Benchtop Oven LCD Design
Designing an intuitive oven interface across 20 languages for a European Market.
Context
A Benchtop Oven for the European Market
This project emerged from the need to support a wide range of languages across multiple countries for a new Benchtop oven, whilst maintaining a clear and intuitive cooking interface.
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To address this, the product adopted a dot-matrix LCD display, which enabled flexible text rendering across 20 European languages without requiring separate hardware variations for each market.
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How do you ensure that your designs are understandable upon first use, and can be used across multiple languages?
EXPLORATION
Exploring LCD Layouts
Designing for an oven LCD is nothing new, but when oven’s are notoriously over-filled with iconography, it can feel overwhelming.
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When organising the interface, I needed to consider:
Grouping related controls
Dot matrix location
Avoid clutter
UI patterns to accommodate different word lengths across languages
Ensure the LCD screen relates to physical buttons
EXPLORATION
Segmented Display Investigation
As an alternative to Breville’s existing 7 segment digits, I investigated the use of segmented dot matrix digits.
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As our current European market ovens use a dot matrix text display, I was curious to understand if users preferred to also see the digits utilise a dot matrix approach, or if they preferred the original digit design.
RESEARCH
Iconography Research
I conducted a survey to understand user preferences on existing iconography, new iconography and new oven functionality. This helped me understand what icons best represented the cook modes on the oven, and if they understood new terminology we wanted to introduce into the oven (i.e. bottom bake).
TESTING
Designing an Interactive Prototype for Testing
I worked with a developer to design and upload an interactive prototype of the LCD into the oven.
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My role was to create the functional specifications and flows for each mode, and creating the UI in Framer ready for code to be applied to create the functional prototype.
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This made usability testing seamless, as if the user was interacting with the oven itself.
TESTING
Usability Testing
I organised and ran testing sessions with consumers to understand the overall usability of the proposed design, understand icon preferences and oven logic.
These sessions were run using a scenario based testing approach, and included multiple A/B tests.
HANDOVER
Documenting Flows and Logic for Development
Each of the 14 modes on the oven needed to be specified in detail to be handed over to the software developer to build.
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This required extensive oven logic flows, specifying each small interaction the user may make on the oven at any given time.
Brands I’ve worked with:
