In all other respects, it is pretty much a piece of crap: low cooking power, an annoying beep marking that it has finished its job, and I would bet it has a radiation leak. The colour I could do without, it is not white but one feels it should be (and so it is just dirty.) But when it comes to its design — the looks — there is another story to tell. Even if it is neither particularly attractive, revolutionary or avant-garde insofar as its lines and curves flow.

My microwave only has one button to open the door, and one dial to set the time, and because of this I love it. No “Start” button, no useless keypad or electronic display. A microwave does not need all of that bullshit. The features have been added by manufacturers to somehow make their wares seem better than the rest, while in effect it was just feature creep detracting from the real purpose that a microwave serves. To heat things up. And for that, ideally, you would only need one button; alas, having a button and a dial is something I can live with. In this case, the dial is both input and output, as it winds down to show the time left. It is an effective way of representing the only piece of information one really wants to know when they are using the microwave: How much till the chow is ready? And this dial does everything that a keypad could, only far more elegantly because of its simplicity.

It is easy for designers of interfaces or of software to get sidetracked. It happens, lots of times because of upper echelons, sometimes because we forget we are not the typical user. So we have feature bloat, design that needs a user manual to operate, software that has a lot of features and all broken, keypads on microwaves. In all these ways, we show how much we forget our purpose and our goals.