The Project
Welcome to one of the most unconventional projects I’ve ever worked on. The strangeness of it (for lack of a better word) posed challenges I never thought I'd have to overcome. The project started as a simple visual uplift to the embedded UI on a multi-functional kitchen appliance, but as we UX-ers know, simplicity is never easy.
An Unwinnable Battle (AKA The Catch)
The current UI for this kitchen appliance was anything but intuitive. I was originally tasked with giving the UI and graphics an uplift — but with the constraint of keeping everything where it was.
After attempting to redesign the icons and graphics, I quickly realized that a simple enhancement would do little to nothing to improve the product’s experience and usability.
That’s when I called for a meeting with the product manager to explain that the panel would need to be completely re-tooled and redesigned from the ground up. And it worked — I got the go ahead to begin work the very next day.
Designing for the Past
The largest challenge I’ve had to face in a long time was designing for antiquated technology. Modern screens (like the one on your smartphone) can change on demand, and it’s easier for product designers to draft flows and create scenarios when screens have the ability to change. However, screens in the past (like your old Casio watch) couldn’t do that — they were limited by the number of LED lights they had installed. And that’s the hardest part of designing for embedded GUIs.
The Breakthrough
My thinking had to shift to creating an all-purpose linear task flow. I know task flows are used more by engineers, but in this case, I think it was really beneficial to have one.
I spent a couple weeks meeting with our customer service team to learn more about our specific user’s complaints and frustrations. Being the one in charge of creating user manuals for the company was also a huge plus, as I already had an idea of what people usually struggled with and got confused about when navigating a panel and using an appliance. I decided to keep a dial as the driver for the user, much like a steering wheel, just because of the sheer amount of cooking presets and functions the user had to choose from.
Iterations
The One
While the iterations above were worked on in collaboration with the unit development team, I thought they still looked a little confusing. Multiple knobs made the panel busy, and the text within the panel itself was too small to read for the average consumer, and especially for our target demographic of people 62 and up. With the goal of having one main driver (the dial) to cycle through the cooking functions, I came to the following solution.
Usability Testing
We launched a company-wide test where employees would get a unit with either the original panel or my updated version, and have it for a month and just cook with it. (Many even had other family members try it out, which was great.) And during those 4 weeks, I surveyed my coworkers about their experiences.
As expected from those with the original panel, they told me the unit worked great but that it was hard to just navigate through it. From those with my updated UI, the results however were phenomenal — most didn’t even mention the panel, showing that it was so seamless, they didn't even notice it.
In an Ideal World
In the future, every kitchen appliance will (hopefully) have a great OLED screen that’s easier to see, design for, and use. It’s kind of like what Tesla is doing right now in the auto industry — modernizing our cars and the way we use them, because they know that less is more. I believe it’s only a matter of time before it becomes mainstream in the appliance industry as well, and then every appliance will have the same level of usability — one that’s intuitive and able to change as quickly as the world around it.
Final Thoughts
I remember talking about this project with a friend back in NYC. I had mentioned I was involved in redesigning a UI with the catch that it had to be a static screen with set options. My friend at first didn’t even understand what I was talking about, so I referenced the old Casio watches we used to have as kids. He then gave me a look like “Wow, really? I wouldn’t even know where to start!” and we had a good laugh.
While this project was super unconventional, it really pushed me to shift my thinking and reduce my strategy to the bare bones of what UX really is — getting the user from point A to point B, not always in the fastest way, but always in one that’s seamless:
Drive → Select → Execute
