My favorite behavior is when you can press it again to turn the machine off before there’s any indication of it turning on.
Laptops like a bit of foreplay
Meh, helps with accidental presses and it’s fine for the power button to require a slightly more deliberate action imo.
Turning on from full shutdown when you open the lid on the other hand sends me flying
To turn off? Yes, turn on? No
I could say consistency is a good design pattern.
If it’s something you’re gonna be doing infrequently, sure - it helps you perform it smoothly and without much cognitive overhead.
But if it’s something you’re gonna do very often, then it’s okay if it appears a bit random at first, you’ll soon start doing it mechanically without thinking and it’s best for it to be designed around it. This will allow you to insert a smart quirk in this hole left by the lack of consistency. Like enabling you to clean your keyboard in this case.
Ergonomics often collides with common sense, and it’s ok.
Slightly tangential, but along the same “stupid design” line. My workplace recently got a new water filter/ice machine. It has no buttons. At all. No switches, no tab you press the cup against, none of it.
Instead, it has a no-touch sensor. There’s no instructions for it, no labels saying how to use it. You’re supposed to hover your hand over the sensor to make either water or ice come out, and it takes a second to respond. It took me about a day of trial and error to figure out how the hell it works.
So now when I want to fill my water bottle, I have to set it under the spout and hold a hand awkwardly over the sensor. If my hand moves slightly, the water stops coming out. I’ve found it easier to lean my hand against the machine, right over the sensor (but not touching it directly, or else it won’t work.) Which defeats the purpose of a “no touch” design in the first place.
For a bonus, the sensor reacts when people walk too close in front of it. I work with kids and the dispenser’s right in front of the fridge where they store their lunch boxes. Every day, kids line up to put their stuff away, and every day, the dispenser will get triggered by someone standing too close. Then there are ice cubes sliding around the floor, turning into puddles…
I wish we just had a regular water fountain at this point. So much of modern design has gotten too stupid to be practical.
For a bonus, the sensor reacts when people walk too close in front of it.
All the sinks, toilets, and urinals in my work bathroom use touchless sensors. I often have to wear high-vis; when I walk through the bathroom (even directly along the far wall) every sensor goes off as I walk past. Water for everyone! Even the ghosts.
My god, UX has taken a cliff dive in the last 20 years. There are so many things being replaced with touch buttons and touch screens that DO NOT NEED THEM. A good old physical clicky button is going to remain the best way to interact with 98% of digital inputs and yet product designers cut 1.2¢ by putting capacitive touch interfaces.
Fuck touch buttons and any other non-click-button control that doesn’t need to be. Just let me push the button!
For cars, it’s more than just the cost saving of physical switches but the entire oesign budget: just put all that shit on a touch screen for every model.
I hate it. I was so happy when I finally bought a used car with bluetooth. It’s probably all downhill from here.
In ancient times people press on a handle to pump water up from a well. There’s no mistake can be made. Modern days gave so-called “designers” numerous ways to fuck it up. The most notorious tech in this regard is touch interface.
I assume you’re not talking about the Elkay EZH2O, because I think it’s wonderful. I can’t imagine needing to have my free hand hovering over a sensor to get the water bottle in my other hand to fill. The whole point of the sensor is to make things easier. I also am having trouble imagining the ice. I’d love to see this contraption you’re describing.
It’s a different machine. I will try to take a picture later.
This is what we get for everything including a microcontroller and engineers deciding they need to make everything “simple” (read: cheap) by having a one button interface. Flashlight manufacturers, I’m looking very hard in your direction. Tap once, this. Press and hold three seconds, that. Double press and hold six seconds, the other.
If your device has multiple functions or settings built into it, put more than one friggin’ button on it!
This for some reason reminds me of one of the biggest brainfarts i ever had as a kid. I was sitting on my computer waiting fir something to download or whatever. I looked at the turbo button and pressed it a couple of times, just to see tge TURBO light go off and on. I was wondering what it even does. Suddenly my eyes wandered over to the POWER button and i was like: i wonder what that does. And my pc ahut off. For some mysterious reason i thought i had a turbo and a power button to give it some extra juice
“Oh, you pressed it for too long, now the computer is in factory reset mode. You wiped your hard drive.”
I somehow managed to factory reset my Kobo that way a few days ago. It had frozen, so I held the power button for a few seconds as I usually do when it freezes. Didn’t work, so I held it a little longer.
And suddenly, BOOM, it comes back to life, shuts down, and heads into factory reset town.
I did a few swears, then set it back up, reset the sync to Grimmory, and got all my books back.
Stoopid shit.
That’s exactly how our stupid Siemens dishwasher works. You have to press the power button for ½ a second, and then it only shows that it registered when you release it!
But if you press it for 3 seconds you make a factory reset.
And you have to press the power button first before you can do anything!?!?
Why not just allow people to choose the program they want, and have it turn on with that?I have a tendency to press those buttons way harder than necessary, because it feels like they aren’t working! 🤡
Last time I ever buy anything from Siemens, it’s simply too demented.What happens when you factory reset a dishwasher? Does it erase all of your dishes?
The washer gnomes that live in the appliance mail your crockery to the factory
It resets wifi settings and a favorite setting you can make to start a combo program faster, like washing faster or more thoroughly in the bottom drawer. And it resets 2 settings for water.
So quite annoying to have to do all that shit again, except for the wifi which is completely useless, and doesn’t have a single function to make it worth it.But without wifi you can’t connect to its internal webcam to see how clean your mugs are!
bUt iT’s eLegANt!!!
I also remember when the fucking reset button was quietly removed, first from videogames, then computers, then cell phones, because “software is getting better, it won’t crash and freeze everything so you no longer need to reset”. Then the power button went from being a switch to a piece of shit
Also really annoying that you often hardly get feedback that it is now booting up, because it takes another few seconds before the screen turns on. At various points, I’ve pressed that button, didn’t notice that it was turning on, and then pressed it again, which turned it back off.
BOB THE POWER ANGRY FLOWER ON
how I felt when my phone’s power button turned into the AI button.
I have had calls pretty close to this when working at an IT helldesk.
Power-button-on-keyboard problems
Absolutely this. Why do I have to press the power button for 3 seconds to force it to shut down?
If I made a bad overclock that could fry my system, I want it to shut off immediately!!
In the good old days, we had a REAL power button on the front of our desktop computers, that physically shut off power to the PSU.
And the computer didn’t use any power when not used.
This idea of pressing a button for x seconds before it does what it should have done instantly is moronic IMO.There’s still a switch on the psu if you really want it off NOW. Or you could unplug it.
The power button does a graceful shutdown by default because most people don’t like data loss/file system corruption…
If you’re doing potentially damaging overclocking changes and haven’t prepared to kill power asap, that’s on you.
That switch is hard to reach, and basically useless, it’s better to unplug the cable.
The power button does a graceful shutdown
Which is pretty useless, because you normally shut down through software, and if you can’t do that, the system has likely crashed anyway, so it’s better to shut down fast, than having a crashed program causing damage.
Speak for yourself.
Plenty of people use the physical power button - including me. It’s directly equivalent to the software shutdown button, but you don’t have to go to a specific menu for it. Just press and walk away.
You can also change settings so it puts the computer to sleep or hibernate, instead of a full shutdown.
Your experience =/= Everyones experience.
but you don’t have to go to a specific menu for it. Just press and walk away.
IDK why you need to do that, I use a hotkey on my keyboard.
So regarding speaking for yourself, how about you respect that not everyone do like you do, but your way is the only kind of hardware that exist.
I am not the arrogant one here, you are.A physical power key on a desktop computer should physically shut off power IMO, but that option doesn’t exist anymore. And from an energy preserving perspective that is bad.
Hit the reset button then the power button, as the bios usually handles that interrupt by just shutting down immediately (and CPUs reset into low performance modes, so it reduces the power on your CPU immediately).
I also often get annoyed at the one button on my toothbrush having a delay or else it means switching to ROUGH MODE.
![Power On [Bob the Angry Flower]](https://lemmus.org/pictrs/image/0e5d5c7b-228e-430d-8a29-0ffaf46c81f3.webp){kind=link}