This is inspired UX work, but I doubt it would actually sell washing machines.
My wife and I recently tried to buy a rice cooker. I said "We should buy a $60 rice cooker." She said "We should buy $JAPANESE_BRAND, because it has more features. It will cost us $600." I said "I have, in observing your use of rice cookers, never seen you press any button other than Cook The Rice."
This was not an optimal thing to say.
We will purchase a $600 rice cooker.
[Edit to add: Relatedly, the vast majority of men professing "I do not know how to use a washing machine!" are signaling their values, to whit that they believe washing clothes is beneath their notice, not signaling that they are intellectually incapable of memorizing a four-step process which you could train a chimpanzee to do.]
There is still hope. Microwaves use to have a lot of buttons, but since a few years ago there are some models with only two buttons: “Add 30 seconds” and “Cancel”. I think that most of them are used in public places, like the University cafeteria.
At home, my microwave has only two dials “power” and “time”. I like the time dial, because it’s easier to choose the time analogically that convert it to digits and choose which buttons to push.
The difference being that with a microwave like that if you screw up and add too much time the worst that will happen is that you'll have ruined your meal (and I am expecting that most people are not using microwaves to cook things that cost over ~$10 pretty much ever). If you screw up with a washing machine, even a super dumbed down one, the stakes could be a lot higher; try explaining to your wife how you ruined her $200 (or even $2000) dress because she spilled spaghetti sauce on it and so you pushed the "very dirty" button.
In a sense, I think that washing machines are so popular and there is such a wide variety of them because they do a very good job of selling a lie, and that lie is something like, "I will make it so that you do not have to think when you do laundry." People who have to interact with these machines tend to realize that this is a lie pretty early on, and that no, you still have to think to use the machine. However, the sheer magnitude of things they have to think about (colors, material, water temperature, volume, intensity of spinning, detergent, surfactant) can be overwhelming. When coupled with the fact that there is usually no good, solid guide that you can just read and go "Oh, now I know exactly how to wash all of my clothes and have no fear that they will get ruined!" and the fact that the washing machine is still sitting there, whispering that lie at you, that this should be easy because you have a washing machine, the cognitive dissonance can get pretty strong. At the same time, it's subtle enough that we usually don't realize that if we took a couple of hours to study it and better understand how these things work we'd probably be fine. So instead we cautiously try to find a couple of collections of settings that work pretty well for most of our stuff. Once we find them then we stick with those programs and usually it works out pretty well, but there's still that tiny fear in the back of our minds that maybe this time will be the one where something goes Horribly, Horribly Wrong.
I usually do the laundry. I’ll just repeat one of my sibling comments:
I use my washing machine regularly and it’s easy. Always use the “11” program (35°C=95°F). You can also use the “1” program (90°C=195°F) if you don’t want to see your cloths again. It has all the numbers between 1 and 16, but I guest they are not real, only for cosmetic purpose :).
[Note: She once used “1”. It was not a good idea.]
I separate the cloth by color: white, blue, red, black, yellow+green, gray goes with white or black. (Be careful with blue, because it will usually stain the other cloths. Sometimes red may stain too, but blue always stains.) Always in “11” (35°C=95°F). Then dryer.
Personally I feel microwaves are getting less usable. They used to have a numpad and a "Go" button. Now they have dials, programs, modes, and of course cryptic iconography.
The reason that microwaves and washing machines are like this is that the two use cases "Buying an appliance" and "Using an appliance" are wildly divergent, as patio11 hinted. When using an appliance, your thought is, "Just let me push one stupid button to accomplish this task and get on with my life." But when shopping for an appliance, you are weighing cost, features, aesthetics, brand name, perceived value, and so on.
We can tease that this is due to gender roles, but the fact is that I know all the above, and yet I just spent 25 minutes in a Target trying to decide which toaster to buy.
Just stereotyping the other way around: how do things work out if you want a new tv, computer, or car and she says she has never seen you do anything else than click next/prev channel, read HN, or drive 20 miles an hour in traffic on Tarmac?
I was going to protest the "for Men" title, and suggest that if 58% of British men can't understand how to use a washing machine then that's an unflattering reflection of gender imbalance in household chores; "men just need to learn how to do it."
But then I saw the pictures, and remembered my time living in London and traveling in Europe, and how confusing I found the washing machines and their universe of iconography (every single machine has different icons).
I grew up in New Zealand, where we had a locally designed Fisher & Paykel washing machine [1]. It had a few settings, but there was one default called "regular" that invariably did a good job, so I always just used that - I would literally turn the machine on and press "start". It figured out the water level for itself.
Now that I live in an apartment block in the USA I use a shared commercial coin-operated Maytag washing machine. It probably has even fewer options than the Fisher & Paykel. My wife and I take turns doing the washing, and the only settings we ever change are "warm" (underwear, socks, towels) or "cold" (everything else). That's it, and it works perfectly.
I don't know why feature-creep plagues European washing machines but it reminds me of late 90s / early 2000s PCs with their byzantine terminology and myriad acronyms.
I laughed out loud at the horrific GUI icons. We've got "wash a peacock" which probably violates some animal cruelty laws "the headless horseman is drowning" which is probably emergency shutdown because a pet got into the machine (see above) "turn counter clockwise to loosen screws" aka enter maintenance mode or "tip recliner chair over backwards" which is probably some nod to the auto-balancer for the spin cycle, probably. I just love GUIs, they make interfaces so intuitive and simple compared to plain text menus.
The weird part of the article is for decades I've been stuck doing the laundry because its a "programming job" which is more my lifestyle than my wife, so I'm way more comfortable doing it than her. The washing machine is already a "mans washing machine". The "womans washing machine" would have one button labeled "nag husband" to notify me, and a separate set of controls for me to actually use when I arrive. I have a gut feeling that HN readers are going to get stuck programming the washing machine regardless of their sex unless their S.O. is the superior programmer in the family. Its the same way with cooking, its a simple procedural program with a couple subroutines and some library routines, whats so complicated about cooking other than the real time OS aspects of trying to get a whole meal to completion more or less simultaneously?
Personally I think a data flow diagram UI would be a heck of a lot simpler and easier to use. Its the kids stuff so its filthy so soak and scrub the hell out of it in high temp water. Its my biz casual work clothes so press "permanent press" button and walk away. Its blankets and sheets so slow spin because its going to be out of balance no matter the supposed auto-balancer. This is intuitive with a data flow diagram or procedural programming but pretty mystifying with an object oriented GUI where everything is marketing trademark or incomprehensible icons.
The other comedy is its a commentary on lifestyle where its important to spend hours a month studying fashion and hours standing in stores to make a selection but once you do the only reason for existence, that being consuming, once its bought then spending 30 seconds and no money learning how to keep it clean is just waaaaay tooooo muuuch, so just walk around like pigpen or wearing pastel colored former-whites or whatever other epic fails.
I also forgot GUI issues WRT greenwashing. My washer is green but that ruins clothes, so every time you boot it up you have to tell it to rinse the soap out, and let it soak a bit, and run the spin extra long to get rid of water, and use warmer water. Or just wash everything twice, which wastes far more water than just doing it correctly the first time.
Its always easier to ship something that meets the numbers but doesn't actually work, than to ship something that both meets the numbers and works. Therefore you have to do a lot of programming every time you boot up, to prevent "save the planet".
Eventually we'll need to flash the eeproms to get some super greenwashed appliance to actually work. But for now, the UI involves a lot of "useless" reconfiguration on every boot.
Aside from the washer, both the dryer and the dishwasher and the fridge and the thermostat are greenwashed out of the box and need reprogramming to actually work. The fridge wanted to greenly keep my food at like 55F until reconfigured away from green mode, now it works fine.
I use my washing machine regularly and it’s easy. Always use the “11” program (35°C=95°F). You can also use the “1” program (90°C=195°F) if you don’t want to see your cloths again. It has all the numbers between 1 and 16, but I guest they are not real, only for cosmetic purpose :).
My wife and I recently tried to buy a rice cooker. I said "We should buy a $60 rice cooker." She said "We should buy $JAPANESE_BRAND, because it has more features. It will cost us $600." I said "I have, in observing your use of rice cookers, never seen you press any button other than Cook The Rice."
This was not an optimal thing to say.
We will purchase a $600 rice cooker.
[Edit to add: Relatedly, the vast majority of men professing "I do not know how to use a washing machine!" are signaling their values, to whit that they believe washing clothes is beneath their notice, not signaling that they are intellectually incapable of memorizing a four-step process which you could train a chimpanzee to do.]