Toaster usability study
From DDL Wiki
Contents |
Product Use
Here is a series of photographs depicting a typical customer's interaction with a toaster:
User
For a toaster, users fall into a wide range of people. This includes all ages and economic status, but tend to be limited to people who own or have access to a kitchen. The only major restriction is that toasters requires a user to have a supply of electricity in their household.
For this usability study, we sent around a survey and interviewed several people who have interacted with a toaster on a regular basis. The results of this study is shown below.
Needs
- to toast bread
- low cost
- easy usability
- ability to use a wide variety of bread
Likes
- golden brown toast
- cancel button
- well-defined settings
- custom printed toast
Annoyances
- bread gets stuck inside the toaster
- unreliability of toaster settings
- hard to clean
- burned sides of wider bread
- toast doesn't come out of the toaster high enough to grab it.
Possible Usability Improvements
From our usability study data we have come up with several possible usability improvements:
- including a cancel button on the toaster to give more user control (already part of our dissected product)
- have toast lifted higher after toasting for easy and pain-free removal
- widening slots after toasting in order to remove wider bread products easily
- allow toaster to fit a wide variety of bread sizes, keeping bread from either not being toasted or being burned on edges.