An Object I Love: Oster Rice Cooker
While in general I am not the biggest fan of appliances with only one purpose, the ease-of-use and simplicity of this rice cooker make it worthwhile, especially if you make a lot of rice.
All of its parts and functions are easily visible, including the pot, steamer, lid, and button. The affordances of the pot easily indicate that the button is the only thing you can use to operate the rice cooker, which is also physically constrained to only move up or down.
The mapping is very clear too: when the button is in the down position, it’s cooking. When it’s in the up position after cooking, it’s keeping the contents of the pot warm.
When it’s done cooking, there is also unobtrusive feedback, as opposed to annoying beeps—you can hear the button click as it goes into the keep warm setting.
It’s very hard to mess up a pot of rice with this appliance, which is the most important thing.
An Object I Hate: Instant Pot Ultra (Interaction Design)
To be clear, I love my Instant Pot and will never stop loving it even though the interaction design on the Ultra, allegedly the most-advanced model, is awful.
The dial is the worst for selecting which function you want to use and making changes to the settings. The mapping is very unclear—does turning the dial clockwise make it go up or down? I have yet to remember, and I’ve been using it for months. There are also no affordances on the dial to suggest that you push it to select or confirm.
Once you manage to select what you want, you can also adjust the time, pressure, temperature, and other settings. The mapping is improved because the options are displayed side-by-side, but feedback and constraints become more relevant. When you try to select a specific setting with the dial to change it, the text on the screen blinks but isn’t actually clear on what the blinking means. The real problem though, is that there are no physical constraints on the dial to force you to go through the selections slower, or one at a time. It turns too quickly. This is useful to go through many options quickly when choosing the function, but not when there are only two options. On top of that, you’re forced to listen to very annoying and unnecessary beeping every time you turn the dial that means nothing at all.
Ironically, the older model actually has a more intuitive interaction design. It has buttons for each function and labeled buttons to control settings.