[cirrus3]

> one of the worst misconceptions in product design is that a microwave needs to have a button for every thing you could possibly cook

"Worst" is a stretch. Not to mention these often actually do more than just power and time. For example detecting humidity and/or varying power over time.

> You can just have a time (and power) button. People will figure out how to cook stuff.

You could, but people don't always want to figure it out, especially when they are hungry.

This would have been a better article if the takeaway wasn't basically "people are smart, make them learn the underlying structure".

I think good design is recognizing when and how to either expose the structure or paper over it, all while making it pleasant to interact with for all users at either end of the spectrum of willingness to learn it.

For a bike, it pays off to learn. For other things maybe not so much. Combining these two very different cases and then making a blanket statement that "Good designs expose systematic structure" doesn't land well.

[gklitt]

(post author here)

Yes, it's absolutely great to have a "low floor" -- common use cases should be easy to do, without needing to learn a ton up front. But, hiding the structure is not the only way to achieve that!

For example: a microwave could have presets like "we recommend cooking a potato with this power for this time. If it's undercooked, try higher power, but avoid max power because XYZ."

The simple use cases should guide the user while building up a coherent mental model. If there are fancier sensors being used, those could be explained and exposed to the user directly.

Otherwise you end up with no path to further learning. If I have no idea how potato mode works, then I don't know when it applies or doesn't apply, I don't know how to adjust when it doesn't work well, and I don't know how it relates to the other modes at all.