In our ever lasting quest to make the world a better place, at least a better looking place, we challenged ourselves to redesign the kitchen timer. At least how kitchen timers are made as apps these days. The kitchen timer apps do solve some key features, but they also often add too much complexity to it, making it more cumbersome and time consuming to use.
- A kitchen timer that can time several burners and an oven at the same time.
- It has to be as simple to use as the standard kitchen timer.
- It has to be smarter than the standard kitchen timer.
Thyme offers a unique combination of features that easily sets it apart from the rest.
Our app is all about helping you make that delicious meal. Whether it´s for yourself, for your family gathering or for that perfect dinner with your best friends, you´re quite likely to need more than one of the burners on your stove. You might use one for sweet potatoes, one for the carrots and one for grandmas epic cranberry sauce. You might even have something juicy sizzling in the oven. This is a quite common scenario in most homes. But setting timers for everything you got cooking in a logic and simple way hasn’t always been that common. Thyme is a smart kitchen timer app that helps you do exactly this. The app gives you five timers. And they are all layed out like your kitchen stove. Four burners on top and an oven on the front.
The intuitive and unobtrusive two-step interface is simple to use and lets you set all the timers you need in a jiffy so you can keep focusing on your food. And when the timer is done, it will simple notify you with a ring-a-ding and a message saying “Your top-right stove just finished!”. It´s really that simple!
Because fine dining needs fine timing.
When designing an app there are always moments when you get great feature ideas that you really want to cram in to that little screen. In the case with Thyme we really wanted to keep it simple and intuitive. And to keep it like that all the way to production, we decided to follow the great industrial designer Dieter Rams and his “10 principles of good design”. With these principles in mind we could focus on making a product that had it´s focus on being user friendly, intuitive, esthetic og simple.
There are no settings: you don't need them. Pretty, simple and effective interface.
Thyme was released just in time for the x-mas season and quickly climbed up to the top 10 on the AppStore, both in Norway and USA. The app has been shown love by known tech- and design blogs all over the world. To mention a few, Lifehacker, Beautiful Pixels and Cult of Mac.
Won 2nd Place in Sølvtaggen award The jury statement:
Thyme was featured in Real Simple in their June edition. Real Simple is a magazine (owned by Time Inc,) features articles and information related to homekeeping, childcare, cooking and emotional wellbeing. The magazine has 7.6 million readers all over the world whereas 90% is women. ***Chosen Pick of the week by Starbucks + iTunes*** “Pick of the Week” is a cooperation between Apple and Starbucks where they single handedly pick out apps that they want to feature and gift to Starbucks customers all over the world. After the first day in the campaign we passed 100.000 downloads. So far there are a total of 1.200.000 apps in the AppStore, and as far as we know Thyme is the only norwegian app that has been Pick of the Week."The second place goes to Hyper with their perticularly gorgeous kitchen timer app Thyme. The jury is not at all in doubt that this is one of the prettiest and most user friendly apps we’ve seen, and wanted this to be stressed subsequently. It does exactly what it should, and in a quite appealing way.”