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and 4 seconds for off. neat
Hardware is complicated; understand it or get left behind.
I suspect some “leader” at apple is the first person that decided that two different ways to use one button is better than two buttons.
Whoever they are, I hope they suffer from confusing buttons until they repeat and remediate.
It’s a good combination of the power button and the do nothing whatsoever button.
My bluetooth headphones have the worst power button. You have to press and hold it for ~1 second to turn them on, but that’s only the activation threshold. They still take a further ~0.3 seconds to turn on. So basically you just need to press it for the whole ~1.3 seconds because otherwise you end up pressing it for what you think might be 1 second and then waiting to see if they eventually activate and then if they don’t, then you’ll just end up pressing and holding it for 3 seconds until they’re all the way on.
Those numbers might not be entirely accurate, I’ve never actually really timed it out, but you get the picture. The entire window is frustrating to nail down and feels just awful and unsatisfying, sometimes I don’t manage to turn them off either because it’s the same behavior backwards.
I feel like the design is to prevent them from getting bumped in your bag and turning themselves on and draining the battery and while that might technically work, they’re just as likely to end up getting squashed in my bag in a way that presses and holds the button anyways. None of this would even be necessary if you just put in a cheap, old school, tactile slide switch??? Like what is the fucking point?!
I got these headphones from Dollar General a few times, and they were pretty good quality, but when they ran out of charge, they closed all windows of my phone, so that was responsible for ruining many a writing and fap sessions, sometimes at the same time!
The hardest button to button
My favorite behavior is when you can press it again to turn the machine off before there’s any indication of it turning on.
Meh, helps with accidental presses and it’s fine for the power button to require a slightly more deliberate action imo.
Turning on from full shutdown when you open the lid on the other hand sends me flying
Accidentally hit your laptops power button to turn it on?
Let me count how many times that has happened to me…
Nope, still zero out of many thousands.
You ever just burn electronics? They smell nice, y’know? I don’t even far goes the winds of the fiberstrong, and it does what it do to be.
To turn off? Yes, turn on? No
I could say consistency is a good design pattern.
If it’s something you’re gonna be doing infrequently, sure - it helps you perform it smoothly and without much cognitive overhead.
But if it’s something you’re gonna do very often, then it’s okay if it appears a bit random at first, you’ll soon start doing it mechanically without thinking and it’s best for it to be designed around it. This will allow you to insert a smart quirk in this hole left by the lack of consistency. Like enabling you to clean your keyboard in this case.
Ergonomics often collides with common sense, and it’s ok.
Slightly tangential, but along the same “stupid design” line. My workplace recently got a new water filter/ice machine. It has no buttons. At all. No switches, no tab you press the cup against, none of it.
Instead, it has a no-touch sensor. There’s no instructions for it, no labels saying how to use it. You’re supposed to hover your hand over the sensor to make either water or ice come out, and it takes a second to respond. It took me about a day of trial and error to figure out how the hell it works.
So now when I want to fill my water bottle, I have to set it under the spout and hold a hand awkwardly over the sensor. If my hand moves slightly, the water stops coming out. I’ve found it easier to lean my hand against the machine, right over the sensor (but not touching it directly, or else it won’t work.) Which defeats the purpose of a “no touch” design in the first place.
For a bonus, the sensor reacts when people walk too close in front of it. I work with kids and the dispenser’s right in front of the fridge where they store their lunch boxes. Every day, kids line up to put their stuff away, and every day, the dispenser will get triggered by someone standing too close. Then there are ice cubes sliding around the floor, turning into puddles…
I wish we just had a regular water fountain at this point. So much of modern design has gotten too stupid to be practical.
For a bonus, the sensor reacts when people walk too close in front of it.
All the sinks, toilets, and urinals in my work bathroom use touchless sensors. I often have to wear high-vis; when I walk through the bathroom (even directly along the far wall) every sensor goes off as I walk past. Water for everyone! Even the ghosts.
Your super power!
Mr Flush Man 😉!
My god, UX has taken a cliff dive in the last 20 years. There are so many things being replaced with touch buttons and touch screens that DO NOT NEED THEM. A good old physical clicky button is going to remain the best way to interact with 98% of digital inputs and yet product designers cut 1.2¢ by putting capacitive touch interfaces.
Fuck touch buttons and any other non-click-button control that doesn’t need to be. Just let me push the button!
How come a touch button is cheaper though?
I mean for a complex system I get it (because 1 screen = many many buttons. I hate it regardless but I understand where it comes from), but like a water dispenser?
A simple tactile button costs around 0.10¢ of € on aliexpress, an ultrasonic proximity sensor is like 1.70€
So, unless there is a better way to understand the distance that i don’t know, they are wasting money, it’s just for the “modern and cool” factor to sell more
(All this without counting the price of a micro controller to read the sensor input, you could engineer the whole dispenser to work without one)
For cars, it’s more than just the cost saving of physical switches but the entire oesign budget: just put all that shit on a touch screen for every model.
I hate it. I was so happy when I finally bought a used car with bluetooth. It’s probably all downhill from here.
In ancient times people press on a handle to pump water up from a well. There’s no mistake can be made. Modern days gave so-called “designers” numerous ways to fuck it up. The most notorious tech in this regard is touch interface.
I assume you’re not talking about the Elkay EZH2O, because I think it’s wonderful. I can’t imagine needing to have my free hand hovering over a sensor to get the water bottle in my other hand to fill. The whole point of the sensor is to make things easier. I also am having trouble imagining the ice. I’d love to see this contraption you’re describing.
Okay, I got a picture. Sorry for potato quality, but I had to take it quickly before a kid entered the room.
See the little symbol of a hand over a dot? That’s all it gives as far as instructions. I thought the picture was of someone pushing a button, but no, it’s apparently a hand hovering over a circular sensor. Which doesn’t even match what the sensors actually look like. The real genius move was choosing to make two of the three sensors black so they blend in with the rest of the machine. I only figured out the water part (right side) after I figured out the ice part (left side) first.
So ice, water and hmm cold water and wind?
I’ve been to some places with this thing (or ones like it), and I end up just opting for the sink.
It’s a different machine. I will try to take a picture later.
Edit: Picture added in new comment.
Laptops like a bit of foreplay
“Oh, you pressed it for too long, now the computer is in factory reset mode. You wiped your hard drive.”
That’s exactly how our stupid Siemens dishwasher works. You have to press the power button for ½ a second, and then it only shows that it registered when you release it!
But if you press it for 3 seconds you make a factory reset.
And you have to press the power button first before you can do anything!?!?
Why not just allow people to choose the program they want, and have it turn on with that?I have a tendency to press those buttons way harder than necessary, because it feels like they aren’t working! 🤡
Last time I ever buy anything from Siemens, it’s simply too demented.What happens when you factory reset a dishwasher? Does it erase all of your dishes?
The washer gnomes that live in the appliance mail your crockery to the factory
It resets wifi settings and a favorite setting you can make to start a combo program faster, like washing faster or more thoroughly in the bottom drawer. And it resets 2 settings for water.
So quite annoying to have to do all that shit again, except for the wifi which is completely useless, and doesn’t have a single function to make it worth it.But without wifi you can’t connect to its internal webcam to see how clean your mugs are!
I somehow managed to factory reset my Kobo that way a few days ago. It had frozen, so I held the power button for a few seconds as I usually do when it freezes. Didn’t work, so I held it a little longer.
And suddenly, BOOM, it comes back to life, shuts down, and heads into factory reset town.
I did a few swears, then set it back up, reset the sync to Grimmory, and got all my books back.
Stoopid shit.
This for some reason reminds me of one of the biggest brainfarts i ever had as a kid. I was sitting on my computer waiting fir something to download or whatever. I looked at the turbo button and pressed it a couple of times, just to see tge TURBO light go off and on. I was wondering what it even does. Suddenly my eyes wandered over to the POWER button and i was like: i wonder what that does. And my pc ahut off. For some mysterious reason i thought i had a turbo and a power button to give it some extra juice
Turbo Power !!!
Fun fact for anyone who doesn’t know about the turbo button: it usually slowed down your computer. This was to make it compatible with older software that was written for slower processors, otherwise it would run way too fast. That was especially a problem for old games that would be pretty much unplayable unless you slowed them down.
Calling a button that slows down your computer “turbo” was confusing for a lot of people, though, so some manufacturers made turbo the computer’s normal speed and slowed it down when it was turned off. Oddly, though, making their computers work the exact opposite way most worked didn’t do much to make things less confusing.
This is what we get for everything including a microcontroller and engineers deciding they need to make everything “simple” (read: cheap) by having a one button interface. Flashlight manufacturers, I’m looking very hard in your direction. Tap once, this. Press and hold three seconds, that. Double press and hold six seconds, the other.
If your device has multiple functions or settings built into it, put more than one friggin’ button on it!
And for those simple things like flashlights, we almost never use any of those different functions. They’re more annoying than useful
Also really annoying that you often hardly get feedback that it is now booting up, because it takes another few seconds before the screen turns on. At various points, I’ve pressed that button, didn’t notice that it was turning on, and then pressed it again, which turned it back off.
Usually they light up a button on the keyboard, at least that’s what they do on most laptops i have seen
bUt iT’s eLegANt!!!
I also remember when the fucking reset button was quietly removed, first from videogames, then computers, then cell phones, because “software is getting better, it won’t crash and freeze everything so you no longer need to reset”. Then the power button went from being a switch to a piece of shit
I was fine with the hidden button that we need to intert something very thin to press
I have had calls pretty close to this when working at an IT helldesk.
![Power On [Bob the Angry Flower]](https://lemmus.org/pictrs/image/0e5d5c7b-228e-430d-8a29-0ffaf46c81f3.webp){kind=link}