Retrospective: A low-tech girl’s journey to design for the high-tech home.

Christina Luchkiw
Jul 27, 2017 · 8 min read

GA UXDI Project One: Design an interactive prototype of a mobile application for the connected home.

For a girl who likes to keep things old-school, developing a mobile app for the connected home was not exactly an easy task. Where would I even begin? The home in general is such a broad category, and for a person who doesn’t even own a microwave, let alone a TV, I was about to enter some unfamiliar territory.

So, tuning in to my innate curiosity, I decided to go exploring. First stop: the kitchen. I went to a friend’s house for a home-cooked dinner the night we received the assignment, and observing the clearly well-used kitchen— filled with utensils, appliances, storage spaces and even an analog timer — I felt I was in prime problem-solving territory. Witnessing the complexity of this one room of the household and someone hard at work inside of it, I decided the kitchen would be my area of focus and embarked on my design process accordingly.

The Research

There were little time and little resources to dig deeper into what I anticipated would be fertile ground for developing a design solution. The plan was to conduct three user interviews with my classmates, comprised primarily of well-educated city dwellers who had newly transitioned to student life. I was more than ready to dive in.

However, with awareness of my cognitive bias — I’m an avid cook with minimal counter space and a pretty tight budget — I decided to take a step back and consider what I might first need to know about my users before jumping straight to their kitchen habits. Maybe they live in a studio apartment that doesn’t have a true “kitchen.” Maybe they use their ovens as extra storage space. Maybe they’ve never touched a spatula, or eat every meal outside of the home. And through this “beginner’s mindset” I developed a discussion guide and conducted my user interviews.

I started my interviews broadly asking users to describe their homes, tell me how they’ve recently spent their time there, and then narrowed down the discussion to meals, grocery shopping, and time spent in the kitchen. “Tell me about the last time you enjoyed a meal at home,” I asked each respondent, eventually drawing a wealth of insights (within the constraints of three interviews, that is) that helped to inform my product design.

Findings

Three 15-minute user interviews and an affinity map later, I was coming closer to a product concept. A few interesting trends had emerged, namely that respondents:

  • are highly connected to technology
  • multitask to save time
  • are conscious of saving time and money
  • ascribe a positive emotional value to food
  • have a desire to cook, but to do so quickly and easily

““When I come home from a long day at work, I immediately think about food. I feel like I’ve earned a good meal.” — Respondent #1

Affinity Mapping Begins!

Based on the above findings, I was able to come up with a problem statement…

Urban professionals need a faster and easier way to cook meals at home to save time and money.

…And also make some design decisions:

  1. To address the users’ love of food and desire to cook, I wanted to design a product to help make cooking more pleasant.
  2. To address the trend of multi-tasking, I wanted to design a product that allowed users to save time by cooking while completing other tasks.
  3. To address the problem of saving money, I wanted to make the product simple so that users would feel more inclined to cook at home.

The Product: Heat It!

After an ideation session with 2 other classmates — we spent a strict 5 minutes on each of our problem statements brainstorming as many crazy solutions as possible — I decided to run with a connected kitchen concept that would cover all three of the aforementioned design decisions: Heat it! A mobile app to control your stove and oven anywhere, anytime.

Sample Use Cases:

  • Preheat your oven on your way home from work to avoid waiting around when you arrive at home.
  • Switch your stove from high to simmer while doing your laundry. No more need to drop what you’re doing and move to the other room!
  • Turn off your oven on your way to the dentist just in case you forgot. Forget those worries that might make you turn around even though you’ve already spent 10 minutes walking to the subway.

For my first round of sketches, I wanted to keep things really simple. After all, what was often stopping my users from cooking in the first place was the time and effort they felt they had to put into it. To ensure the app was intuitive for any cooking skill level and to avoid reinventing the wheel, I researched the web to explore basic oven functions and the various oven and stove interfaces out there on the US market.

Common oven settings included:

  • Bake
  • Broil
  • Slow Cook
  • Keep Warm
  • Set temperature
  • Start
  • Off

Many oven interfaces also included a screen to indicate current and desired temperature, and an option to set and start a timer. I’d include these basic functions and settings in my first prototype iteration, and map them out simply and clearly on the mobile app interface. This served as the basis for my initial sketches, which would demonstrate the app’s ability to let users remotely control their ovens. Iteration 1 also included an emergency off button on the home page so that users could turn off the entire oven and stove unit in the event they forgot to do so before leaving the house.

Heat It! 1.0

User Testing

Once I had my sketches in order and the interactive functionalities set up in a Marvel prototype, it was time to start testing the product out with the people who’d actually use it. Again turning to my classmates, I identified four users with busy schedules and who cooked at least once per week.

User testing in action

Before each test, I provided users with a task scenario:

“You’re 10 minutes away from home and want to start preheating your oven so it’s ready when you arrive. Set your oven to bake at your desired temperature.”

Users across the board found the app to be simple and intuitive, clearly understanding the icons on the screen and rarely hesitating to ask themselves questions as to how to complete the requested task. “I would definitely use this,” commented one user after completing every step of the walkthrough, “It’s simple. I like it.”

However, the initial design may have been a bit too simple, as 100% of the users requested the addition of some feature they’d like to see on the application. Repeated recommendations included:

  • Adding a universal “Emergency Off Switch” on every screen (safety concerns emerged as a significant theme during user testing)
  • Removing redundant buttons (e.g. users found the presence of both a “set” and “check” button on screen #3 to be repetitive)
  • Adding an option to turn the oven off on screen #5
  • Adding the ability to skip screens for a more flexible flow

My first round of testing complete, it was time to return to the drawing board.

Heat It! 2.0

Keeping my users at the forefront of my second iteration, I did my best to to maintain a simple interface design while adding several additional features based on their design feedback.

Screen 2: Change #1

Change #1: To address the users’ safety concerns, I added a universal emergency off button at the top right corner of every screen.

Adding this feature made the switch more accessible throughout the entire flow, as users would not need to return to the home page in case of an emergency.

Screen 3: Change #2

Change #2: I added a clickable stove icon to the top of each screen, so that users could switch back and forth between remotely managing their stove and oven in the event they were using both at the same time.

In other words, this would reduce time spent completing the task of switching to the stove by removing the unnecessary process of returning to the home screen.

Screen 4: Change #3

Change #3: I added a home icon to provide users with more options as to how they could switch between screens.

Before including this option, the users would have to repeatedly click the “back” arrow icon if they wanted to return to the home screen.

Screen 4: Change #4

Change #4: I removed redundant buttons on screen #4 to enhance the simplicity of the interface. More specifically, I eliminated the “set” button that appeared next to the temperature and time input, as the users felt the “check” button at the bottom of the screen sufficed.

Screen 5: Change #5

Change #5: Finally, I added an “off” button on screen #5 (the oven dashboard) so that users could shut off the oven not only in case of an emergency, but also when their food was ready. (I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of this!)

This added button was the perfect function for a scenario in which the food in the oven was finished, but the items on the stove still needed more time.

I was feeling relatively confident that these added features would make Heat It! much more user-friendly, but the work was certainly not over yet.

Next Steps

Heat It! still has a long way to go before a product launch, but as with every design process, there are some immediate next steps that could add to the the product’s eventual success.

First, I would revisit my relatively brief user research and conduct more interviews and observations to draw insights about the process of cooking a meal. With this new information, I would create a storyboard documenting the users’ actions, thoughts and emotions to inform the refinement and development of Heat It!’s existing features and future functionalities.

Next, I would conduct user tests of Heat It! 2.0 to determine the utility and usability of the changes made to the first iteration.

Finally, I would sketch additional features and functionalities (e.g. stove controls), creating a prototype that I would test with users in a similar manner to what’s documented in this retrospective.

The Journey Continues…

This design project is only the first of many adventures along my new path into the world of UX design. Despite the excitement, ideas, and inspiration that characterized Project 1 I have a feeling that the best is yet to come.

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