This post has as main character the only utensil that my wife trusts me to use in the kitchen: the microwave.

I use it as 90% of inexperienced cooks to warm up leftovers. And you can guess in the holiday season how much delicious food falls in this category, after big launches and dinner with family and friends.

In the leftovers sometimes ends up also a cup of coffee of the 2 moka pot left over from the previous day (Italian grandma sobbing).

While this morning I was looking at the movement of the coffee cup inside the microwave I was surprised at the simplicity of two of its components: the grid and the button.

Probably the molecules of the coffee were jumping around as the ideas on my mind.

Grid

The first lesson is a short one from physics.

The grid that is in front of the microwave it’s not there for an aesthetic reason. Microwaves used in the oven are of the right frequency to interact with water molecules inside the food, make them move and therefore warm up the food.

The grid is designed to have “holes” small enough to keep the microwaves inside, and don’t warm up your face. On the other hand, the visible light having a shorter wavelength can pass through the grid and you can see your food warming up. Something like this:

You can see how my cooking skills pair up nicely with my drawing ability.

Button

The second one is about User Experience.

While the coffee was warming up, I thought of Randy Au’s article “Everything tries to become a one-stop-shop”. The piece is centered on how products starts small with a clear goal and then over time try to turn into a one stop shop. Indeed it has a paragraph about microwaves:

Mostly, I thought about how the most used button on all microwaves in the world is the “+30sec” button. Even extremely cheap microwaves these days come with all sorts of extra functionality, like turntables, sensor cooking, a digital keypad instead of a knob, and all sorts of other functions that are supposed to help users cook better and easier. But almost everyone chooses to ignore all that extra functionality and press one simple “go!” button multiple times until they get the desired result.

For setting the time on my microwave, you have to rotate a knob that increases (decreases) the time with steps of 10 seconds. For instance I believe the right time for warming up a cup of milk is 1:50 while my wife thinks is 2:00. Anyway, I agree with Ray’s opinion that of the bunch of different buttons that you could use actually the only one needed is the one to select somehow the time. (By the way, after re-reading his article I figured out that pressing the knob the time increases of 30 seconds!)

Why then this proliferation? For capturing a tiny slice of gourmet chefs that want to use a microwave oven instead of a oven? Or probably because as Ray outlines innovation on any product forces it to make it better. How? Adding something. Than competition kicks in: if my competitor makes a microwave with 2 buttons, why not adding a third for defrosting whatever-you-have-in-the-freezer? And why not having one for grilling stuff? Maybe up to a point it makes sense, but then this leads to an explosion of unneeded features. And maybe the only solution is to exit the rat race of adding stuff and going back to a microwave with one button. As the gurus say Less is more.

Time to enjoy the warmed up coffee (Italian grandma crying desperately)!