Project: Thermador Built-in Refrigeration

Team:

Graham Sadtler: Design Director

James Gawley: Lead Industrial Designer

Natalie Sacks: Lead UX/UI Designer

Project Goals:

We set out to develop a new platform of luxury built-in refrigeration for our Thermador brand that would:

Leap-frog current competition in features and design
Establish a base platform for on-going technology and feature development including IOT and Smart Camera uses cases
Increase modularity and flexibility of storage
Facilitate new recurring revenue streams for consumables and grocery inventory management

Contextual Research

In-home ethnographic research to discover unmet user needs for luxury refrigeration, grocery storage, cooking habits, and water and ice usage.

Low Fidelity Prototyping

Full scale paper prototyping to determine architecture of product and space trade-offs for glass shelves, drawers, door-bins, flexible zones, and freezer.

User Interface Usability Testing

We conducted multiple rounds of usability testing for the embedded user interface with low fidelity prototypes in Adobe XD and high fidelity prototypes in QML. We practice an agile approach to quickly mock-up solutions, get user feedback, and constantly refine our design.

High Fidelity Prototype Testing with Users

Embedded touch screen user interface

Ice drawer and full flex temperature drawer.

Camera with object recognition integrated under door bin.

Results

Based on our in-home research and user testing we developed market first innovations including a separate ice drawer with easy access to ice as well as a temperature configurable drawer for storing a wide variety of foods and beverages. We developed new smart uses cases for detecting food items via a camera and automatically setting temperature and humidity as well as creating an inventory list for grocery shopping and re-ordering.