Emotional Design Fail: Divorcing My Nest Thermostat [Nielsen Norman Group] - http://www.nngroup.com/article...
Feb 25, 2015
from
Brent Schaus,
Laura Norvig,
Jenny H.,
Eivind,
imabonehead,
Aloof Schipperke,
John (bird whisperer),
Big Joe Silenced,
and
Jennifer Dittrich
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Article from Feb 22, 2015 by Kara Pernice: "Summary: Don Norman’s 3 levels of emotional design (visceral, behavioral, and reflective) helped me understand how my pure love for the Nest thermostat morphed into abhorrence. I was a proud early adopter of the unique, cool, and pretty device. It helped me save energy, and communicated to me. But things went bad when it let me down emotionally."
- Stephen Mack
More: "[...] When I turned the dial to increase the heat to 66 degrees, rather than responding by making the house warmer, or by informing me that it is now working toward this, it read, "in 1 hour and 20 minutes 66 degrees until 10:00PM.” The next day the house temperature plummeted to a punishing 50 degrees (I realize I may be spoiled) for no reason I was privy to. Here, by the way, is another usability heuristic not heeded: visibility of system status.
Try as I might, it won’t listen."
- Stephen Mack
She details how with her Nest, she can't actually set the temperature. I'm not a Nest owner, but that's shocking to me. Really? It won't let you actually switch on the heat or the A/C? It thinks it knows better than you what the temperature should be?
- Stephen Mack
(Hidden motive: Part of why I'm posting this is because Cristo hates Jakob Nielsen so much that I'm hoping this will irk him into reactivating his FF account just to berate the user design model being leveraged here.)
- Stephen Mack
I never had any trouble setting my Nest to the temperature I wanted, reliably -- barring when my furnace actually broke. Every once in a while, it would take a small change in habits a bit too far, but it was trivial to go in and readjust the schedule. You can also turn that function off, and set it all manually. My only beef with them right now is that when I got my new furnace (almost identical to the past model,) it wouldn't work for some reason. I've been too lazy to go in and try to fix it, but probably will in the next few weeks or so.
- Jennifer Dittrich
I never had a problem with mine.
- Glen Campbell
Haven't read through the entire article yet but I have two and have had no issues changing temps.
- rønin
So this writer is divorcing for all the wrong reasons.
- Stephen Mack
Pretty much. It's like she never even bothered to read the simple documentation, much less the more complicated. When it says "in 1 hour and 3 minutes" it is telling you how long it is likely to take for your house to reach that temperature. It visually indicates (by showing red, blue, or white) in the meter whether the furnace/ac is currently active, or passive (the picture shown is the AC, in an active state.)
- Jennifer Dittrich
@Stephen you can set the temperature with your Nest. (Of course)
- Louis Gray