I will say this much: that seems totally intuitive to me. You tap the button for the burner you want, then tap the +/- buttons to get your temperature, right? I like having each burner's setting readout all together in one place, as well.
Everything else about it is terrible. Oven controls need to be tactile, they need to be immediate, and they need to not be three inches from a hot pan. That'll cause enough burns just from fumble-fingering in normal use--now imagine that your pan has caught fire and you're trying to select the left front burner and press - 8 times while your hand is showered with flaming grease. Who could possibly have thought this was a good idea?
This is a long-solved problem. Stoves have dials to turn the burners on and select the temperature. Done, solved. This is one of those things that a simple, mechanical control is best.
You need to visit a kitchen showroom. The knobs have vanished and you have stupid bits of glass that don't do anything then go up 3 increments when they finally recognise input.
Well, that's not exactly true. You just need to either buy a very cheap hob(so that touch controls are above the price range) or go for the high-high end where manufacturers understand that knobs are better experience. All Rangemaster hobs have knobs:
Touch buttons are so much better on stoves than rotating knobs. Its not just a design gimmick. I used stoves with both, and with the touch buttons cleaning the stove after cooking it's a matter of wiping once. With the knobs on the other hand it's really hard to clean, you might need to remove them clean them and replace them.
From your post I assume that the stoves you tried had the rotating knobs on top of the stove (where the touch controls in the above picture are?)
That in fact sounds like a really bad idea, but in the European countries where I have lived, the typical "good ol' knob" stove had the knobs placed vertically right above the oven, not on the top of the stove. Like this:
So the problem you mention doesn't exist because the knobs aren't something you have to clean after cooking, you're OK cleaning them once per week.
I personally prefer the knobs because stoves with touch buttons tend to beep and turn themselves off when water or oil gets on the controls, which is a quite common circumstance when they're 2 or 3 cm away from a boiling pot. I don't know who had the great idea of designing controls that don't work when wet and putting them in a place that will very often get wet - OK, if you are careful you can avoid it, but I shouldn't need to be careful with that when cooking. Sometimes (e.g. for cooking a big crab) it's very convenient to fill a pot almost to the brim with water for boiling and just dry the water that comes out afterwards, with the touch buttons you just can't do that.
The real problem with these new UIs is lack of choice. I can live with the touch buttons, but my grandma can't, she's 86 and she just doesn't learn new interfaces at that age. Her stove recently broke and we had a really hard time to find another vitroceramic one with knobs, because apparently they don't make them anymore. We finally found an old model somewhere and probably paid it quite overpriced.
I'm pretty sure the only reason those touch buttons are being put on appliances is because they are both much cheaper to manufacture than knobs or physical switches, while at the same time looking modern.
I do not know if this applies to all stoves with tactile buttons, but the one I have turns itself off if anything hot is put on the buttons. This happens both if you overcook something and boiling water/food pours all over the stove, or if you happen to put a frying pan on the buttons.
But yes, overall I do agree with you. My one major annoyance is that changing temperatures is slower than with a rotating knob.
You'd think it's hard to screw up a rotating knob, but they've found ways to do that as well! When I went shopping for a stove years ago I found out that some have knobs that only go one way, so to switch a burner to max, you have to twist it all the way around. Extremely annoying.
I ended up going to a showroom and twisting all the knobs of all the stoves to find out which ones didn't have that limitation. I must have looked like a crazy person, but I got one I liked in the end.
The stove I ended up buying had one variable-size burner, and that knob had a bounce-back switch at the end, so you have to turn that knob the wrong way around to max it, but I could live with that. Why a regular burner would have the limit beats me. The only thing I could think of would be some sort of extremely crude and ineffective child-protection, but all stoves have a child-lock anyway, so what's the use?
The stove where I live right now has knobs whose full range of motion is a quarter-turn, and the flame goes out if you turn it more than halfway down, so effectively you only have one-eighth of the knob to use. If you try to set it to low heat, you'll usually go too far and put the flame out unless you pick up the pan and watch the burner while turning the knob a millimeter at a time.
It's absolutely amazing what people can manage to screw up.
One integration test should be to take the engineer in charge, bind one arm behind his back and tell him to make Spaghetti aglio olio peperoncini for Gordon Ramsey waiting with a Santoku knife ready for some action.
Edit: To clarify - Aglio olio is what they cook in prison in Good Fellas. It's both the most simplest pasta dish and the easiest to screw up - overcook the garlic a bit and you get garlic chips instead of melting their flavour into the sauce.
Used an 80s microwave for the first time in years, a few months back. I'd forgotten how nice they are.
Power knob (the kind that clicks to exact positions), timer knob. Only interface. Set power (or don't if it's already where you want it), turn timer to where you want it. Done. Pull door to open, not even a button for that. 100x better than the interface on modern microwaves.
I will say this much: that seems totally intuitive to me. You tap the button for the burner you want, then tap the +/- buttons to get your temperature, right? I like having each burner's setting readout all together in one place, as well.
Everything else about it is terrible. Oven controls need to be tactile, they need to be immediate, and they need to not be three inches from a hot pan. That'll cause enough burns just from fumble-fingering in normal use--now imagine that your pan has caught fire and you're trying to select the left front burner and press - 8 times while your hand is showered with flaming grease. Who could possibly have thought this was a good idea?