The problem#

Kitchen timers are common tool used by many (most?) people while cooking. They come in many forms, but tend to have the same basic user interface: turn a dial (physical or digital) or type in a time and press a start button, and get a notification (usually some kind of beeping sound) that amount of time later. Very simple concept, your kitchen probably has multiple on different appliances, some of which you might even use.

I've run into a couple ways this design does not quite fit what I want while cooking:

1. For shorter measurements where being half a minute off matters, the time I take fumbling with the timer settings starts to feel non-trivial. In practice, I'll often just set the timer for one minute less than I actually want. Alternatively, you could make sure the timer is already programmed, so you just have to hit the start button. But both of these are workarounds for an interface not doing what I want.

2. The timer is often just an estimate, and the reaction to the timer is to check on the food and set a new short timer for the next time to check on the food. This may happen multiple times, to the point where I've forgotten exactly how much additional time I've added and there's addiitonal gaps in time between hearing the timer and setting a new timer, so I don't know the actual total of how long something cooked unless I had memorized the time on the clock when it started. Some timers do start counting up after finishing which does help with this somewhat.

The solution#

I have not yet implemented a timer app, just thought about what I think would solve these problems.

The main interface idea I had was that the interface should not restrict the ordering of specifying the settings of a timer and starting a timer. The main entrypoint would be a big "mark time" button that would record a time point that could then be set as part of a new or existing timer as a starting or ending point, or just when an existing timer was extended for some additional time. Additionally, timers and time points should be able to be named, so you could have, for example, a timer named "turkey" and a time point labeled "temperature reduced".

I'm less clear on exactly what this should look like and how the history should be presented. The most important information is the amount of time left on the current timer and its name. And possibly the time since the very start and the time since the last named time point? This will require some experimentation, but since it will likely be used on a display with limited space (either a phone or a tablet that would optimally be visible from across the kitchen), the main display should have as little information as possible so it can be made as legible as possible.

The details#

Displaying a timeline#

One idea I had was for displaying a collection of timers as a set of parallel timelines like a Gantt chart. When planning a complicated meal with a lot of parts, it can be useful to write out the times when everything needs to be done which can be visualized as parallel lines. While I have been involved in cooking meals complicated enough to need that level of planning and keeping track of things, they are definitely limited to special occasions, so I don't see a lot of need for going all in on making lots of timers work well. It may be an interesting feature, but unlikely to be a common way to use a timer, especially as such charts are not a great way to display information at a glance like how long until the next timer expires. You could have a moving vertical line of the current time, but it would be difficult to make it easily clear what that means in minutes and seconds.

Since these charts are very wide, especially if there's few items being kept track of, I was thinking such a display might work well for taking a small vertical or horizontal slice at the edge of a screen of a kitchen tablet where the rest of the screen is being used to actually display recipes, but I will have to try it to see how well that works in practice.

As Gantt charts can be useful for planning, it might be interesting to be able to pre-load a planning chart in and be able to use it as a combined checklist and preset collection of timer/time point labels. And then displaying the history afterward as a chart to see how the actual compared to the plan which may help in making plans in the future. (Having not a lot of practice with complicated meals, I've never seen one actually follow the planned schedule.)

Sharing timers#

The most straightforward way to share timer state is to simply have the timer on a device that's visible to everyone. The timer built-into your oven or other appliances handles this well, since anyone in the kitchen can see it (although for long timers, you might not be in the kitchen), but if I'm making my own, the default would be to view it through a phone. Which means either, not doing that and having a separate device like a kitchen tablet where the timers live or synchronizing them between devices. I will probably do the latter eventually, but for simplicity, the first version will not include that feature. Although it should not merely store timers in the state of a single web page and instead use localStorage or similar to avoid accidentally losing a timer due to reloading the page.