights, the beeps don't even have to be of different pitch or duration (which would have helped differentiate them with two lights).
3. Label the controls, at least the lights.

With these simple changes, the controls become much more intuitive.  The heat gradient removes the questions around the numbered dial (really, 6 numbers with 6 wells?  Who's idea was that?  Why not go with 5?)  The labels explicitly inform you what they mean, and three lights indicates to the user that there are three steps (heat, pour, remove), not two (pour, eat).

Let this be a lesson to everyone who's designing an interface (be it for an appliance, a car, a computer program, or a web site): If your design is not intuitive, your users won't get their waffles.

The good news: the next morning, after finding and reading the instructions, the waffles were delicious...but the controls still sucked.