Impulse Labs, Inc. provides household appliances. The Company offers battery-integrated induction stoves. Impulse Labs currently serves customers in the United States with plans to serve customers internationally.
Impulse Labs
Lead UX Designer
Induction Stove UI Design
Impulse Labs successfully met their January 2025 ship date, delivering an innovative and user-friendly induction stove on time. This milestone reflects their commitment to excellence and their ability to align product development with customer expectations.
Overview
My first thoughts when Impulse Labs approached me to help with the design of their induction stove user interface was, “What? A Stove? This is not my area of expertise.” After further thought I then said to myself, ”Wait, I’ve never designed for hardware before. Plus designing hardware for such a wide demographic where the only customer inputs are right turn, left turn, and press must be challenging.” Excited, I accepted the challenge to lead the design efforts to to meet their January 2025 ship date and establish new partnerships.
Working collaboratively with product owners and engineering, the goal was to reimagine the UI to deliver a seamless, user-friendly experience that aligned with Impulse Labs’ vision of innovation and precision. My role involved conducting extensive user research, analyzing prior test data, and iterating on design to address consumer frustrations. The design had to strike a balance between functionality and simplicity while ensuring that users could understand and operate the stove quickly and with ease.
This collaborative effort was pivotal to ensuring the product not only met its ship date and solidify partnerships, but more importantly exceeded user expectations.
"I was also delighted to discover he had a good deal of experience running user tests, and Chris owned user testing for the new UI in its entirery, recruiting participants, coordinating timing, writing scripts, executing the tests, and collating feedback and proposing changes based on the results. In user testing the new UI quickly reached a point that it scored highly on ease of use and appeal.
Chris's contributions to the project were substantial and without his help we couldn't have gotten the UI to such a solid place."
Brian Sharp
President, Software & Design
Impulse Labs
While the company had already developed initial designs, consumer testing revealed significant usability issues: the interface was perceived as confusing, unintuitive, and unable to clearly communicate key functions. These pain points risked impacting both the product's market readiness and adoption by customers.
The research and ideation phase for the Impulse Labs induction stove redesign was focused on understanding user behaviors, needs, and pain points to craft an intuitive and efficient user interface. This phase began with a deep dive into prior usability testing data, which highlighted common frustrations, such as difficulty understanding stove status, control ambiguity, and information overload on the display.
To gain further insights, I conducted user interviews, observed real-world cooking scenarios, and benchmarked competing products to identify gaps and opportunities. These findings informed our ideation process, where we explored multiple concepts that prioritized clarity, simplicity, and ease of use. The ultimate goal of this phase was to create a design framework that empowered users to interact with the stove effortlessly, while aligning with Impulse Labs’ commitment to innovation and functionality.
Key Insights gleaned from moderated remote and in house (not pictures) testing
which were essential for directing design.
Ideation
My approach to the ideation phase was to look at industry leaders and the previous work that had been done, compare it to the testing results, and develop concepts that addressed key pain points and opportunities for improvement. I particularly targeted problems around user confusion regarding controls, display clarity, and overall interface simplicity.
Visual design played a critical role in this phase, as I explored designs that enhanced clarity and consistency, using color, typography, and iconography to guide users through the interface effortlessly.
Prototyping was equally essential, allowing us to create interactive models that could be tested and iterated upon quickly, ensuring that our design choices were validated by real user interactions before final development.
This iterative process helped shape a refined induction stove experience that balances aesthetic appeal with functional simplicity that has won numerous awards.
A few of many early icon centric POC wireframes for low-fidelity protoyping.
Although these explorations tested well, they did not make it passed POC phase.
After rounds of testing and stakeholder buy in, I moved on to designing in high-fidelity integrating the visual identity and voice and tone of the brand. The goal was to create a visually appealing and cohesive interface that also adhered to accessibility standards.
Throughout this process I maintained continuous feedback loops with stakeholders and customers making iterative adjustments based on their input. This approach ensured that the final design was not only functional but also met the needs and expectations of the customers and business.
Impulse Labs Takeaways
Over the six months designing for Impulse Labs, testing was critical to the design process. Testing invalidated and validated early assumptions which guided design toward a simple, intuitive control set that was widely praised by current and potential customers. The final UI emphasized minimal controls and clear status indicators, helping Impulse meet their January ship date and secure a key partnership with THOR.
As the Lead Designer, I coulld not have been happier with the outcome.
