A toast to an impeccably designed toaster
Making toast is a User Experience. Like all experiences, it can go well, or it can go poorly. A significant factor in achieving a successful outcome depends on the design of the object at the core of the experience — the toaster itself.
I hadn’t spent much time thinking about how toasters were designed until an exceptional one showed up in my old office, resulting in a personal existential crisis that caused me to question my competency as a software developer. Allow me to explain.
The experience of making toast
Ask yourself the following questions in a daytime TV infomercial voice:
- How many times have you found yourself scraping off char due to an over-toasting misadventure?
- How much time have you spent puzzling over whether “7” equates to the perfect golden-brown bagel that your heart so desires?
- Can you count the number of times you’ve interrupted the toasting process upon anxiously thinking “it seems like it’s been going for a while, what if it’s burning?”, only to have to restart the cycle and risk setting off the smoke alarm should you be forgetful?
This is where the scene cuts to an attractive assistant taking some jet-black toast out of a smoking toaster and then looking perplexed, half-heartedly waving a towel at a beeping smoke alarm.
“Don’t let this happen to you!”
Say it with me now: “There has to be a better way!”
Well, there is. Design your toaster properly.
When this new toaster descended from the heavens to show up in the lunchroom at my previous job, someone had stocked the kitchen with free raisin bread to celebrate the occasion. As I used the new toaster for the first time, I explored the various features that set it apart from all toasters I’d used before.
The toaster was amazing. It was life-changing. All other toasters paled in comparison. It immediately made me feel inadequate as someone who produced software in an “Agile” environment (read: giving sales and clients more say in the design process than is good for them) when compared to the geniuses who had brought this toaster into existence.
Let me tell you what was so great about the design of this toaster and the importance of thinking from the user’s perspective, in order to create an exemplary experience, be it making toast or navigating the latest trendy app that’s vying for users’ attention.
I’m going to be writing about a specific toaster line, the Breville Die-Cast Smart Toaster. Don’t worry, it doesn’t have an internet connection, it’s just Smart at what it does (help you make perfect toast). I’m not being paid to write this, nor am I using any referral links. I’m just in love with a toaster and feel the need to shout it from the rooftops.
So let’s dig into what makes this toaster so Smart.
It has a progress bar
So you’ve purchased a new toaster, and you’re going to make toast for the first time. What do you set the dial to? Somewhere in middle? A lighter setting to be conservative? Or do you go ham and set it to max just to see what this baby can really do?
With a regular toaster, you take a shot in the dark. You’re able to arbitrarily adjust the dial on subsequent toastings. Not brown enough? Bump it up a little bit for next time! Too brown? Dial it down a notch. Eventually, you’ll end with your magic number, after much trial and error.
Instead, the Breville has an LED progress bar. It visually ticks down as it toasts, so if you start it at a 3, and stop it before the cycle is over, you know exactly how much time (toasting units?) were left to go. This helps immensely when calibrating things for your next slice of toast.
There’s also the added benefit of being able to see how much time is left in the toasting cycle so you know when you need to make your way back to the kitchen. It also cues you check on your toast if it’s nearing the end of the cycle, should you be concerned that it may be getting overdone. Here we see a core tenet of digital product design in action: providing the user with feedback, thus removing uncertainty and improving their experience. This feedback then works synergistically with the next amazing feature of the Breville…
The “Lift and Look” button
It does what it says. Press “Lift and Look” mid-toast and a motor briefly lifts your toast up for a visual inspection before lowering it back down again. This is great for the following reasons:
- It doesn’t interrupt the toasting cycle. With a conventional toaster, “peeking” at your toast this way requires you to stop and restart the process (assuming your toast isn’t ready yet). As previously discussed, this can result in over-toasting if you forget to stop it early after a restart.
- It lets you easily benchmark at what point your toast is ready when used in combination with the progress bar. Go ahead and start toasting at the maximum setting, then use “Lift and Look” along the way. When your toast is done, do the math. If you started at a 5 and finished at a 3, set the toaster to 2 to ensure you get a perfect piece of toast with no oversight the next time around.
- You don’t have to stick a bread knife in the toaster. I don’t know if other people do this, but I’ll use a bread knife to push the piece of bread/toast* to the side to get a look at whether it’s done or not, while the toaster is still operating. I do this to avoid the aforementioned stop/restart/burn scenario. I haven’t been electrocuted (yet) when doing this, but it’s less than ideal.
A motor is an unconventional component to include in a toaster. It increases the cost and complexity (and thus failure rate, presumably) of the unit. This tradeoff yields an improvement in the overall user experience of making toast, which then (hopefully) converts to more toaster sales. Heck, if the toaster is exceptional enough, maybe some kook on the internet will compose an ode to it and give us some free promotion. Let that motor whirr!
(Actually, the motor is whisper-quiet.)
*At what point does bread become toast? The moment it’s put into a toaster? The moment the toaster is turned on? Is there a minimum amount of brownness required for bread to officially be classified as toasted? Is there an ISO standard for this like there is for brewing tea? This is truly one of life’s great mysteries.
The “A Bit More” button
This button also does what it says. It toasts your toast for “a bit more”, should you find its current level of toastiness lacking. You don’t have to restart the toasting cycle and risk misadventure, you just press this magical button, and shortly thereafter, you get a slightly toastier piece of toast.
And again, we have synergy here with “Lift and Look”. If you preview your toast as it’s nearing the end of the cycle, only to realize more is going to be needed, simply hit the button to add some time and walk away!
I’m not the only one who feels this way
There’s a great series on Netflix called Abstract: The Art of Design which I recommend to everyone regardless of whether or not they’re in a design or design-adjacent field.
I was watching season 2 episode 5 with Ian Spalter, former head of design at Instagram. About 3 minutes into the episode, what shows up? The toaster! The toaster I’d been obsessing about as my personal gold-standard for good design for several years.
The toaster received what I would call a brief cameo in the episode, and Spalter had this to say about it:
“I have a toaster that has a button that says “a bit more” … that’s part of the user experience of making toast. Now, as a designer there are costs to that, because now you added a new button — is it worth it? Is it actually valuable? Is it something that people use, or is it just sort of superfluous? … That’s all part of the experience, thinking about the conditions and the context. And then how do you work within those constraints to make that task as easy and pleasurable as possible?”
So I’m in good company with my obsession. This exposition does a good job of setting up the remainder of the episode, which focuses on digital product design. Personally, I think they could have done a whole episode centred around physical product design focused on my beloved toaster. Unfortunately, my emails to Netflix on the subject have so far gone unanswered.
There’s also a piece on The Atlantic about this toaster worth reading, so I’m not exactly breaking ground here. This just goes to show that if you’re thoughtful in designing the user’s experience, people will take notice — and the buzz that gets generated will help set your product apart from its competition.
Ding! Toast is done!
There you have it, my argument for the superiority of the Breville Die-Cast Smart Toaster. Plus, an analysis of how effective design can improve one’s user experience to the point that they dedicate way too much time to effuse about it online for anyone bored enough to listen. Personally, I wish that more physical product designers would hire a UX expert for their team, I think our day-to-day lives would be better for it.
For example, I have a bone to pick with whoever designed my side-by-side front-load washer/dryer pair: everyone places their dryer on the right. The dryer’s door should open to the right and the washer’s to the left, making it easy to open both doors and transfer the wash into the dryer. Instead, my dryer’s door opens to the left, requiring that I awkwardly navigate wet clothes around or above its door into the dryer. I more-often-than-not drop some socks onto the floor during this process, much to my frustration. If only someone at Breville had helped design my washer/dryer.
I also have a confession. I don’t own the Breville toaster. Although I’ve had it in my shopping cart on Amazon several times, I’ve never pulled the trigger and made the purchase. My current toaster works fine, I’m a bit of a minimalist, and can’t justify replacing it as much as I want to. I do, however, ask all of my friends if they need a toaster when I hear they’re moving apartments, so far without any takers. In the meantime, I’m left to secretly hoping that the next time I go to make toast, that I discover my current toaster has died, warranting the need for its replacement.
I suppose I’m also concerned that if I had this toaster on my counter, which is close to my eye-line from my home “office” desk in my somewhat-spartan one-bedroom apartment, that its presence and perfection would slowly mock me to the brink of insanity, rather than serving as a source of inspiration. But at least I’d have perfect toast as I lost my marbles.
So until further notice, I’m going to keep sticking a bread knife into my toaster like some kind of savage in lieu of having a sophisticated “Lift and Look” button of my own. Oh well.
