Selection of convenience food
Remove the wrapping and simply pop them in the microwave … once you’ve grasped how it works. Photograph: Jochen Tack /Alamy

Visited anyone recently and tried to use their microwave oven? Of all the familiar devices in a house, the microwave has long been the laggard in usability. The “science oven”, as it is so wonderfully described in the 1970s-set film American Hustle, pre-dates the digital era (the first came out in 1967); and the advent of programmes and digital buttons hasn’t helped much since. So when you buy one, or go to someone’s house and use theirs, you will almost certainly be confronted by an unfamiliar interface. How powerful is it? Do I have to set the heat or time first? If I have to press digital buttons to set the heating time, will it interpret them as hours? If I need to set a heating time of more than an hour, do I enter the minutes, or is there an “hour” setting?

Meanwhile, since the “science oven” came along, we’ve got used to smartphones and tablets whose interfaces have undergone a flurry of interbreeding. Even in rival mobile interfaces, you expect to find apps offered as an array of icons; to have notifications about events in a sliding layer at the top; and get easy access to key functions such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth from any screen. If microwave interfaces had standardised to the same extent, we’d be able to operate almost any on sight. Instead, they still can’t tell when you’ve put metal in them.

The extent of the variation was pointed out in a 2013 post that recently resurfaced in which blogger Timothy Ellis wondered about the awfulness of the interfaces. He looked at an LG model with 31 buttons, and a Jenn-Air one with 34 buttons, “when all I want to do is heat up food for a specified time”. On the Jenn-Air, he noted: “The vast majority of the time, I use exactly two of these buttons: ‘add 30 sec’ (which also starts the heat) and ‘Stop/Cancel’.” So 94% of the buttons are wasting space.

In some ways, microwave interfaces have gone backwards. Older models had two dials: power and time. They were intuitive: more clockwise, more power/time. Then digital timers arrived, as did tapping a button to enter time, rather than turn a dial. This favoured the cool factor over usability: a dial provides its own feedback and is easily grasped (literally and figuratively) by old and young.

The infatuation with digital became another part of the problem. A discussion on Stack Exchange on the topic points to a book by Alan Cooper, who says that if you mix a computer with another thing, the result is still a computer. This leads to “feature creep”: Microsoft Office has a bazillion more options for formatting pages than you want, because someone somewhere might use it occasionally, so things such as chaos defrost become a selling point. In fact, “chaos defrost” can cut defrost time by up to 60%. Our microwave has it. But we bought it based on price and volume, not “features”.

In the end, I think there’s a simple reason why these interfaces have not merged more rapidly: life-spans. It’s not unusual for these machines to last 10 or 15 years, their interfaces frozen in time, while designers think of smarter ideas. The “30 seconds” top-power button is becoming increasingly common, but it’ll probably be 10 years before you can go into someone’s kitchen and be confident of seeing it on the microwave. Sometimes, even great user interface ideas are held back by simple problems: the products just don’t wear out fast enough for new stuff to come through.

If you’ve ever complained about your smartphone’s short life, look at it this way – at least you’re not trying to operate it with an interface from 2005.