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Improving the UX of Salt & Pepper Mills

Nicolas Brouillac's tabletop design work for Peugeot, spotted in Coroflot

By Rain Noe - March 8, 2016

in Flotspotting | Product Design | UX | Food

Improving the UX of an everyday object can be tricky. When something already has a well-established design and a simple function, our instinct is to assume the item is as good as it's going to get. It takes a keenly observant designer to spot where there is room for improvement.

Nicolas Brouillac is one such designer. When tackling the design of the Alaska Salt & Pepper Mills for Peugeot, he aimed to have them operable by one hand, a boon for cooks. You've seen such one-handed designs before, either manually operated by means of a squeeze mechanism, or power-operated with a button atop a cylinder; both designs can be problematic for those with arthritis. Brouillac's approach was to opt for power-operated, but he's placed the pleasingly large button at an angle that requires minimal thumb movement to actuate.

[Editor's Note: See more of Brouillac's work on his Coroflot portfolio]

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The form almost recalls one of those Vipp cans, and the way the tactility of the button is presented makes one really want to press it.

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The killer feature for me is that he's placed an LED light at the bottom (I'm not sure why that's not illustrated in the images). One of the biggest complaints I have about cooking in my poorly-lit kitchen is that I often can't see exactly how much salt I'm dumping into a pot or pan whilst cooking. I've only ever seen LEDs on the bottom of one other salt mill, but I suspect this is a feature we'll see appearing more in future.

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We previously highlighted Brouillac's work on elegant decanters here.

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Nicolas Brouillac

8 years ago

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Thanks a lot for this paper.

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Nathan N

8 years ago

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Lets be honest with ourselves here...this is just regular ol' Industrial Design.

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Nathan N

8 years ago

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Lets be honest with ourselves here...this is just regular ol' Industrial Design.

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