The Good Enough Button: Balancing Customizability and Simplicity

The microwave in my college apartment can heat food for one minute and eighty seconds. My roommate tried it one night, and it counted down from 01:80. It has specific baked potato, pizza, beverage, frozen dinner, cook by weight, defrost by weight and speed defrost buttons.

I've never used a more customizable microwave in my life. Unfortunately, it's not customizable in a way that's useful. I would give up all those buttons for the one I used the most at home: "30 sec."

Sometimes improving a product doesn't come from adding more functionality but instead from re-bundling existing functionality in a way that makes it less mentally taxing to use.

Forcing the user to control how long to heat their food every time they use the microwave adds a small but noticeable cognitive load to the process. On the other hand, having express buttons that simply heat for 30 seconds or 1 minute removes the mental friction of deciding exactly how long to cook the food. Such buttons don't take away any functionality from the microwave; you can still enter exact times if you want, but they allow the user to bypass the decision fatigue of picking an exact number 95% of the time.

The beautiful thing about an express button is that you barely have to think to use it. Of course, by going with a "one-size-fits-all" option your food may come out too hot or too cold, but that can happen even when you decide precisely how long to warm your meal. Most of the time, I don't need my food to be heated to perfection. I just need it to be good enough.

Good design limits the mental toll of using a product, not with extraneous features or dumbed-down functionalities, but through thoughtful simplification of its most common use cases.