M.
Siemens Oven
User experience redesign
Overview
The Challenge
Siemens challenged us to evaluate the user experience and redesign one of their premium smart oven's interactions.
Solution
The research phase concluded that the oven's interaction experience was complicated and non-intuitive. We focused on redesigning the oven's interface to make it simpler, and cleaner and integrating it better with its smart app.
Roles + Responsibilities
End-to-end research to design, with equal ownership of research and testing, leading on prototyping
Timeline & Team - Year
6 months | 4 members - 2021
Type
Digital product design, mobile application, Smart devices
Tools
User research
Prototyping
Speculative design
Wireframing
Storyboards
User testing
A/B testing
Cogntive walkthrough
Usability testing methods
Adobe Suite (Illustrator, Premier Pro, After Effects)
If you are interested in reading the full report:
Understanding the Oven
The initial discovery phase involved elaborate testing and exploration of the Siemens oven in order to understand current user experience and user flows.
The Siemens iQ700 built-in oven is framed around “high-end home cooking”. The targeted user group is people that can be described as ‘Leading edge’. They have a very high bar for themselves and their appliances at home: they rely on and are interested in and have experience with technology.
These users are not expert cooks and cooking for them is not a daily effort; they often head out to restaurants a lot. However, when they cook, they aim for a high-quality meal that lives up to the quality of a restaurant in a short amount of time and buys appliances to help them to achieve this. During the weekends they have more time for cooking and invite friends for dinner. They are proud of their lifestyle and also want to be as proud of the food they create.
Testing the product
Cognitive walkthroughs, task flow analysis, user tests and user interviews were performed for an initial assessment of the usability of the product. An overview of the insights is as follows:
From the cognitive walkthrough and task flow analysis, we learned that the users can easily get lost from lack of information and rather confusing information hierarchy. Users had insufficient feedback from the oven about whether they performed the right action. The task analysis revealed a very complex information architecture loaded with too many features. The oven also lacked good feedback allowing users to make assumptions about the oven use. This in turn created a gap in expected vs actual use of the product.
Initial user tests were done with 3 students. The combination of the knob, touchscreen, and buttons was not intuitive to use. We also interviewed 2 real users of the oven. Surprisingly, they were unaware that the oven had plenty of features for cooking apart from the standard modes. The smart oven was also supported by a mobile app meant to boost efficiency, and quality of life, help delegate tasks and monitor smart appliances remotely, but it was severely underutilized and the context of use was unclear.
Testing the product in context (user owns the same oven).
Testing product with fellow design students.
Problem overview
Design Vision
We needed to decide what our interaction should feel like. We defined some key terms which would act as our reference point for the user experience we wanted to create.
Design vision statement
We want the interaction between the oven and the user to be collaborative. The user should feel guided in an intuitive and assuring way while also maintaining a sense of control over the cooking process. The oven should be clear in its communication and live up to its high expectations and intended use.
Target experiences
Collaborative
The oven should feel like a partner who works together with the user during the cooking process. There should be communication in both ways.
Guided
The user should be able to know what’s happening while operating the oven but also while the oven is cooking the food.
Assuring
Users should experience the product use as ‘I am sure what I did is right’.
Sense of control
While using the oven, the user should experience that they are the one that’s in charge of the result, they should feel proud after cooking.
Intuitive
We want users to experience seamless and natural flow while operating the oven; tasks should not have a high cognitive load on the users.
Conceptualisation
We collected all the insights from our testing activities and decided to cluster them to help us create ideas. Based on the clustering, we found some interesting patterns which we later deliberated on to generate the concept direction.
We initially diverged to create 5 concepts/ideas which we later fused to create 3 main concepts that we could test with users. The following were the ideas :
Concept 1 : Collaborative cooking
This concept focuses on making the oven more collaborative and guiding during the cooking process. To create this feeling for the user the oven acts as a cooking buddy. This cooking buddy helps with choosing a recipe and guides the user through a step by step recipe based cooking process. The oven is voice controlled through the mobile application and provides the user with tips and insights about cooking in general. To create trust in the cooking system, a commercially known chef cook is linked to the oven namely Jamie Oliver. Instead of trusting the settings by a user we are now trusting the settings as it is Jamie Oliver guiding us.
Concept 2 : Customizable Collaboration
This concept aims to make the oven personalized and provide shortcuts for users’ daily usage, more fitting the user’s expectations and preferences. It will constitute two main parts :
1. Customize the function and screen: The oven offers a lot of functions, but their use remains limited to the settings they know. Therefore, users can set some shortcuts in the ‘my zone’ page to reach those functions quicker.
2. When using the ‘meal’ function, users can give feedback to the oven, both during and after the cooking process, from which the oven will learn and do smart adjustments. For feedback during cooking, the oven will automatically detect the changes made by users and ask if they need to adjust the recipe. For feedback after cooking, users can give feedback for different aspects based on the result of the food.
Concept 3 : Simple Oven, Elaborated App
This concept is focussed on simplifying the interface of the oven and on the other hand integrating the home connect application in
a natural way in the cook/oven interaction.
By simplifying the oven's interface, we intend to design a situation in which people are not overwhelmed and confused. By involving the app in an intuitive way, we intend to design a more guiding and collaborative cooking interaction.
Concept testing
The following images show some of the test setups we had created in order to test our concept exploration. We had to restrict our testing to roommates and online tests due to the pandemic lockdown.
Test Results
The concepts were compared with each other in relation to the design goal qualities stated in the design goal. Due to the Corona crisis, the tests were conducted by different team members at different locations and with different participants. There was unfortunately no chance to conduct a concept comparison test. This overview is based on scaling and comparing the comments people made.
Towards final design direction
Through the prototype test and analysis, we found each concept has its own strengths and weaknesses, which we compared and combined to create an even stronger final concept.
Concept 1
Concept 1 gave users a sense of working together (collaborative) with the oven at the same time a sense of control. It was guiding and the presence of an expert cook gave them assurance.
Concept 2
The users felt customization gave them a sense of control over the oven. It also gives them
the opportunity to reduce the overload of functionalities and to organize it based on their personal needs.
Concept 3
This concept did well in terms of clarity of use and proved to be really guiding to the users through simple instructions on the oven and notifications on the app. It gave users assurance about their actions
Final design direction
The final design primarily involved refining the concept of a simple oven with an elaborate app.
Final Concept Storyboard
Simple oven use scenario
The simple oven is part of the concept that taps into this more classic or familiar way of cooking. It’s part of the concept that is ‘meant for’ cooking a dish that people know by heart, meaning that they know the proportions and cooking time very well. The concept also covers cooking something easy, heating a
pizza, baking a baguette, roasting potatoes, or putting something in the microwave. It acts as what might be seen as a 'classic' oven.
Elaborated app scenario
Elaborated app is part of the concept that taps into ‘cooking something new’. Here, people are searching for and exploring a new recipe to cook. With this concept, people see cooking as a nice activity and are excited or curious about the result. People might, but not necessarily, take more time to cook a dish. The big focus of this concept is the voice assistance that guided the user through the new recipe. Throughout cooking, the user is guided and updated by the oven through voice, it is a collaborative approach to cooking between the user and the oven. Users are also encouraged to give feedback on the outcome of the cooking to personalize the recipes to their needs.
Final design
The oven interface was simplified to make it more intuitive to users. That meant removing a lot of the original features. We wanted to do away with the heavy use of physical buttons. The oven setup was broken down into simple steps to reduce overwhelm and error.
The image below shows the part of the mobile app where the voice guides the user through a recipe.
The image ABOVE shows recipe structure, history of recipes used by the user and what a typical search for a recipe would look like.
The image ABOVE shows recipe structure, history of recipes used by the user and what a typical search for a recipe would look like.
The images on the LEFT shows the subjective feedback that the user can provide to adjust recipe guidance to their liking.
Final test result
Overall, the participants had a positive attitude towards recipe-based cooking with voice assistance. People scored the overall product experience as genuinely positive. We used a simple Likert scale, a Premo chart, and the Attrakdiff questionnaire to evaluate the product experience in multiple ways. The results are shown above. The average of the results was evaluated for the seven participants tested.
Reflection
This project involved extensive learning of product evaluation and user testing.
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This project forced me to evaluate products in detail and explore methods of testing and evaluation of designs. The structured nature of the course was guiding but at the same time was challenging to incorporate with time constraints and limited access to resources due to the pandemic.
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We had to get creative with testing voice assistance virtually and in-person tests. Sometimes subjective feedback was difficult to translate into concrete themes or outcomes. There was a lot of deliberation during each decision made in order to reduce bias and avoid loss of meaning during interpretation.
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We also had to be aware of our cultural differences in the ideas and perception of cooking and be able to relate to a user group we did not have much access to.