Touch Glaciem : The Touch Screen for Soft Ice Machines

Abstract: The Chinese company Ocean Power manufactures and exports soft ice cream machines to companies worldwide. Their machines have high functionality and robust design that enables a low-cost manufacturing. All machines have a control panel where settings of the machine and the ice cream can be ranged. The control panel is at present designed in accordance with an old indigenous design tradition. With increasing international influence and contact, the need of functionality and design is changing. To stay competitive Ocean Power requests a change and an improvement of the control panel. The device needs to be intuitive and more attractive to the western as well as the domestic market. The purpose of this Bachelor Thesis has therefore been to develop a new, modern, userfriendly control panel that takes both cognitive and visual ergonomics into consideration. In order to make the control panel more intuitive and user-friendly, cognitive and visual ergonomics were studied. Different design theories and rules of how a control panels should be designed were taken into consideration. After exhaustive observations on Ocean Powers machines and an interview with Richard Cederwall, former employee of Ocean Power, a brainstorming session took place. The project members came up with various suggestions on the new control panel and its design. A returning theme in all the proposals was simplicity and intuitive symbols. A hierarchy map was then developed in order to group the machines functions into logical sub categories. During the projects development phase, it was decided that the new control panel should be a touch screen. This would allow a more flexible interface design, as well as give the ice cream machine an uplifting look and a feeling of exclusivity. To show what the touch screen with its interface, functions and graphics are meant to look like, a prototype was developed. The prototype is programmed for Android operating systems and will be demonstrated on an Android touch pad. This gives the viewer a realistic idea of what the interface could look like and how it would work.