Designing user interfaces and experiences is quite a common thing I have needed to do. But not so much when it is for a very tiny screen and requiring specific interactions. This is new territory for me. So new, I almost jumped the gun and forgot about the complexity and importance of this step in the project.
The true first step in building the bottle maker would be to design a menu with the functions a user can interact with before even thinking about measuring the milk powder. In case you are confused about what I’m talking about. In yesterday’s blog post I alluded to starting on the work for measuring milk power and dispensing it. That turns out not to be the true first thing I needed to build. I needed to first work on the interface menu, and think through how to present the functions that make up the product.
Solution Draft:
In order to quickly achieve the goal of having a user menu that allows the user to input and set commands within the device, I have chosen the old and great Nokia 5110 LCD module and some tactile buttons I must have salvaged from some projects a while ago. The interface will allow a user to scroll to options and choose the option or set a value depending on what it is that you are doing.
Designing the menu.
The user should be able to achieve the following tasks.
Choose if they want to make a bottle or only get milk powder/warm water.
Specify the amount of milk powder they require
Specify the temperature of the water
Choose to “Prepare” Pre-boil water for later use when making the bottle
Set auto bottle tracking features/settings
First published on Substack.