The IC3 Blue Train - A little journal about design, marketing, sales and other matters

An open letter to Jim Stephen, President and Chief Executive Officer of Weber-Stephen Products Co., 200 East Daniels Road, Palatine, IL 60067-6266, U.S.A.

Dear Mr Stephen,

This is about the user experience of a nervous owner of one of your Q Gas Grill ‘systems’. First, the good news: mine works fine (phew!). The bad news: this product is a case study in bad user-centred design. You have good engineers but you don’t seem to have any designer focusing on usability. Moreover, what about marketers making the whole experience as friendly as possible rather than, it seems, lawyers obsessed about potential liabilities?

Joy of Cooking?

Let’s start with the Owner’s Guide. The first two pages include 42 WARNING or DANGER triangles and nothing else. The 12 pages of the Guide contain no less than 74 of these triangles. I felt I was about to operate a nuclear space craft.

After these two pages describing all catastrophes that could happen, you get to the “Cooking” section that represents a whopping 2% of the Guide. This is followed by “Cleaning” – already! – come on, I haven’t even started; but I get two more warnings. Then “Parts List” and “Assembly” – aha! –action at last. Actually, putting together the ‘flying saucer’ was quite straightforward.

At that point you start to relax. But you quickly face three pages of “Gas Instructions” that are downright scary. I read just enough to connect my gas cylinder. At that time, I was getting hungry. So, I jumped to “Lighting Instructions”, followed all the steps and … nothing happened: I had forgotten to open the tap on the cylinder (not supplied by Weber). Second attempt: open cylinder tap, open grill knob, press the little red button and … whoopee: little blue flames brighten up the burner. Bring the rump steak.

The Tap, the Knob and the Button .

Sounds like a western-spaghetti? The tension is the same. We are entering here the land of design flaws. My cylinder tap operates as one would expect: turn counter-clockwise to open, because it’s gas (if it were electricity, it would be clockwise). The Weber knob [see yellow arrows] operates like a normal gas stove’s: counter-clockwise to open, and then still counter-clockwise to reduce the gas flow – the opposite of what you do to reduce the water flow from a water tap. Isn’t that weird? Finally, there is a little red button to create a spark that launches the whole craft into cooking orbit.

The first problem is that the Q Gas Grill knob is half hidden by the handle [see picture left] when the right flap is still folded on the grate and totally out of the sight for a normal user in standing up position when the flap is open (and, if you don’t open the flap, it will burn on top of the grate).

 At that point, your right hand is blindly controlling the knob; so your eyes are free to look for the ignition button … that is at the opposite side of the grill, far left [red arrow in the top picture]. OK, once you’ve done it twice, you sort of get used to all that jazz and perform the whole sequence without problem. However, wouldn’t it be more logical to put the red button close to the knob? The current design looks to me as the result of engineers worrying more about making their job easy and the device cost effective than about the poor ‘end-user’.

Amenities?

My Q Gas Grill stands of top of the companion trolley sold by Weber. It seems that designers of kitchen counters, BBQs and other similar items have not realised that the average height of humans has significantly increased over the last century. Why should we get backache when we cook?

Here, the Q Gas Grill ‘features’ another flaw: the three little hooks [see blue arrows in the top picture] provided to hang up utensils are too low. Standard utensils tend to touch the ground and the position of the hooks at the front of the grill make the appearance of greasy stain on users’ shoes and/or trousers very probable. Why not put the hooks on the left side? Fine, but they would be hidden by the other flap. Oops!

Here’s a possible solution: allow both flaps to slide on their rotation axis. Sliding the right flap would make the knob visible. Sliding the left one would give easy access to the utensils. Your lawyers would probably ask you to add another dozen of warnings concerning what is reasonable to put on the flaps after take-off; but your customers would gain in terms of usability.

Or you could of course re-design the whole grill, this time starting from the user, and reinforce your leadership position on the BBQ market, don’t you think so?

Yours sincerely,

Henri Aebischer