Chefman Crispinator
Designing for Elevated Simplicity
As part of Chefman's ambitious "Tier One" initiative to develop a premium product line, IÂ served as the lead UXÂ Designer for the Chefman Crispinator digital air fryer.
This initiative represented a significant shift in the company's design philosophy, embracing minimalist aesthetics and brutalist industrial design principles to create kitchen appliances that would stand out in both form and function.
The Crispinator was positioned as a flagship product within this new premium ecosystem, featuring a sleek control dial as the primary interface element—a deliberate departure from the button-heavy interfaces common in the category.
My responsibility was to ensure that this bold design choice translated into an intuitive and satisfying user experience that matched the product's sophisticated visual language.
Product Impact
The Crispinator is now stocked nationwide at Walmart and Kohl's, representing a significant expansion of Chefman's retail presence in the premium small appliance category.
Further validating our design approach, the Crispinator won the 2024 Red Dot Design Award for Best Design Concept.
The award jury specifically recognized the product's intuitive user interface and minimalist brutalist aesthetic, writing:
“With an intuitive user interface, easy-to-use knob and a minimalist brutalist design, [the Chefman Crispinator] combines ease of use with a sophisticated, modern aesthetic. Perfect for cooks of all skill levels, the [Chefman Crispinator] is the future of air frying, seamlessly blending performance and style."
This recognition from one of the design industry's most respected awards programs underscores how the integration of thoughtful UX design with bold aesthetic vision created a genuinely differentiated product in a crowded market.
The Design Challenge
The central challenge of this project lay in the tension between aesthetic minimalism and functional comprehensiveness. The singular dial interface, while visually striking and aligned with our brutalist design principles, presented potential usability concerns:
- How can I provide access to all necessary cooking functions through a single dial input?
- How can I create an intuitive navigation flow that doesn't require extensive learning?
- How can I empower users to maintain precise control while reducing visual complexity?
- How can I communicate the system status effectively within a minimalist framework?
User Research Insights
To understand how users would interact with a dial-centric interface in a cooking context, I conducted comparative usability studies across a range of premium appliances that utilized similar control schemes.
This research revealed several critical insights:
- Users appreciate the tactile satisfaction of dial interaction as long as it isn't too rigid in movement
- Users can become disoriented when multiple functions share a single control
- Contextual feedback, such as clear visual cues to show which value is being edited, is essential for boosting confidence during the setup process
- Mental models of cooking processes strongly influence expectations of the sequence of events
Armed with these insights, I developed a framework for dial interaction that would align with users' cooking-related mental models while maximizing the aesthetic impact of the minimalist interface.
The Solution: A Guided Contextual Experience
Rather than attempting to replicate traditional button-based interactions through a dial, I reimagined the cooking setup process as a guided journey.
The interface was structured around a sequence of decisions that mirrored the natural cooking process:
- Select a cooking function - Using the arrow buttons on the left of the display, users can toggle through the menu items of cooking functions available, with the currently selection's LED illuminating
- Users in our target markets often scan interfaces from left to right, so having the list of cooking functions and their designated buttons positioned furthest on the left reinforced the intuitive sequence of setting up their cook
- Users are also unlikely to change their cooking function after the initial decision, so I determined this was the aspect of the cook that could be separated from being set using the dial, to help minimize the amount of settings that the dial was responsible for
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- Set the cook temperature - Users press the Temp icon on the toggle button, and either turn the knob clockwise to increase the temperature, Â or counterclockwise to decrease the temperature
- Temperature and time are more likely to be edited throughout the cook if the food is not cooking as intended, so we wanted these values to feel more malleable compared to the cooking function
- With the dual segmented displays positioned in between the Temp/Time toggle button and the dial, it feels more intuitive that these are grouped together, and that the user can begin using these interaction points to refine their cook to ensure their food is prepared to perfection
- Set the cook timer - Users press the Time icon on the toggle button, and either turn the knob clockwise to increase the cook timer amount, Â or counterclockwise to decrease the timer
- We grouped the time and temperature onto one toggle button because they're the most connected settings in the process of setting up a cook, but also to help reinforce the notion that turning the dial is used to edit one of these two options
- Start the cooking session - Featured prominently in the center of the dial is a large Start/Stop button, which when pressed, begins the cook and displays a circular digital animation around the border of the dial’s display to show that the cook is actively working
- Often we will utilize a change to the color of the Start/Stop button to signify a change in the unit's status, illuminating white when the unit is in standby and ready to begin cooking, and illuminating red to convey that the unit is actively cooking and that pressing it will stop the cook
- However, to meet the expectation that Tier One line of products deliver a minimalist, refined aesthetic, for the air fryers in this line we instead opted to implement a circular animation into the dial ring that would visually communicate when the cook was in progress
- Guided Action Alerts - Â Depending on the selected cooking function, users are prompted to take quick actions such as shaking the basket or flipping their food over midway through the cook, to ensure that it cooks evenly
- A challenge with these alerts is the balance between ensuring we capture the attention of users who are relying on them, while taking proper consideration to prevent the notifications from being too annoying, so as to not upset any users
- When the notification is triggered, the LED will blink on/off and the internal light will turn on to attract the user's attention visually, while the unit's buzzer will beep once every 10 seconds in case they are not looking at the unit to try and attract their attention visually, either until the door is opened and closed or after 1 minute of inactivity
- Implementing multiple methods of attracting the user's attention is a measure we take not only to consider multiple scenarios regarding how much attention the user is paying to the unit in that moment, but also an accessibility initiative to ensure that we implement at least one method of attracting the user's attention in case they are either visually impaired or hard of hearing do not miss out on this guidance
Usability Findings and Iterative Refinement
The initial prototype testing revealed several specific usability challenges that required thoughtful solutions.
Their test was to setup and begin a bake session, at 375°F for 20 minutes, all values not set by default to test for their intuition on how to edit the selected cooking function, temperature, and time.
While most users reported that the interface felt intuitive once they became familiar with it, our testing identified clear friction points in the initial interaction phases.
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Finding #1: Unclear where to begin
25% of users had difficulty determining how to select the cooking function at the very beginning of the process.
Many were unsure where to start, with the dial and large segmented displays attracting their attention the most, distracting them from the first step of the process — using the arrow buttons to select a cooking function.
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Solution:
I implemented an introduction sequence so that by default the LED next to selected cooking function is blinks on/off, and will continue to do so until either the temperature or time are edited.
This subtle visual cues direct users' attention to the appropriate starting point without requiring explicit instructions, significantly reducing initial hesitation.
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Finding #2: Unnecessary extra steps bring progress to a halt
56% of users didn't understand that they first needed to press the toggle button to select whether they want to edit the temperature and time.
This created frustrating moments where turning the dial produced no visible response, leaving users to feel uncertain and confused.
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Solution:
I redesigned the startup state to default to Edit Temperature mode, eliminating scenarios where the dial would have no immediate effect.
Additionally, a physical indent was added to the toggle button on the Temp icon, to provide tactile communication of which option is the default selection and to reinforce the fact that the button is intended to toggle between the two options.
This reduced the cognitive load by making the system status physically perceptible.
Finding #3: Secondary Control Interference
Half of users expressed some form of confusion about the relationship between the main cooking controls and the secondary physical buttons for the power, light, and sound controls.
These auxiliary controls were inadvertently distracting from the primary cooking setup flow.
Solution:
I completely redesigned these secondary controls as capacitive touch buttons with dimmed illumination by default.
This visual de-emphasis clarified the control hierarchy and reduced accidental engagement with non-essential functions during the critical setup phase.
Through these targeted refinements based on specific user feedback, I transformed moments of friction into a seamless experience.
Post-implementation testing confirmed that users could navigate the interface without conscious effort, eliminating the sentiment of "once you get into the swing of it, it feels very intuitive," and instead validating that the experience could now be considered immediately clear.
Lessons Learned
This project reinforced several valuable principles that continue to inform my approach to UX design:
- Constraints foster creativity - The limitation of a single control mechanism pushed us to develop a more thoughtful, streamlined interaction model
- Mental models matter - Aligning the interface flow with users' understanding of cooking processes created intuitive pathways
- Feedback builds confidence - Subtle multi-sensory feedback at key decision points eliminated uncertainty
- Aesthetics and usability can reinforce each other - The dial's visual simplicity actually enhanced usability by focusing attention and reducing cognitive load
Conclusion
The Chefman Crispinator project demonstrates how user experience design can bridge the gap between bold aesthetic vision and practical usability.
By embracing the constraints of minimalist industrial design and transforming them into opportunities for interaction innovation, we created a premium product that delivers on both its visual promise and functional requirements.
The success of this approach has influenced subsequent product development at Chefman, establishing a design language that balances distinctive aesthetics with intuitive usability across the entire Tier One product ecosystem.
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