Under the Wire: A toast to mediocrity

OPINION: What’s so great about toasters? I recently had a software vendor describe their product as “like a toaster for the internet”.

He was meaning this to imply some great simplicity and ease of use, rather than any data-baking property the product had.

He’s not the first person to use that simile though. You often hear hardware manufacturers and software developers (particularly operating system developers) using the term 'appliance' to imbue their product with some supposed ideal of simplicity.

An appliance, of course, is a bit of hardware that has a single application. It’s simple because it doesn’t do much. The range of options is limited, therefore there are fewer ways to go wrong.

The analogy makes sense, except of course that computers and most software programs are multi-use items with a huge range of options and many things that can go wrong. We forgive the vendors their economy with the truth, because we understand marketing.

What I don’t understand is why the general ‘appliance’ metaphor is so often specified to “toaster”.

Think about this: when was the last time you were entirely pleased with the output from your toaster? When you were dissatisfied, did you find that an easy, adjustment to one or other of the device’s settings produced a more ideal result? Do you find that the controls on your toaster are entirely intuitive, or do you just hope for the best? See, I’ve used a buzzword there.

Intuitive. That’s another one commonly used by technology vendors to indicate that their product is so well-designed it works the way you think. It doesn’t, I promise you. It works the way its developer thinks. I remember reading two technology white papers, one prepared by a manufacturer of two-button computer mice, the other prepared by a maker of single-button mice (guess who?). Both argued convincingly that their approach was “intuitive”.

Both had data backed up by scientists and research subjects, and both concluded that their case was unarguably proved.

Both of them were wrong. A computer mouse is not intuitive.

It’s something you can get the hang of, but moving a brick on the desk and making a blob on screen move accordingly is a high-level abstraction, not intuition. I digress.

These same vendors arguing against futility that their mice are intuitive are the ones who will hold up, as the paragon of intuition and simplicity, the humble pop-up toaster. And I don’t get it.

OK, the lever on the side for making the toast slide down into its slots is reasonably intuitive -- vertical motion equates to vertical motion.

What happens, though, if the toast begins to overcook, and you want to get it out of the slot before the toaster thinks it’s ready?

My toaster has a “Cancel” button on it, for that task. Not bad, sort of makes sense. An old one my parents had featured a little hook on the up-down lever that, when forced out of place, caused the lever to hop up -- great, except that it got hot when the toaster was in use so you either risked personal injury or watched your breakfast incinerate.

Their current toaster has a smaller lever next to the large one which, if you need to eject the toast, you pull down. That’s right: pull down to make the toast go up. That makes a lot of sense.

The short story is that toasters are not intuitive. They’re not well-designed and (from a results-oriented perspective) they produce compromise output almost every time. And this is the ideal to which vendors believe technology design should aspire.

No wonder people find computers so frustrating.