Improvable Stovetop User Experience

I never thought I would write a blog post about our stove, specifically the user experience of our stovetop. But here we are.

Three years ago my wife and I moved into our own newly built house. With the new house came a new kitchen. When we set out to choose a kitchen, we had a plethora of kitchens to choose from. Like every kitchen, our new kitchen needed a stove. So the salesperson showed us a small selection of stoves, and we picked the one we liked best. And like almost every new stove, it came with a ceramic stovetop.

Features, features, features, and a problem

The ceramic stovetop came with a lot of features, such as a child lock that beeps five times every time you place an item on the stovetop. Which is great because you get immediately notified when one of your cats jumps on the stovetop. Which is not so great because you get notified every time an item is placed on the stovetop. But after three years we got used to it.

Another feature the stovetop had in petto was a touchscreen to control everything. So we had to say goodbye to the normal buttons and say hello to the touchscreen. At the beginning we really thought the touchscreen was a great upgrade because of the minimalist and futuristic look. Looking back, we wish we had chosen a different ceramic stovetop because its touchscreen is very, very, very sensitive. Every time we cook, we have to watch out that no water, steam, or food drips on the touchscreen, which would either cause it to turn on one of the five cooking zones, to change the temperature of one of the cooking zones in use, or—what happens the most—turn off the stove immediately, which is very frustrating because we then have to clean the touchscreen and turn on the stove again.

That problem makes the fact that you need some exercise and precision to select the cooking levels between 5 and 14 almost forgotten.

Not just an isolated case

Unfortunately, we don’t seem to be the only ones that have that problem with their stovetop. My parents-in-law bought a new stove with a ceramic stovetop from another manufacturer a little over a year ago, and they have the same problem we have.

After a quick search on the Internet, I found out that my parents-in-law and my wife and I aren’t the only ones being annoyed by our stovetop. For example, I found a subreddit with a bunch of people having the same problem.

How the problem could be addressed

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of minimalist designs. But if the stovetop’s user experience is so underdeveloped that it makes cooking a hassle, it degrades the best designed user interface.

A quick solution could be to make the touchscreen of the stovetop less sensitive to everything that touches it except your fingers. And in general, it shows that designers and engineers should invest more time in testing their products before they hit the market, to spare other people this unfavorable experience.