Middleby

Plexor Oven Touchscreen UI

A simplified oven designed for the untrained restaurant worker

Background

TurboChef, a Middleby company, approached Fresh to redesign a touchscreen experience for a multi-chamber oven with various configuration options. The oven is used in fast-casual restaurants to cook a wide range of foods using any combination of TurboChef’s rapid cook, impingement, or convection technologies.

Challenges

Three obstacles defined our work:

Making it easy for untrained workers to know which chamber to cook specific food items in.
Allowing for multiple food item lists and oven chamber combinations.
Improving dated aesthetics to match the forward-thinking technology of the Plexor oven.

Services & Capabilities

Motion Design

UI Animations

User Research & Testing

UX/UI Design

Key Contributors

The original UI was difficult for new users to operate efficiently

Important information at a glance

Our first task was to ensure that restaurant workers could quickly identify the status of the ovens (available or in use) from various distances. We conducted tests to analyze the visibility of fonts, icons, and images while users performed their typical workflows. A critical measurement was whether users could quickly and successfully identify available ovens and start the cooking process.

Intuitive status indicators

Button colors change based on oven availability for a specific food item, indicating what can be cooked and where. If no ovens are available for a food item, then the food item button is dimmed to a disabled state. Cookable food items are denoted by a solid green light corresponding to a designated chamber position.

A Design Language System built to scale

The existing design aesthetics needed to be updated to fit the Middleby brand of products. When developing the UI, we had to consider a flexible system designed to scale with various oven combinations.

We started by utilizing base components and adhering to a Design Languages System (DLS) we created for a previous Middleby project. Then, we expanded on styles for the Plexor Oven product line. The flexibility of the DLS allowed us to quickly create and test designs before handing them off to production.

An accelerated turnaround

The oven launched in 2021, and our approach resulted in the fastest go-to-market turnaround of any Middleby product to that date. The quick delivery was primarily due to efficiencies generated by the Design Language System, something we’d intentionally developed to be reusable and customizable.

The touchscreen experience helped TurboChef with a Kitchen Innovation award for 2021.