I was working on a design challenge to “design a mobile app for microwave ovens.” It was pretty vague and broad so I decided to do something I thought would be fun and interesting.
While reading around for some inspiration, I found this article by Brian Huang called “Using a Microwave Shouldn’t Be This Confusing” on designing better experiences for physical products, in this case, a microwave oven. I thought the article was interesting and I wanted to try designing something around this problem while learning how to do better UX.
“Using a Microwave Shouldn’t Be This Confusing”
In his article, Brian talks about the complexity of controlling microwave ovens, especially for the first time. And how we learn to use them by trial, error, repetition and a splash of frustration. He mentions UX challenges with complex ovens such as ovens with no labels to complement icons where only icons are used to describe functions and action buttons that stray too far away from the users’ mental model of an oven.
Where My Project Came In
I wanted to design something around this UX problem and although Brian’s article focused more on improving UX for physical products (microwave ovens), this project would be using a digital product to try improving the UX of the physical product.
It Began with — Observation & Asking Questions:
As Brian suggested, I went to our office break room and idly (I had to drink a few cups of coffee to try to look casual) watched my colleagues using the kitchen microwave oven.
Here’s what I noticed;
- My colleagues would press one button to open the oven
- Then press another button to start the oven (the oven timer automatically sets at 1:00)
- Press again to increase the timer by another 1:00
- No other buttons were pressed. Just those two.
It occurred to me that my colleagues had probably already learned how to use the oven, possibly by watching others and by trial and error. (I admit the first time I used the oven, I had to watch two people use it first). So I was looking at the wrong users. All my colleagues already knew what to do to get the barest minimum — a heated meal.
But what about someone that was just trying the oven for the first time? Would they know what to do? Trying to work with the challenge deadline, I skipped observing and started interviewing my colleagues about their experiences with this oven.
“I couldn’t end up figuring it out, I ate my food cold like that.”
“I was just pressing anything.”
An app that helps simplify microwave ovens.
Deciding on what kind of app to build was ‘e get as e be’. I wondered whether it should allow you to control the oven remotely over Bluetooth or WiFi. But that meant the app would be dedicated to only one brand of oven. (IoT enabled ovens to have their own dedicated mobile apps. So for every oven brand, you want to remotely control, you have to download its own app sometimes not even available on the Play Store.)
Hoping to go for something less limiting that could be easily used by anyone regardless of the oven brand or model, I eventually settled for an information kind of app.
Simple Wave
An app that shows you how to use any oven with quick and easy-to-follow instructions.
How Does It Work?
Step 1:
The application would prompt the user to scan the dials of the microwave oven.
(Design Thought: I tried not to think too much about how this could be implemented. I thought about whether the application could automatically connect to any microwave over via WiFi or Bluetooth. But I knew that would be tricky since most modern IoT enabled ovens have their own dedicated mobile applications which is necessary of communicating with a unique ID.)
Step 2:
Using this scanned information, the application would search to find the exact oven or a list of ovens closely similar and display this.
Step 3:
The user can choose their oven from the search list and then select the actions they would like to perform — e.g cook, defrost, heat etc.
Step 4
The application takes all this information and then recommends an easy to follow instruction on how to use the chosen oven.
Limitations
I would have loved to actually take time to observe people using a microwave for the first time. I do hope the questions I asked were not simply confirming a bias. (I’m still learning this part of interviewing)
Interesting Feedback
I did get some interesting feedback and questions about this project such as:
“How are you going to catalog all the instructions for all possible microwave ovens in an efficient manner — assuming you had limited resources?”
Conclusion
Overall, I had a good time coming up with this. I hope to revisit it later beyond a design challenge.
PS. I didn’t spend a lot of effort on the interface design so please bear with me.
