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Coffee machines in America as told by an Italian
A few days ago I used for the first time an American coffee maker. You might think that this is absurd, but I had never seen one out of movies before coming here as an exchange student. I knew it was going to be a really long day for me, so I decided to make myself some coffee with the machine that I have in my kitchen, which after some research I found that is called Black+decker 12-Cup* Programmable Coffeemaker. I was too lazy to look it up on the internet at first, thinking it was going to be straightforward enough for me to know how to use it without any help. Never have I been more wrong.
I pulled the machine closer to me in order to examine it better. In my head I was trying to compare it to a traditional Italian moka, the really simple device I have always used to make coffee, but I soon found out that the two couldn’t be more different. My mental model reflected a device that has no technological components, allowing you only put water in one container and then press the coffee on top of it. When you are done with these steps you only have to put it on the stove and turn on one of the burners. I can say that the key components were the same in my mental model and in the conceptual model, but the similarities ended there.
At first I noticed on the side a series of measurements, so I rightfully assumed that the water would go in that section. To be honest, that was as far as I could go in understanding how the machine worked. I tried opening up the top and I found a small container where I assume I would put coffee. I started setting the coffee powder inside, but it didn’t look right at all. This is the first big discrepancy that my mental model and the conceptual model had. I had to ask my friends to find out that to make coffee with these machines you need a filter. I didn’t know what this type of filter looked like so I searched around the kitchen for something with a label that would tell me. When I finally found them I have to admit that they looked nothing like I expected. Nevertheless, I successfully placed the coffee powder in the filter and then the filter inside the previously mentioned container.
Now that the coffee and the water were in their rightful place I assumed that the hard part would be over. Yet, once again, I was wrong. I closed the lid and looked down at the buttons. I don’t know why I hadn’t looked before, nor what I expected the features to be. I was torn between expecting something like a kettle, with one button that would just brew your coffee, or something like a microwave with dozens of options but at least one with a simple function, easy to understand and use. There was no such button, obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing about this experience here.
The buttons that you can see on the coffee machine are labeled: “power”, “strong”, “brew later”, “hour” and “min”. Since I am a stubborn person and I didn’t want to waste time looking how to use it on the Internet, I intuitively pressed the power button and it light up the display, which showed a time stamp of 12.00, which couldn’t be the current time since it was early morning. I waited a couple of seconds and listened for sounds as evidence that something was happening and my coffee was actually being prepared, but nothing happened. Since the labels on all the other buttons referenced a time stamp, I assumed that pressing the power button would just mean that the coffee would be brewed at 12.00. Since my goal was to make coffee immediately I had to find another way.
I tried pressing the strong button and, no surprise here, there was still dead silence. I pressed the “brew later” button and again, nothing happened. I then decided to press the “hour” button and the display changed to show a time stamp of 1.00. Intuitively enough, the “hour” and “min” buttons allowed you to change that time, so I was able to set it at the current time. As I pressed the brew later button again, the display became fixed and the machine started brewing my coffee, which meant that I was able to achieve my goal successfully.
I think that this whole experience wasn’t necessarily complicated for someone who is familiar with a coffee maker, even if it not the same model. I can see that the machine is fairly simple with few functions that are easy to remember, as soon as I managed the first time, it was easy to use. This means, in usability terms, that the device is learnable and memorable, even if it was not intuitive for me.
Update
After I finished writing this, as I was looking up pictures of that particular coffee maker on the internet, I stumbled across the instruction manual. I started reading it out of curiosity and I found out that the power button allows you to brew coffee immediately, which makes the assumption I made before wrong. When I arrived home I decided to test it out and that is actually the case, the machine just takes a little bit more to start working. This doesn’t explain why the display says 12.00 for no apparent reason. To me, this remains a mistery.