If you have a small apartment or small kitchen, you probably do not have the luxury of having a microwave, oven, and grill along with your stovetop given the limited counter space. Keeping in mind that this is a problem that many people face, especially the younger generation (I am a millennial so I am going to include my generation in the young category along with Gen Z), a team of designers from Analogy Design created Decker – a multilayered kitchen appliance which has a stove, a convection oven and a grill. The idea was to make something that can help young professionals still enjoy and experiment with cooking, heating up food or grilling outdoors despite having busy lives.
Decker is an all-electric appliance so grilling on it is devoid of fossil fuels like coal. It creates a smokeless experience which is perfect for an urban kitchen or a balcony. Young millennials and Gen Z have little access to the experience of cooking food on a grill. Using a BBQ grill indoors only creates a fire hazard but most living quarters don’t allow them because of the smoke and soot which can be bothersome in cities where people are often living too close to one another. “We worked to understand the core user and their daily habits, likes, and dislikes as well as the environment in which the product is likely to be used. Using a bunch of observational research as well as qualitative questions, we were able to get a ton of insights into how we can move away from the traditional kitchen appliance,” said the team.
After a thorough analysis of how their target audience uses and interacts with the kitchen appliances, the team at Analogy Design included features like a meat/veggie divider to prevent cross-contamination (and to keep everyone with different food choices happy), a glass lid that keeps the food warm, a detachable residue tray to collect all the gunk and more. The appliance can be entirely controlled with a smart app and has a beautiful, modern touch interface. In fact, Decker’s UX/UI is so sleek it almost becomes a USP when compared to its competitors on the market. There are no physical buttons, only a smart interface with zero visual clutter and only relevant options.
The team further elaborates, “We created a clear yet functional UI that displays options as and when the functionalities are selected. The display screen is a hi-definition OLED display that is touch-sensitive with multi-touch as well as provides haptic feedback to the option selected. With the three functional elements of a stove, grill, and oven, the options for each use case are already mapped out so the user doesn’t have to navigate through a whole bunch of visual clutter thus creating a Dynamic UI.”
My favorite part is the magnetic skewers – the back base of the grill has a magnetic base to hold any metal skewer in place and making it easy to roll and grill meat or veggies! The convection oven and grill dock onto the hot plate stove through contact points to provide a multi-layered cooking experience. Just like the UX/UI the appliance is designed to be devoid of visual clutter yet intuitive enough to access all the features and key areas. It is stackable and modular which is why it saves space without compromising on functionality. With the contact points connecting each appliance, power can be transmitted easily to each of the coils independently so that the appliance is not only efficient but also can cater to various use case scenarios. With the smart docking feature, it can be easily assembled or disassembled to create multiple cooking features.
If hot girl summer was a kitchen appliance, Decker would be it!
Designers: Vyasateja Rao, Joel D’silva, Anil Ramesh, and Arun Kumar of Analogy Design
