Mise
A parallel timer for people cooking more than one thing at once.
What it was
Home cooks and culinary students weren't burning food because they couldn't cook — they were burning food because kitchen timers only track one thing, and a real dinner has four things happening at once: onions caramelizing, dough resting, stock reducing, rice steaming. Every phone timer app assumed you only cared about one of them.
What I did
I designed and built a lightweight web app that runs several color-coded timers side by side, readable from across the kitchen at a glance — no accounts, no ads, no app store. You set a timer with one tap, and it lives in your browser tab, so it survives a phone getting flour on it. I ran early tests with a local cooking school's Tuesday-night class, watching where people actually looked while their hands were busy, and redesigned the numerals twice until they read clearly from six feet away.
What changed
Thistle & Thyme Cooking School adopted it for every weeknight class. Instructors stopped hearing "sorry, can we restart" mid-demo, and word of mouth carried it well past that one classroom.