Another consideration about usability...

1. on usability…
Soft boiled eggs and UX Design
I LOVE soft boiled eggs!
Simple dishes are the more difficult to prepare
well1 , making a good soft boiled egg, soft but
not liquid, needs some skill.
The most critical factor of success is, off
course, the boiling time. The metropolitan
legends say that every morning Prince of
Wales Charles chef prepares 7 eggs with
different boiling times so that his majesty may choose the one he likes more.
I do not have a personal chef, yet, and in order to learn to boil my morning
eggs the first thing I did was, of course, a Google search. There are, as usual,
a lot of pages with this kind of information, but all the one I’v found start with
the statement: “use eggs at room temperature”.
Well, first of all: what is room temperature? This parameter may vary a lot
from place to place and from season to season.
The real reason for this advice is that cold eggs may broke when immersed in
boiling water, but this problem can be overcome putting some salt in the water
and immersing them with attention.
Normal people keeps eggs in a refrigerator!
To give a good UX in boiling eggs would be much better to take in account the
real situation and do not ask people action that he will never remember like
taking out eggs form refrigerator 12 hours before preparation.
“Cacio e pepe” (cheese and paper) is one of the most simple and good dish in the traditional
foods of Rome, very simple, but VERY difficult to prepare well!
http://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/cacio-e-pepe
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December 11th, 2013 v 1.0 ­ page 1 of 2

2. on usability…
Better make some experiments (temperature in a refrigerator is anyway much
more constant than in the room) and give, as an advice, the cooking time
starting from that temperature.
In other words when trying to give to user’s a nice user experience start from
real situation, solve the real problem and make things as easy as possible!
The results of my experiments says that if you want a soft boiled egg like the
one in the picture (the egg’s yolk soft and the white harder) 6 minutes in
boiling water with some salt to avoid breakage is good for eggs coming directly
from the refrigerator.
December 11th, 2013 v 1.0 ­ page 2 of 2