Usability - Vacuum Cleaner Buttons

I suspect that those who were not allowed to use the software because of extreme incompetence are engaged in the design of interfaces to household appliances. metaclass

Recently, the topic of vacuum cleaners is quite popular in Habré. But today I will speak not about vacuum cleaning robots, but about the usual manual vacuum cleaner, which is in almost every home. Or rather, the buttons for power management and auto-winder cord.

Maybe some still remember the models in which the cord was wound on a vacuum cleaner or disconnected altogether and stored separately. There was no question of buttons for automating this process. When the design became more complicated and there was a need for a cord rewind button, many manufacturers did not come up with anything better than to make a reflection of the power button with a similar icon.

In this approach, there is one plus - most manufacturers use the same location: on the left - the power button, on the right - auto-winding. This is more convenient than hot keys. Pressing will be almost reflexive. If your profession is a cleaner.

Honestly, I get confused in these two buttons more often than in the keys of my laptop, although I have been cleaning every few days for several years. And this article is one of the attempts to understand what is the reason. Perhaps subconsciousness brought up with a childhood owl associates a plug with a power outage? Or I can not hastily discern the same type of round icons, painted in the tone of the whole button?
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Anyway, my personal statistics show that I would use the cord rewind button an order of magnitude less often if I hadn’t poked at it every second time the telephone or vacuum cleaner called would swallow the sock out from under the bed. So it could be done less and closer to the very cord. But for some reason, many designers of home appliances think that without a symmetrical arrangement of the buttons, a normal design will not work. And how do you think habrauzer?