Baking Cookies with IoT

Coauthored by Jessica Wilson

I read an article the other day about a smart oven from GE that you can control with your phone. You can even set up a “recipe” on IF This Than That, which states that if your Nest Thermostat is set to Away and you left your oven on, it will turn your oven off for you. That’s a pretty handy safety feature.

The feature that allows me to preheat my oven from my phone on the other hand, not too much. I’ve never been in a rush to get home and start a pot roast. If that statement made you cock an eyebrow, let me explain:

Part of what consumers find so disappointing about connected devices (and the Internet of Things in general) stems from functionality that doesn’t really help. Take this IFTTT recipe for instance, which turns your Hue lights blue when its raining outside to remind you to take your umbrella. Sure, maybe I will begin to associate the blue lights with rain and think “Oh it’s raining, I should grab my umbrella!” But what if I’m not leaving my house? Now I have blue lights that makes my home feel as gloomy and depressing as the view outside. Changing the colors of lights is not something I already do as a way of remembering things.

What if we made an umbrella stand that worked with The Weather Channel via IFTTT? When it’s raining, or there’s a chance of rain, it would draw my attention to the stand. Maybe the umbrella slides out, or a the light on the stand changes? As it turns out, this is already a product.

As designers and developers we need to remember that our products need to be useable, useful, and desirable. Just because we can we can connect things, doesn’t mean we should. Just because we have the technology, doesn’t mean we should force it as a solution…especially when there’s no problem to begin with.

This got me thinking about my own behaviors and goals. One of my goals is to spend more time with my family. So we instituted a weekly movie night and I bake cookies. Not from scratch, mind you. I buy the pre-made dough from Toll House. Why? Because the process is fast and the cookies are pretty good. The whole thing only takes about fifteen minutes between the time I pull the package out of the fridge to the time I’m parked on the couch with my family and a warm plate of chocolate chip goodness. The point here is that my process supports my goal of spending time with my family. This goal hasn’t changed for many years. What has changed are the tools and technology that allow for me to complete this goal. What once was been a time-consuming, albeit cherished, tradition of baking cookies from scratch, is now a minor preparatory step in the rest of my evening. Thanks to Tollhouse, I can still bake cookies, but in a more efficient manner that allows me to spend more time in the living room, than in the kitchen.

But what if we could make the process of baking cookies even easier? To do this we have to establish my baseline. What are my current behaviors? How long does all of this take? Am I willing to invest in the time setting up a new process? Is it cost efficient? Let’s start by listing out my current steps.

Cookie Baking Process Steps

1. Take Toll House Cookies out of the fridge
2. Open the package
3. Take cookies out and place them on a sheet pan
4. Look at package to get the temperature of the oven and cooking time
5. Pre-heat the oven to 350
6. Wait for the oven to preheat
7. The oven makes a sound to indicate it is up to temperature
8. Open the oven and put the sheet pan of cookies in
9. Take my phone out of my pocket
10. Launch my clock app
11. Select the timer
12. Dial in 11 minutes
13. Start the timer
14. The timer goes off
15. Turn off the timer
16. Open a drawer, grab an oven mitt and put it on
17. Take the cookies out of the oven
18. Turn the oven off
19. Take of the oven mits and return it
20. Wait for cookies to cool

This is twenty steps in about fifteen minutes to enjoy cookies. How can I make this a more efficient process?

Enter Amazon’s Echo with Alexa. I can tell Alexa to set the timer.

From five steps to one step. Same result, Alexa just helps me with the timer. The same amount of steps are used to turn off the timer.

So using an IoT connected device allowed me a small win. Now let’s think about if I had a GE connected oven? Using IFTTT, could I create a recipe ( no pun intended ) that allowed me to use Alexa and my oven together? Imagine walking into the kitchen and saying

“Alexa, let’s make cookies!”

And she would say “Alright Will, I will preheat the oven to 350 degrees.”

Now image that we had sensors on the oven door. When I place the cookies and then close the door, the oven tells Alexa to set the timer for 11 minutes. When the timer goes off, Alexa shuts off the oven and let’s me know my cookies are ready.

Now imagine a not too distant future where, when I open the cookie package, the package itself sets this chain of event into motion. It communicates to Alexa. The steps are automated. The technology being used is helpful and unobtrusive.

Again, even though I have introduced increasing amounts of technology into this scenario, my goal still hasn’t changed. My behavior is just slightly modified by these connected products and services that give me more time to spend with my family. That should be the aim of what we design: help users better achieve their goals. To do this we have to put humans at the center of our design process. Once we understand their needs, motivations and behaviors, then we can experiment with building services and products to support them.