Toaster Design

510 lab 1
Lillie Kittredge

the Tragedy of the Toaster

This is my toaster. I swear it looks a lot less filthy under normal lighting conditions. I base this report on observations of my roommate making toast, on my own experiences with it, and on discussion with my roommate about how much the toaster sucks.

The design was made with pretty obvious choices: you need to control the temperature, and you need to control how long it cooks (represented on some toasters by how dark you want your toast). And so, there are two knobs, one for temperature, and one for how long it cooks. In this presentation, I'll gripe about why the design is bad, then say why I suspect it was designed this way.

toaster control knobs

Problems with timer knob

Small range suitable for actual toasting, so fine-tuned toast color is near impossible
Mysterious "pop tarts" logo
Mysterious arc from 0 to about 7 minutes
Annoying, surprisingly loud ticking noise and ding when time's up
Unclear where the knob has to be for the "stay on" function to be active

The small toast-appropriate range is the main problem, making it difficult to set the time accurately. This is compounded by the problem that from a standing position near the toaster, the knob partially obscures the dial, making it harder to tell what you're setting it to. The user ends up having to keep a close eye on the toast, and either add some more time partway through or at the end, or find that the toast is done before the timer's run out. In the latter situation, I take the toast out, but don't like to waste the energy on the remaining minutes. The only available options are to force the timer down to zero, or turn the temp knob to "off". The former probably damages the timer, and the latter leaves the toaster in a useless state for toasting next time you want to use it. Probably due to the times I've twisted the timer down, it now sometimes will tick down slower and slower without dinging, if it's set to something in the pop tarts vicinity.

Timer knob design considerations

Why was this designed the way it was?

The ticking noise and ding provide auditory feedback on the state of the oven, which may be why they were included (it may also just be difficult to mask the sound of the ticking). Though I appreciate some manner of alert, I prefer the sound of a spring being tripped, such as an upright toaster makes by its design. I would argue that there is no need for the ticking sound, since no danger befalls the user by it slipping their mind that there's toast in the oven, as the toaster will turn itself off soon enough.

I would speculate that the arc drawn on the dial from 0 to about 7 minutes is meant to indicate the range appropriate for toast. If so, it was pretty clearly just a guess on the part of the designers, since in my experiments, turning the knob to the highest end of the arc results in rather blacker, smokier toast than most users prefer.

The course timing granularity in the toast range is due to the fact that the dial goes all the way up to 30 minutes. It would have benefited the designers to think harder about how long their users tend to want to put things in the toaster oven. When I use the toaster oven, it's generally for toasting things that have to be horizontal, for instance, those involving cheese. These items only need to be cooked for the same amount of time that bread needs to be toasted for. I suspect that most casual toaster-oven users have similar behavior patterns. (Searching for toaster ovens on the Internet for purposes of comparison, I find a surprising number of "professional" styles. Do restaurants use them for some purposes? Or is the "professional" toaster just to lure conspicuous-consumption buyers? I am perplexed.) Some users certainly would want longer times, for example, users without access to a full-sized oven. What percentage of the expected market for this product were those users? Did the designers consider who was likely to be using their product?

A meta-problem of this kind of timer for toast is that it has to be set each time you want toast. With upright toasters, one can usually set a dial to the desired darkness, and press a button to initiate toasting which does not interfere with the dial. In that design, the amount of toasting can be set as a state variable, allowing the same degree of toastedness to be reliably recreated. In this design, it's hit-or-miss with each piece of toast, not to mention that dealing with a dial is a lot more taxing first thing in the morning than pressing a button or lever would be. On the other hand, this design provides something that the dial-and-button design does not: constant visual feedback on toast timer progress. This would be more useful if using the oven function and cooking something which needed a particular number of minutes. However, I would argue that visual feedback on progress towards doneness is provided already by the clear door and the user's own understanding of how dark they want their toast.

The temperature knob

The temperature knob is labeled "oven", which indicates that it has something to do with the oven. A better name would be "temperature", or, if tight on space, "temp". It could also be argued that a label is unnecessary, since the values are likely ones for degrees ferenheight.

It covers a standard range of temperatures for ovens, ending in "broil", which is the state where maximum power flows to only the top pair of electrical elements. This is a convention of regular ovens, which is probably why it was chosen (along with the lack of other options). Some visual distinction between regular oven behavior and broiling behavior would be good - as it is, the only visual feedback that you've really got it on broil is to note that only the top set of elements is glowing. This is a factor that differs slightly in the design of the temperature knob versus the timer knob. Where the timer offered the "stay on" state at the end of the spectrum, it left off the tic mark that it had used for the other times, giving a subtle visual clue that "stay on" was somehow different in kind from "30". The inclusion of the tic mark on "broil" makes it seem to still be part of the spectrum, that "broil" should just mean "500". I suspect that this was not a conscious design decision, just the effect of a not particularly conscientious design process.

Miscellaneous complaints

Why the mix of capital and lowercase letters? Though this does not make it harder to interact with, it does bespeak a rushed design atmosphere. Perhaps they felt that "oven" and "off" were more important than "broil".
Why the "pop tarts", for heaven's sake? One assumes there was some deal cut between Toastmaster and Kellogg, but given the course granularity of the timer, the range that could apply to the pop tarts is inconveniently large.
The pan is less wide than the rack. If I'm cooking something that needs the pan, why should I be deprived of those extra inch and a half of space? I can think of no reasons the designers would have chosen this property, except perhaps so that users could jiggle the pan side to side to . . . make their food dance? No idea.

Good design choices

I like the simplicity and readability of the knobs, with the simple dark dot to indicate which end of it is the pointer. I like the visual feedback of the little red light that goes on when the toaster's on. I like things that provide me with toast. I like the obvious bits, like the clear door and the availability of the drip tray, the fact that the bottom is hinged and will open for cleaning, and the fact that the knobs look the same and have the same range of motion, so that the user gets used to interacting with the toaster by twisting a knob clockwise. Most of these were probably included because they've always been included in this type of product - the designers of this particular toaster oven were just creating their interpretation of the old standbys.

An unintentional useful aspect of the toaster is that if one leaves the pan and little rack on top of the oven when not in use, it provides something to put toast on while buttering it, without water condensing under the toast and making that side soggy. (Some of us are picky about our toast.)

How it could be better

My parents' toaster oven has two sets of controls: on the bottom, a fine-grained dial for toast color and a switch to start toasting. On the top, a thermostat dial. Turning the thermostat causes the oven to come on, and stay on, maintaining the selected temperature, until you turn it down. The little red light turns on while the elements are receiving power, so that when the light goes off the first time, you know the oven has heated up. This way, it provides fine-tuned toast color for bread toasting, plus the capability of use as an oven. What it lacks, which this toaster offers, is a timer for baking, since it assumes you have another method of timing.

Summary

The main flaw of this toaster oven is that it expects to be used for more ovenlike purposes, to the detriment of its usability for bread-toasting. Though I've critiqued it from a bread-toasting perspective, if I were planning to bake things in it, it would not be that bad. Conversely, if it were better fine-tuned for toasting, for instance by having a smaller available time range and thus finer granularity, I would be out of luck for those times when I wanted to cook something in a toaster oven for half an hour. This insistence on providing the user with 30 minutes of timing ability (or any timing ability, for that matter) is what prevents this design from beings as useful as my parents' toaster oven.

Happy Ending

new good shiny toaster that actually makes toast

We got a new toaster for actual bread-toasting. Not only does it have much finer-grained toast color controls, but it's shiny. It includes a "cancel" button to safely abort toasting before the time's up, and includes "defrost" and "bagel" buttons, each with their own light to indicate that option has been selected.