[robocat]

Touch controls on induction cooktops/hobs are almost ubiquitous, and they have extremely poor usability in my experience. Liquids cause problems, and you need to be very careful not to move a pan or any utensils over the controls, or brush against them while concentrating on cooking. Apart from the other awful usability issues with the UI or icons.

I did a survey of all the cooktops/hobs I could find in my city, looking for something that would suit my elderly mum, and I didn’t find a single unit that was usable. Fortunately a salesperson knew of a recently developed “cheap” model from a noname brand, which had individual knobs, so I ordered that, it arrived an month ago so I got it installed, and it has worked very well for my mum.

Usability is not something that most people know to look for when making purchases, so most whiteware ends up with a hideous UI. People will buy shit, then complain, but it doesn’t change their future purchasing habits (e.g. looking for features, especially useless features!)

I bought a middling brand microwave with knobs that has reasonable usability, despite providing all features. The iPhone is another possible counterexample, although I fucking hate many of their usability decisions (remove all multi-tasking shit from my iPad - I only ever initiate it by mistake and I always struggle to revert my mistake - fucking floating windows and split windows and fucking ... at top of the screen).

[VBprogrammer]

The ability to clean the cooker is the only advantage of touch controls. I don't know how well the original iPod touch wheel would hold up in that environment but from a usability point of view it was excellent.