SmartOven
Interaction Design, App Design, Usability
1 MONTH - GROUP PROJECT
SmartOven is a mobile app that is fully-integrated with your home oven.
Tools
Physical Prototypes, Adobe XD, Rhino, Keyshot
Methods
Wireframing, Competitive Audit, Journey Mapping, User Testing, User Persona, Storyboarding
DESIGN CHALLENGE
How might we design an oven interface that is easy and intuitive to use for users that cook on a weekly basis?
Competitive Audit
To inform our design process and identify pain points in oven interfaces currently on the market, we conducted a competitive audit, from budget models to higher-end ranges, at a local appliance retailer.
Some of the key features tested included semantics, signifier of start and stop, haptic experience, and different types of touch targets (i.e. touch screen, knob, etc.).
Design Opportunities
Recognizable Semantics
The standardized icons used in most oven interfaces were not legible to users. Most users relied on a single oven setting function to cook their food.
Analog vs. Digital
Touch targets varied across the oven ranges, from completely analog knobs to digital touchscreens and some combination of the two. The signifier of start and stop was not always clear within the user flow.
Interior Visibility
All the ovens offered some visibility to the interior of the oven in the form of a glass door window, helping cooks to watch the progress of their dish, but cooks still have to open the door to check for doneness.
USER TESTING: PHASE ONE
The focus of the first user dialogue will be user flow: do users understand the path to complete a task within the app? Are the series of steps to complete this action logical and intuitive?
Research Findings
Low fidelity, paper prototypes in greyscale represented initial ideas for a mobile app that would integrate with the physical oven, opening up the possibility for features like remote start.
The users testing group commented using grey scale made it difficult to distinguish between certain interactions in the design. Refining the look and feel of the wireframes with a higher-fidelity and fully-interactive color prototype was a clear next step.
The tests also revealed a need for more consistent semantics across the different tools within the app. Consistency is fundamental to usability and the lack of it was a glaring issue during the first round of user tests.
USER TESTING: PHASE TWO
The second phase of usability testing utilized a functional, high-fidelity prototype in Adobe XD.
Design Approach
A mobile-based app that is fully-integrated with a smart oven.
Using the SmartOven app, users can preheat the oven, view cooking progress from the oven’s internal camera, import recipes, and receive cooking instructions for different dishes.
From our research, many users did not prefer preset recipes in an oven. Many home cooks like to find new recipes on the web, whether via YouTube, blogs, etc. The SmartOven app allows you to bookmark recipes and view them on the oven’s screen interface, so that you can easily follow along with the recipe.
Importing Recipes
Using Optimum Character Recognition (OCR) technology, users can scan a picture from a cookbook, import a recipe from an online blog post, or write their own recipes within the app.
They can also attach program settings notes (i.e. temp, time, and oven mode) to the recipe, so that the oven will assist them with preheating the oven.
Internal Camera
Heat escapes every time you open the oven door, impacting the final result. The internal camera allows users to view the interior of the oven so they can check on the progress of their meal, even from another room.
Users can quickly and easily make changes to their oven settings directly from the camera view tool.
Kitchen Assistant
To make the most of your oven, an additional info button elaborates on the functionality of different heat settings and their best use. A Kitchen Assistant feature suggests cook settings for particular meals by type, weight, and preferred doneness.
And when a dish turns out perfectly to taste, users can save the cook settings for a quick start.
