A Tale of Two Ovens
The Importance of Consistency at Enterprise Level
It happened again. Dinner was going to be late on a school night.
“I thought you turned the oven on!” I say to my frustrated and perplexed wife.
“I did!”
“So… it’s not on. Care to explain?”
“Here — I’ll do exactly what I did before.”
So I watched her, and she did. And as she watched herself do it, she set the oven to Bake, entered the number of degrees on the keypad, and promptly hit the clearly marked red Cancel button:
“Huh,” she said. “That’s stupid”
Ok, what she actually said is not appropriate for transcription in a public forum, but suffice it to say it was a sailor-worthy rant — she’s an ex-sailor — about what morons the designers had to be to put the Cancel button in that spot.
Now, the Start button is right there, not hidden, and labeled appropriately for its function; it’s even a bright white for clarity. And as humans, we know pre-consciously that red is a color of warning, and all the ramifications thereof, even if we have no training in human factors or visual perception. We’ve also had this oven for three years, so we should be used to this by now.
So why is this not the first time this has happened, and why will it almost certainly not be the last?
It’s easily argued that the position of the Cancel button on that stove interface is inanely placed in the lower-right, a spot where we very frequently see an “Enter” or “Continue” control. You’d be perfectly right to argue that, and I’m sure the design issue above contributes to our continued struggles with this oven control interface.
But I’m not here just to address poor button placement or color intensity or a Z- or F-type scan pattern or the recency effect or anything like that. I’m here today to talk about larger challenges in the enterprise design process and people not talking to each other. I believe the fault lies somewhere in the cracks between the enterprise-level structures of Electrolux itself.
This is about larger challenges in the enterprise design process and people not talking to each other.
Don’t get me wrong: this is not a (significant) knock against Electrolux’s generally fine products. When we remodeled our kitchen, we decided to go with nicely matching appliances from a company we generally trust. Not only is Electrolux a solid and time-tested brand, they are Swedish, which — given my wife’s family heritage — is a major bonus. If it’s not Scottish, it had better be Danish or Swedish.
It’s no real surprise that we use the microwave more than the oven. We bake and cook, but as fast-moving parent-professionals, we more often end up reheating yesterday’s coffee and last weekend’s Thai leftovers. The microwave is our go-to.
Given that, when we want to start our process we are programmed pretty efficiently to consistently press “number-number-number-button-in-the-lower-right” to get things done. When one is moving quickly between tasks at the end of a busy day, a three foot distance and different panel context is just not enough to overcome that normally helpful habit of muscle memory.
The oven sits below the matching microwave and they blend together nicely with their satin-textured stainless-steel finish and similar design aesthetic, fonts, and icon choices. Why is it, then, that one of the most critical parts of the control panels — the Start and Cancel controls — are laid out in opposite spots on these two complementary devices?
What makes the disconnect even more surprising is that these two appliances are not only from the same reputable, high-visibility manufacturer, but they are part of the very same appliance collection. So why didn’t they simply make the panels follow the same layout?
What’s ironic is that you can’t turn around without tripping over consistency at enterprise scale; it can be found on practically every street corner. Just go into a McDonalds in almost any country in the world, or a Starbucks, or any fast food chain and you will experience the brand and experience power of enterprise consistency.
But while secret recipes or ideal coffee roasts may take years to develop, scaling a single, documented process to thousands of locations is a lot less complicated than coordinating design directions across multiple products and teams in many locations. In the former case, you have a hub-and-spoke model that takes a lot of guesswork out of the equation; all you need is the equipment that comes with the franchise, the playbook, and some people to do the work and you can be a fully recognizable McDonalds. But the Electrolux global design team spans multiple continents, and each is creating designs for multiple lines with multiple products.
Corporate design and component systems can go a good way towards creating that sort of hub-and-spoke consistency across diverse, distributed teams; it’s effectively the playbook, handed out to bring everyone into alignment and take the guesswork out of design and implementation. And it can work really well for components and interactions, when properly created and socialized and adopted (none of those being simple tasks, mind you).
It becomes a heavier lift, however, to codify patterns, layout combinations, and interactions between components in a large and complex corporate ecosystem, and this is sometimes where things get lost.
Electrolux has a very comprehensive set of brand guidelines, as do most companies. For product design, however, the most I was able to find was a strong statement of design philosophy — “Human Touch” — that outlines seven design principles and purports to guide their process as they create hundreds of appliances across design centers in seven countries. This is great — but without really clear communication between those teams, and an understanding of the user’s experience across the full product journey, those brand guidelines can only go so far in keeping the experience consistent.
Enterprise consistency isn’t just about scan patterns and the recency effect, or even design systems; it needs to involve clear communication between teams across the full user journey.
Apparently the keypad pattern was one of these casualties at Electrolux. Now, the blame for this is not entirely on Electrolux; across companies and devices, the intuitive layout of keypads (if there is one) is often sacrificed to other design considerations, as evidenced by this small selection of microwave controls — note in particular the enthusiastic abandon with which numbers and controls are tossed about:
This consistency is not much better on traditional ovens and ranges:
Even when a now standard 9+1 layout is used as a base, there is only moderate consistency across such applications, from ovens and gas pumps to ATMs and alarm units. Granted, there are quite a number of different form factors to these appliances that teams have to design into… but the simple pattern of a primary action in the lower-right (for Western audiences) seems like it should be an easy one to follow. Apparently it is harder than one might expect.
When it comes to applicances, of course, a company can safely assume that between frequency of use and the length of ownership, users will quickly learn and get used to even the most bizarre control schemes. But that doesn’t excuse such inconsistencies between products in the same suite by a single manufacturer.
As noted above, usability at an enterprise scale needs to be concerned with more than the design of a specific UI, or even the entire set of task flows for a device. Enterprise usability needs to encompass the larger journey, which often includes the flow of experience between workflows and interfaces for different products.
A bright separation between CX and UX is at best a missed opportunity, and at worst can lead to brand-damaging inconsistencies and a broken user experience.
This sort of customer journey is often considered to be the realm of CX (Customer Experience) rather than UX. In most companies these are separate teams altogether, with CX more in the realm of marketing and brand, and UX exclusively aligned with product. They are, to be sure, somewhat different if overlapping disciplines, with CX taking a higher-level view of the entire customer journey, including many touchpoints outside of any interaction with the actual product.
But a bright separation between these two core, user-focused disciplines (as it exists in many places) is at best a missed opportunity, and at worst can lead to brand-damaging inconsistencies and a bumpy or broken user experience. This is particularly true within complex product suites where multiple, distributed teams may be hard at work on separate but closely related parts of what should be a unified whole experience.
The discrepancies in the important details of our Electrolux kitchen are a good example of this breakdown. It will likely not surprise you, then, to learn that the same sort of issues are even more apparent in the often massively complex worlds of SaaS and PaaS, with which I deal on a daily basis.
It is particularly important in such enterprise spaces that UX and CX (in most cases) work together closely: sharing insights, observing each others’ usability tests and focus groups, and working from the same top-level customer journeys and personas. There should be no surprises between these teams, and their collective results should be a tight, unified brand experience from the first hint of awareness to the teriyaki chicken coming out of the oven (in our case).
UX and CX should often work together closely, sharing insights and working from the same top-level customer journey, with no surprises.
We still love our Electrolux — there is a lot to love. I mean, where most ovens are black or silver inside, the Electrolux interior is a deep, Swedish blue… come on! And truth be told, they do a generally good job of making things feel smooth and consistent within their product collections. But these small details of inconsistency across products within the same line are the kinds of issues that can leave small but indelible marks on the reputation of an otherwise strong brand, and can leave average daily users frustrated. And sometimes hungry.
At least we’ve still got that leftover Thai food we can microwave… if we actually remember how to turn it on.
