HMI HORECA sector
DATE: 2019
SERVICES: UX Design & Innovation.
CLIENT: Elro
TAGS: UX Design, design thinking, user research, user testing, prototyping.
01. The Challenge
Elro faced a dual challenge: on one hand it was required to simplify and improve the usage of the interface of its industrial brazier, and on the other hand to modernize the brand image to make it stand out from the competition.
To achieve this, our team began by conducting thorough user research to identify the users and understand their needs and the market expectations.
02. The Methodology
Exploring phase:
The initial stage of the project involved conducting stakeholder interviews. After gaining some foundational knowledge about the product and its users, we were prepared to embark on more in-depth work.
Our second step was to spend several days in a professional kitchen, observing the behavior of chefs and their daily interaction with the brazier. This allowed us to gain insight into the challenges that chefs faced in their daily work and identify essential features to improve their user experience. Once we had obtained these initial insights, we held a design thinking workshop with the client to explore potential product ideas and concepts.
Validation phase:
Later on, we worked on a first interface concept, we sketched it and we prototyped it. This prototype was the initial stage of an evolving concept that turned into a final user-centered interface after serveral iterations of user testing with cooks and client validations.
Observation in a real environment allowed us to gain insight into the daily work challenges and indentify essential features to improve the user experience.– XAVIER GOMEZ, UX DESIGNER
03. The Solution
After nine months of hard work, the result was a instruction-manual free product with a user interface that is tailored to the needs of its target audience, and which remains more intuitive and user-friendly than its competitors.
As examples of UX improvements:
- We changed the location of the interface to gain some space for the cooks to place the food trays.
- We enhanced the end-of-cooking screen to facilitate the launch of the following recipe and streamline kitchen workflows.
- We redesigned the temperature and cooking time selection process to be faster and more intuitive.
In this particular project, our role was assisting our partners Multiple Design in the conception and UX design of Elro’s new interface. Therefore, in this case, they took the project from here and designed the UI to provide the brand with a refreshed and modernized image.
