Prior Experience of Domestic Microwave Cooker Interfaces: A User Study

Previous work has considered how the performance levels for daily living product such as a motor car and a digital camera vary with age, generation, cognitive ability and previous experience (Langdon et al., 2007). For both, it was found that there was clear evidence to indicate a reduction in performance with increasing age and an improvement in performance with increasing cognitive ability. The analysis and classification of types of errors made was dominated by response selection; the selection of the wrong response as an action given a particular state of the interface. However, overall, the strongest correlations were found to be between performance measures such as times to complete tasks and the extent of previous experience. Building on the findings of the previous study, 16 users were recruited to complete a set of trials with two microwave cookers from the same manufacturer; one with a dials interface and the other with a buttons interface.