How would you redesign a Microwave?

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How would you redesign a Microwave?

Asked at Google over a year ago

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Caleb Reynolds · Answer 1 · 2022-09-04T21:54:09+0000

Design a Microwave

Background

Our company has seen a 5% decrease in sales YoY of our microwave ovens for the past 5 years. In order to remedy this decrease in sales, we would like to explore potential design changes and feature additions to our microwave ovens to both attract these customers back as well as attract more new customers.

Users Groups

Before deciding on a solution, we split microwave users into categories of usage to best decide how we could make the largest impact in solving the problem with the smallest amount of effort. Generally speaking, microwave users can be separated into wide number of different buckets including:

Frequency of use
- Rare users (1-2 times per week)
- Average users (3-6 times per week)
- Frequent users (6+ times per week)
Age/ability to learn and adapt to new technology
- Kids/Young adults
- Middle aged adults
- Elderly
Type of use
- Professional chefs
- At home users

We decided to move forward by splitting users into the “frequency of use” category as we don’t plan on adding complicated new technology that elderly people may have trouble understanding, and the two categories in “type of use” are too disproportionate in size to be useful with at home users making up the massive majority.

Market Research & User Pain Points

The next step in the process to better understand why people have stopped purchasing microwaves. After conducting market research and interviewing people who have used microwaves in the past, we discovered that surprisingly, it was not the “Rare users” who were not purchasing new microwaves, but the “Frequent users”, with the average time since the last microwave purchase for “Frequent users” being 5 years. When these users were asked why they had not thought about purchasing a new microwave, their answers were most commonly related to the fact that since they had purchased a top of the line microwave in the past, they couldn’t imagine ever needing a new microwave as their current one was already of high quality.

Finally, in order to better understand places where users were having trouble with microwaves that we could potentially improve upon, we asked these users if they had any issues with microwaves. Some of the common answers to this question included:

Users were worried about the radiation that microwaves caused
Users were unhappy with the inconsistency of microwaves. Sometimes food would be overcooked/undercooked, and it was impossible to know without manually checking on/tasting the food
The microwave takes up too much counter space

Prioritization

In order to decide which one of these pain points to solve, we will use an impact vs. effort framework.

Users were worried about the radiation that microwaves caused

Impact - Medium
- This would make a medium impact as offering a microwave that had been proven not to emit harmful radiation could not only convince a portion of our “Frequent users” to purchase a new microwave, but also could potentially attract new customers who were avoiding microwaves entirely because of this issue.
Effort - High
- This would require a great deal of time and research to develop and test adequate radiation proofing for microwaves and would likely make them much more expensive.

Users were unhappy with the inconsistency of microwaves. Sometimes food would be overcooked/undercooked, and it was impossible to know without manually checking on/tasting the food.

Impact - High
- This is an extremely common problem and solving this would certainly attract people to purchase new microwaves from almost every segment of our potential user base, but especially “Frequent users” who would naturally have the most issues with consistency.
Effort - Medium
- Technology to detect temperatures already exists at scale, and implementing this into a microwave would likely take only a medium amount of development time & effort as we wouldn’t need to develop any new technology ourselves.

The microwave takes up too much counter space

Impact - Low
- Developing microwaves that better fit into customers homes would certainly add a level of convenience, but since our biggest issue is with our “Frequent Users” who already have a microwave that they use on a regular basis, it seems unlikely that this would be enough to convince many of them to purchase a new one.
Effort - Medium
- Building a different sized microwave would take a minimal amount of engineering & design time, however, building only one new sized microwave would only solve this issue for a small subsection of the people who have issues with microwave size. In order to fully solve this problem, we would need to create multiple microwaves in multiple different sizes, which could add up in time and effort.

Solution

Considering the above prioritization framework, it makes the most sense for us to pursue a solution that would improve the consistency of microwaves heating and allow users to better know when their food was fully cooked without having to manually check. This could be accomplished with a variety of solutions including thermal lasers and physical probes which could be inserted into and removed the food automatically when the door closes/opens. In order to determine the best solution, we will work with the design and engineering teams to understand the tradeoffs that all the potential solutions provide, and then proceed with the best solution from there.

Measuring Success

There are two main success metrics that we can track to determine the effectiveness of our new microwave. The first one would be an increase in overall sales of our microwaves, and the second would be an increase in sales of our microwaves specifically from our “Frequent Users”.

Shobhit Tiwari · Answer 2 · 2022-04-03T19:40:51+0000

ReRedesign Goal

I am assuming that the goal of the redesign is to increase adoption of the microwave. Adoption can be increased by increasing the usability of microwave. So basically, we have to improve the usability aspects for the microwave.

We can do this by adding

New Features which give a better experience
New features which address the current pain points.

Lets focus on the addressing the current pain points to increase usability and thus adoption of microwave.

User Groups

We can divide the users into how much they use the microwave, people who don’t like to use because they think that it has harmful radiations, people who use microwave to reheat food and people who use microwave to cook food or bake food (for those convection microwaves)

We can also divide users age wise, kids, teens, working professionals, elderly.

We can also divide on occupation, chefs and non chefs.

Largely, I would like to divide on the frequency of use of microwave and the purpose of use.

User Groups	User Groups	Frequency of Use	Frequency of Use	Volume (TAM)
Sceptics	NA	NA	High	Low
Conventional Users	Reheat	2-3 times per week	Med	High
Die-hards	Cooking and reheating	6-10 times per week	Low	Low

Prioritization Framework

Clearly, it makes sense to go with conventional users. We can target sceptics of microwave as well but the cost to get them to adopt to microwave will be too big. They could have some reservations around waves or some other thing, so it is not advisable to go after them with such high cost and low volume.

Pain points

I want to now look at some of the current pain points of the conventional users and then prioritize them. Why do conventional users only use microwave for reheating and not anything else? Because, reheating is quite convenient. You press a button, and the food becomes hot.

Cooking is very tedious in microwave. Also microwave design hasn’t changed much over the years, it is still a generic metal box with digital panel and some buttons.

Moreover, it isn’t exactly smart, like most technologies around us such as mobile etc. are. It can’t do recommendations or automatically cook food for a specific time according to a recipe. Further, it can’t be controlled by voice, the only way to interact with microwave is via buttons and a small panel.

Thirdly, the microwave isn’t personalized, there is no way to store a single user or multiple users information on it.

Lastly, the microwave exterior heats up sometimes and may not be safe for children or kids.

Features to address these pain points

Microwave Design
1. Microwave door should be touch screen, side panel is removed, which increases the space inside. This makes it more convenient to cook food inside.
2. On the door, there is a keyboard and touch buttons to input specific instructions, add a timer, or set a program which microwave will follow.
Smart
1. Voice Recognition/Biometrics
2. Talks to a mobile app - using Bluetooth or wireless send instructions to the microwave
Personalized
1. User profile creation - Likes/dislikes
2. User Recommendations
Secure
1. Warning for hot food, shouldn’t allow the kids to open microwave door.
2. More air vents for the heat to move out.

Prioritize amongst features

I will use a simple prioritization framework, Level of Effort vs Impact

SPMT · Answer 3 · 2021-09-18T17:57:33+0000

Assumptions

I am assuming the goal of redesign is increasing usability because microwave as a product has not evolved that much over time
We are talking about home microwaves considering the large user base
I am assuming Google wants to launch a redesigned microwave.
I am assuming the microwave is already bought and the user has it
There are two major use cases of a microwave
1. Bake food
2. Heat/Re-heat food for consumption

I am going to take Heat/Re-heat food as the primary use case considering the bakers already are comfortable using the microwave

List of User Segments

Frequent Users
First Time Users / Less Frequent Users

I would focus on first time users / less frequent users as these users typically find themselves helpless or find it difficult to use it.

Pain Points/Needs

Doesn’t know how much time is need to heat what
Doesn’t know the right container to use
Doesn’t know how to safely use it
The input panel has too many variable to be figured out
Difficult to figure out what's the actual state of item while heating

Prioritising Pain Points

High
Low - Considering these days the containers are marked as microwave safe or not on the container itself
Low - Considering the element of safe usage prior to the use is already taken care by containers and right electric switches.
High - How to make the correct input is confusing as there a lot of buttons and settings for a simple job

I would like to focus on pain 4 and would also like address 1 as a part of that as both seems related

Probable Solutions & evaluation

Solution	Impact to Usability	Effort	Priority
Smart Voice Based Input of setting	High	Med (Because google has the information and the voice input capability to process that)	1
Auto Detect of food and recommendation of setting (Image and weigh)	High	High	2
Auto cut off even if the input is more than required	Med	Med	3

I would like to proceed with a smart voice-based input of setting

Capabilities

Integration with google home and google assistant
Training google assistant for microwave settings [ Can be done through vast information of dishes and foods already available with google]
Auto detect of weight to select the right temperature and time

Metrics

1. Number of users using the service

2. Number of manual inputs if any [ To help improve the functionality more]

Satish Nandi · Answer 4 · 2021-04-11T05:32:28+0000

Clarify the Scope
Lets me ask, why do you want to redesign the Microwave ?
I do not really understand or rationalize the effort for redesign of a microwave.

I am specially doing this to demonstrate not all questions need to be answered when you might have a better approach.
You can show your skills of insight by challenging the question and offering an alternate.

Note: I want this assumption to be challenged by viewers and moderators here. You are not proving yourself any better than normal candidates by just following the framework.

Lets take a step back and see who are the users and why do they need this.

I assume, the ask here is what is the best experience can we provide to Heat or Reheat your food.
Can I take that as an ask, then redesign the microwave ?
List User Groups & Selected Group
User Groups:
1) Kids want to reheat their food home or school.
2) Adults wanted to (re)heat or use to cook food largely home use.
3) Techno challenged individuals like older age group.
List User Needs
User needs :
1) The best way to get the job done. (Re/Heating)
2) With least amount of interaction or ease of use.
3) Safety
4) Usual microwave are a mess with spill and burn outs. Can we avoid it ?
List Product Ideas
We have few options for these idea
1) Price competitive : Limited to certain features, heating and limited safety features
2) Heating, limited safety but with ease of use.
3) Best heating experience, all safety and excellent user experience

I am going to go with option 3. For 1 & 2 just cut features for this solutions.
Describe the Selected Solution
Our best of class food re/heating system will have following features
- The system will have both microwave & Owen features : Based on the type of food, the system will use the best heating system for the item.
- The system will have voice assistant like Alexa which will serve as your guide through display or audio option.
- The system will have a camera inside looking at the good items :
1) will be able to detect the food type.
2) The camera will also serve as monitor to prevent spills. The heating system will regulate to control the spills.
- It will have laser thermal meter to be able to measure the temperature of the food. The good will be heated to the precise temperature for your need
- Sonar/XXX waves system to detect if the container is metal or microwave safe or owen safe & the system will employ the heating accordingly.
- Internet enabled system with a good display can let you work a receipe book & drive the heating per the recipe. OR based on the food detection offer them some options.
- All of this does not need any input from user. Put the dish in, close the door & ask it to heat verbally.

Walla ..... may be throw in a stirrer & get your a AI/ML cook.
Version 2 can be extended to add ingredients along the way like washing machine does the soap and softener drops.