[Sigia-l] Re: IA and semiotics - and standards?

[Richard Wiggins]

How about a microwave oven with a Back button?

When we were in the market for a replacement
over-the-stove-microwave-and-exhaust-fan unit, I chose one from Sears
whose name is, I am not making this up, Navigator.   And I am not
making this up; it's got Home, Back, and Favorites buttons, and a
round knob to move among menu options; push the knob in to select an
item.

When I bought it, four or so years ago, Internet mania was sweeping
the markets and the world, and some industrial designer at Whirlpool
(the actual manufacturer) must have thought "I've got it!  Post-Web,
people will want their appliances to work like their Web browsers."

Boy were they ever wrong!  Its UI is worse than that of the worst VCR
or digital clock radio you ever tried to operate.

I bought the thing because I thought the Web metaphor for the controls
was interesting, sort of a collector's item.  My wife grouses every
time she needs to warm something.

/rich

PS -- I do not subscribe to the argument advanced by some that the
frequent use of the Back button in the Web environment is a sign of a
poor UI.  But I've never hit the Back button on my microwave.

On Thu, 10 Jun 2004 15:08:25 -0500, John Fullerton
<jfullert at lib-gw.tamu.edu> wrote:

But I notice that much of this is about relative preception: an object's
meaning relative to its context. One thing that affects our work is
how these contexts are evolving. Consider one little example: a
browser has a back button that "goes back" through the history of
clicked links. We all know that this simple behavior breaks for
certain technologies (e.g., frames, dynamically generated pages) so
there is a technical context to what "back" means. But in a broader
sense, I am seeing "back" buttons in applications that are not
Web-based.