Designing an IoT Connectivity SmartCooker
SMART COOKER, YOUR NEW BEST FRIEND IN THE KITCHEN
Design Reveal
Product Design
LED Screen Design
How we got there: an Overview
The Challenge: How can we improve user experience with Whirlpool’s brand using IoT connection?
In this project, we were tasked to create a greater user experience with Whirlpool’s kitchen appliances, with heavy focus on its primary feature of utilizing IoT to enhance user convenience. Whirlpool specifically asked for us to design a system in which Whirlpool products both better communicate with each other and use outside information (APIs, IFTTT, Alexa, Google Home, etc.) for a better user experience. Our design ultimately tackles this problem by creating a unified IoT relationship between a user’s phone through their Yummly app with a new product design concept we have created, a Smart Slow Cooker.
Problem restructure: let’s rethink that
Throughout the design process, we continued to reframe the prompt while keeping in mind how to utilize the communication between the user and their home. Specifically, these were the main questions we kept in mind:
(1) How can products communicate with each other and utilize information from outside sources in order to provide a richer and more valuable user experience?
(2) How can communication between you and your home increase user self esteem and empower user by removing stressors from the home?
(3) How can we create a more enriching experience in the kitchen by easing the cooking as a cleaner, less time-consuming process?
Additional Considerations
What else do we know about Whirlpool’s IoT and partners?
The current IoT experience: Currently, the Whirlpool line of appliances do not talk to each other. The only communication is between the app or voice platform and each individual appliance.
Whirlpool partnerships:
- Google Nest (Adjust the thermostat if the oven makes the house warmer; turn off the oven if smoke is detected; weather; use APIs to see weather forecast to encourage using appliances less to conserve energy)
- Yummly (Acquired by Whirlpool; used for browsing recipes and sending instructions to the oven for step-by-step guidance and oven)
- Voice (Similar features as app — start/stop products, set timers, etc.)
Whirlpool brand persona: we want to ensure that our solution embodies qualities that reflect on Whirlpool’s brand persona, which is the following: (1) helps you achieve your goals, (2) takes time to get to know you, (3) thoughtful of your time, (4) knows your life has other distractions and does not want to add to it, (5) is fun to be around, and (6) knows you’re not a machine
Proposed Solution
Create a new weight-sensitive Smart Cooker that connects with Whirlpool’s recent acquisition of the Yummly app
Our design ultimately tackles this problem by creating a unified IoT relationship between a user’s phone through their Yummly app with a new product design concept we have created, a Smart Slow Cooker. Please scroll down to design details for an expanded description in this product and how it will enrich the user journey with Whirlpool product interactions.
Research
Primary Research
Defining the Internet of Things: We define IoT as cooperative communication with our everyday objects that allows for enhanced information collection and data processing.Our definition of IoT was informed by understanding it creates a global infrastructure that has been seamlessly integrated through our everyday objects. Generating a mass of technological and societal implications producing a rich problem space featuring ethical landmines at every turn.
Why did we choose to focus on the kitchen experience?: Our team decided to focus on improving the user’s kitchen experience as the kitchen now has become such an important part of the user’s home experience. By focusing on the kitchen, we were able to maximize the value of the user experience. Kitchens are now the “new living room”; kitchens within the past 20 years are now being thought of as a living and entertainment space as opposed to being just a place to cook. With the shift in kitchen dynamics, homes are starting to make their kitchens a more supportive and congregative space. They further set tone for rest of home: experience in the home from being mediocre to being great. The amount in which the kitchen reflects in one’s home resale value reflects this sentiment.
Secondary research
During our research process, we began by conducting a survey on smart devices and the home, which received 13 responses. We then interviewed several different types of users to get a gauge of their current pain points in the kitchen. While our target users are busy parents, we also wanted to interview other users such as dieters and not-so-confident cookers. The use of these secondary target users are meant to help us cater to parents who share a similar lifestyle as our secondary users.
Selected Interview Questions
- How much time do you spend in the kitchen per week?
- What is your favorite part about being in the kitchen?
- What is your least favorite part about being in the kitchen?
- What is the number one thing that keeps you away from the kitchen?
- Do you typically like to cook the same meals or dabble in new recipes?
- What is your cooking experience?
- Do you feel confident and comfortable in the kitchen?
- What would you consider your biggest concern in the kitchen?
Our main user interview results and insights can be found here.
Analysis
Common pain points
1. I wished I had a mentor… It’s hard for someone to do [a diet] alone without someone to guide them through it.
- How can we ease the transition into diet-cooking?
- Can Yummly be used to guide people going through diets by aiding the process of cooking?
2. Cleaning is my least favorite part about cooking.
- Can we minimize the amount of dishes it takes to cook a dish with our proposed design solution?
3. Time keeps me away from the kitchen. I am normally thinking about what is the quickest way to make a long-lasting meal.
- Can we find a solution which minimizes the time it takes to cook a meal?
4. It’s easy to just make the same, familiar meal over and over again instead of trying anew recipe.
- 7/10 of our users mentioned concerns related to lack of food variety, boredom of food recipes, having the same meals over and over again, and the need for more creativity within the kitchen.
- How can our design help people branch out of their comfortable and familiar zone of cooking and inspire them to try new recipes? What is the root cause of people not trying out new recipes? Is it lack or confidence and comfort in the kitchen, lack of appliances, or something else entirely?
Insights & key opportunities in our product
- Streamline succinct, step-by-step instructions to minimize user mistakes and room for error during the cooking process.
- Decrease amount of dishes and measuring cups to be used in the cooking process.
- Reduce the amount of time it takes to measure ingredients by pouring them directly into the cooking vessel. Use less dishes overall.
- Connect to the Yummly app, which caters the user to nearly limitless recipe options.
Concept Ideation
USER PERSONA: Creating Tony to guide our design decisions
We developed our persona, Tony (busy, stay-at-home dad), and highlighted his common pain points and find opportunities to improve on.
A little bit about Tony’s Day in the Life: he’s a 44-year-old Italian dad who got thrusted into this stay-at-home-father life a few years ago. Since then, he’s had a lot of difficulty managing cleaning, cooking mediocre meals for the family since his wife works late at the office, and taking care of a variety of errands such as taking Billy to soccer practice. He can’t cook, and he doesn’t really have time to either. How can we help Tony out?
AFFINITY MAPPING: Driving key insights with collaboration tools in our team meetings
During our initial ideation and brainstorming sessions, we used an affinity diagram to synthesize and consolidate our user research into cohesive thoughts and organized categories. From this, we determined the most rising trends, themes, pain points, and areas with the most opportunity for improvement. As a team, we all used adhesive dots as voting measures to answer our most distinctive design goals: (1) What are the most important user needs? (2) What are the needs of the business?
We consolidated our sticky notes into Lucidchart (above) in order to organize the clutter more gracefully.
BRAINSTORM SKETCHING: Facilitating a Crazy Eights workshop to ideate themes
From our affinity mapping, we found the most common themes in cooking meals and being in the kitchen tend to be lack of time and inconvenience of clean-up. We also found that people commonly find themselves in a food rut, but struggle to cook new recipes because of lack of guidance and confidence. In order to come up with rapid-fire solution ideas, we used the Crazy 8’s technique to come up with individual solutions, and then voted on the best ones.
Our final solution idea came down to a tie between two ideas:
(1) Tiny Dish Washer (above)
(2) Stand Mixer with a kitchen scale.
The Tiny Dish Washer idea would primarily serve to help with clean-up on single meals for those with studio apartments without a dish washer. After journey mapping with the tiny dish washer, we realized that there was not enough IoT interaction opportunity, and that this type of product would work best with millennials and young, single, working professionals rather than the family-friendly user group of Whirlpool.
Iteration I: Stand mixer design
Our second idea, the stand mixer with the kitchen scale, was the design that we initially started with.
Essentially, by placing a scale on the stand mixer, the user can pour ingredients directly inside of the bowl rather than having to take out their measuring cups. There would be an LED screen on the side that tells you how much to put in as you are pouring it. We would connect the stand mixer to Whirlpool’s highly popular acquisition, Yummly, so that the user can easily browse through meal options and cast it directly to their mixer. Since baking is a more precise activity, we first decided to use the stand mixer.
Low-fi Usability Testing
In order to illustrate how we wanted the product to work, I created an illustration and animation using Adobe Illustrator, converted into a gif format (the prototype is activated by clicking specific points on the stand mixer). This essentially shows that the stand mixer is detachable and the bowl can be used as a standalone concept (scale). The LED screen can be easily turned off and on, and the scale is on the lower bottom. This is what we used for our initial usability tests so that the user could understand our overall concept when we pitched our product idea to users. We tested this with 11 users, between the ages of 21–39.
Round 1 findings:
- Users like the idea of the scale, but do not like that it is limited to baking or just cold dishes.
- Users would like to see how much is left into whatever they are pouring. We can implement this into our screen designs by creating a journey progress bar in our design.
- Users do not like that the clunky stand mixer is still attached to the scale.
- Users wish that the scale and the screen were consolidated into one area rather than having to look in separate areas to see either, especially since they have to look at the scale while they pour and then go back to the screen to see what they need next.
- Users wish there was a way to cast without Yummly.
- Users find that while dishes are minimized, they would still need to worry about washing the mixer itself and the mixer stand. It alleviates minimal dishes but not enough to purchase this product.
Goals for next iteration: Find a new design which can expand beyond baking items or cold items. Maybe it can be directly into something that they can cook?
Iteration II: Smart Pot design
After our first round of testing, we found many flaws with our initial design. Namely, the limitation of the stand mixer. We originally used this idea because baking is a more precise art and science than that of cooking. However, we realized that in order to be inclusive, we must expand this into something that we can cook.
Enter: Smart Cooker. Put in the same idea, but this time, with a cooker (like a crockpot). This is now inside of the pot rather than having a scale on the outside of the pot, consolidates the scale and the LED screen into one area, and allows limitless cooking options (there is slow cooker / crockpot filter on Yummly with over 20,000 recipes, as opposed to the 2,500 stand mixer recipes we pulled up at first).
User Journey Map: What does Tony’s interaction with this product look like?
Meet Tony. You can’t really tell from this picture, but Tony is HUGE. I mean, think within the span of 9 humans sprawled out on the floor.
We carried this giant user journey map everywhere and hung it up on the wall at every single one of our design meetings for reference. It served as a reminder as to what our product’s core function was, and what is was not. When our design thinking got carried away into other futuristic possibilities that we wanted to incorporate, we had to look back at the giant journey map and realize that it’s too much. It helped us craft out Tony’s main pain points and what we wanted to accomplish in order to ease his life.
In this day of product interaction, he has to cook dinner for his in-laws who are coming over for dinner, all the while taking Billy to practice and working his day job in the morning. We sketched out how the story would go with and without the ease of the Smart Pot / Cooker.
User Flow
Prototyping and Testing
Round 1: Low-fi screen testing and storyboarding
What issues should we consider that the user might encounter during the interaction?
In our first round of testing, we presented our screen prototype sketches and brought our journey map and solution idea into our peer team meeting. The group of 23+ peers evaluated our map, and used post-it notes to determine potential flaws that we did not consider before in various stages of the map. We later collected these notes, grouped them together, then determined the most salient and common issues and points of concern.
The most common points of user feedback were:
- What is the user isn’t paying attention to the screen and adds the wrong ingredient to the scale?
- How do I know when to do other cooking directions, such as stirring the pot? Does the pot only account for adding separate ingredients?
- What happens if you put in an ingredient before the recipe says to?
- How can I go back to a previous part if I messed up? How can I skip an ingredient I don’t want to add?
Goals for the next iteration of screen designs:
- Add distinct directions for stirring, mixing, sautee, etc.
- Add back and next buttons for the user if they do not want to add an ingredient or want to go back to a part that they missed
Round 2: Low-fi screen testing
What issues should we consider that the user might encounter during the interaction, based on user interaction with our physical product?
We conducted a usability test with 7 different people. We found the following issues with our screen design:
Round 2 findings:
- Users do not know what step they are on. Does the checkmark mean they have completed it or that they need to complete it or that they are currently on that step? Implement a new feature that is crystal clear to the user what step they are on in the recipe.
- The user does not like Yummly’s suggestions and wants to add their own ingredient to the recipe. How can they do that?
- Users are not sure about the journey progress bar. Is it for the recipe, or the current ingredient?
Goals for the next iteration:
- Change the checkmark progress into something more distinct such as crossing ingredients out as you go.
- Add a “+ Custom Ingredient” option below the recipe.
- Make the circle journey progress circle clearly state that they are showing the progress of the ingredient being added, not the recipe.
Final Design
Click here to interact with the screen designs
Additional Design Considerations
How will the user connect their Yummly app to the Smart Cooker?
In considering how the user will be able to “cast” or send their chosen recipe to Yummly, we have created two potential flows.
What if my food is done but I’m not home?
When the food cooking in the smart slow cooker is done, a notification is sent to the user’s phone through the Yummly app. User can set the smart cooker to a “Keep Warm” mode so that food will still be hot and ready when the user arrives home.
Is there a feature that adjusts the recipe to X number of portion sizes?
When sending the recipe to the smart slow cooker, users will be asked to enter the amount of people that they are cooking for. You would then be able to either cut recipes in half or double or triple them.
Reflection
Iterate on existing items rather than try to create something new
While it was frustrating and difficult to narrow down our prompt at first, once we did, the number of opportunities and possibilities within just one individual problem scope seemed limitless. At first, it really was frustrating to find out that someone had already produced so many of our ideas. We ended up iterating on something that already exists — kitchen scales and crockpots — and combined them together for an overall improved product. Even though it seems like everything has already been done, there’s always room for improvement.
Wrap your idea around a story
I feel like wrapping your ideas a story is not only good for design presentations, but any and all types of presentations as your ideas are more captivating to others when there is a story, a reason to care outside of the bottom line. Having our user journey map and story in mind helped set the scene for our product and stick to its core function.
Focus on the insights more than the straight stats
I put more emphasis on the research as opposed to the insights and how they lined up with our design. I was so concerned about having the correct statistics and research points memorized that I lost sight of the main ideas. The most important part is not the secondary research, but instead, what you get out of your primary research. Since this was my first time doing a physical design product, I was overly concerned about the schematics of feasibility and engineering, which was out of my scope as a designer.
