Upliance Airfryer
overview
This project is designed end-to-end by me as a Principal Designer at upliance.ai, spanning the physical control knob, companion app, and overall user experience. I also designed the working model for Texture Control, a first-of-its-kind technology for air fryers that gives users greater control over their cooking results. Built with the team at upliance.ai, and loved by its users.
year
2026
role
UX Design
UI Design
Concept Design
company
Upliance.ai
Problem Area
The modern air fryer is a powerful tool for healthy and efficient cooking, but most users lack the confidence, guidance, and feedback needed to use it successfully. Despite being marketed as an easy and healthy cooking appliance, air fryers often remain underused or abandoned. Users struggle to understand how to operate them effectively due to lack of intuitive guidance, practical usage tips, and overwhelming or inaccurate online information. This leads to failed attempts, low confidence, and eventual mistrust on the device.
Research Data
Airfryer adoption reveals two distinct user types: regular cooks (40%) and occasional cooks (60%). While both groups see potential in the product, their usage patterns and experiences diverge significantly.
Regular cooks integrate the airfryer into their routine, often using it 2–3 times a week or more. They feel skilled and confident, experiment widely, and even teach others. For them, the airfryer often exceeds expectations. Their challenges are secondary—such as cleaning, unintuitive controls, or running out of recipe ideas—rather than barriers to continued use.
In contrast, occasional cooks—our primary user group—struggle to go beyond frozen foods or reheating. They use the airfryer less than they initially expected, lack confidence with experimentation, and often face frustrations with temperature, doneness, or effort required. These hurdles make them revert to traditional cooking methods, limiting the value they derive from the product.
This indicates that while regular cooks demonstrate the airfryer’s full potential, occasional cooks represent the larger, more critical audience to focus on. By reducing usability pain points (controls, cleaning, effort) and actively supporting them with ideas, guidance, and confidence-building recipes, we can help occasional users unlock the same sense of empowerment and satisfaction that regular cooks already enjoy.
People buying into promise, not understanding
Most people are drawn to air fryers for healthier cooking, convenience, and inspiration from social media, while curiosity and recommendations from friends and family play a smaller role.
This suggests that purchase decisions are driven more by the promise of better cooking experiences than by a clear understanding of the product itself.
Cooking relies on guesswork
Most users rely on trial and error, guesswork, and past cooking experience rather than preset modes or guided instructions. Uncertainty around time and temperature is the biggest challenge, while some users also struggle to understand what they can cook.
This highlights a key usability gap: air fryers leave users to figure out cooking on their own rather than guiding them toward consistent, predictable results.
High intent, low usage
Users aren't using their air fryers less because they prefer traditional cooking, but because of uncertainty about what to cook, inconsistent results, limited recipe inspiration, and the effort involved.
The challenge isn't a lack of interest, but the gap between users' intentions and their actual cooking experience.
Inconsistent outcomes and results
While most users achieve satisfactory cooking results, very few are consistently happy with them. A significant number experience unpredictable outcomes, highlighting a gap in cooking consistency and reliability.
Opportunity Area: Make cooking results more consistent and predictable by giving users intuitive control over their desired food texture, reducing guesswork and helping them achieve the results they expect every time.
60%
of air fryer users purchased one to adopt healthier cooking habits.
80%
Users heavily rely on trial and error and uncertainity when cooking with an air fryer.
50%
of users use their air fryer less frequently than they initially expected.
90%
of air fryer users aren't consistently satisfied with their cooking results.
Upliance Airfryer Knob
We needed an interface that was efficient enough to feel physical, but expressive enough to communicate something very sophisticated. That's why we chose a combination of a physical knob and an AMOLED touchscreen. The knob gives you speed to set your controls. The physical control gives you a sense of certainty. And the screen gives us the opposite capability. It gives us language. It allows the product to explain itself. The display gives us the ability to progressively reveal complexity.
The knob handles the interaction. The screen handles the communication of intelligence. And together they create something neither could do alone.
Layouting Knob
The challenge was working within the physical constraints of a screen-and-knob interface. The display had a defined boundary, with a visible bezel that could make the interaction feel confined. The intention was to make a finite display feel infinite. An interface where the boundaries of the screen become less apparent, and the interaction feels like a natural extension of the product itself.
Texture Control
In our product, progressive disclosure is used to hide complexity at the moment of decision making. Each texture option actually controls time, temperature, and a 3 phase cooking model, but instead of showing all this upfront, we only present simple texture choices and the total time. This reduces cognitive load and helps users make quick, confident decisions without needing to understand the underlying system.
As the air fryer runs, more information is revealed gradually. Users see the cooking broken into three phases with simple descriptions, and only if they choose to explore further do they see the detailed temperature curve and controls for each phase. This keeps the experience simple at first, while still allowing deeper control for users who want it.
Recognition rather than recall
Each setting is designed with a distinct visual language to build a strong, recognizable identity. Temperature, time, and texture are not just values but visually differentiated elements, allowing users to instantly identify them without reading. This identity is carried consistently across states, for example, the texture circle appears both during selection and in the airfrying screen, helping users relate back effortlessly. Similarly, the temperature circle reinforces instant recognition in the running state. This continuity reduces the need for interpretation and enables fast, intuitive understanding through recognition rather than recall.
Building Texture Control
Every ingredient responds to heat differently, making texture control a complex challenge. We didn't want to create another set of presets. We wanted the air fryer to understand how different ingredients achieve different textures. So we tested everything from eggs and prawns to broccoli and chicken, studying their heat curves and using time and temperature as signals to estimate the ingredient and adapt the cooking process. But the user shouldn't have to understand any of this complexity. They simply know what they want: “I want it crispy.” And that became the interface. We weren't removing complexity. We were absorbing it, so the user wouldn't have to.
Connected Cooking Experience
In our product, the app is designed to extend the cooking experience beyond the physical air fryer. We didn't want it to function simply as a remote control, but as a connected ecosystem that brings together cooking inspiration, decision-making, and device control.
Users can discover recipes, explore what they can cook, and send cooking instructions directly to the air fryer without manually setting time or temperature. The app translates recipe requirements into device actions, reducing the gap between deciding what to cook and actually cooking it.
The goal was to make the technology feel less like an additional interface to manage and more like a natural extension of the cooking process.
Interactive Experience
From first sketches to the product on the shelf, I designed this airfryer upliance.ai end to end. Now available in market. This 3D version lets you play with the part I care about most: the knob and screen interaction. Turn it, press it, pull out the tray, make fries and see how it feels.
gauravilad.design@gmail.com
Bengaluru, Karnataka
@2026