Sunday, January 20, 2008

Horrible stove (Assignment 1: Bad design)

Well I remembered going my friend house to stay over, and I was rather hungry in the middle of the night. So I decided to cook something to eat like maggie mee. My 'helpful' friend lead me to the kitchen which he said 'The stove is there. Help yourself.' So when I went to the stove, the design was like:
Fig.1 Picture taken from the user manual.

and I have ABSOLUTELY no idea what knob corresponds to which stove. And my 'helpful' friend was there laughing. So I get my other friends who were staying over too to take a look. And their comments are:

Friend 1 (Yi Ru) : "Haha! Playing mix and match ar?"
Friend 2(Gilbert) : "What the ****? Which is which?"
Friend 3(Zhiqiang): "Wa so troublesome. Don't cook liao la, go da bao*"
*For non-chinese people, da bao means go buy food instead

So feeling irritated, I ask my friend how he used the stove? He said, "Starting i was also fed up. Don't know how they design one. So trial and error lo."

My reflections on the stove

I will DEFINITELY not buy this kind of stove. The user interface is really bad and it is not obvious which knob will correspond to which stove. And the user have to read through the user manual to find out.

My recommendation is that they should at least label the knobs and the stove.
Rating for the stove: 9/10 (Bad among the bad)

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