Eco-Genie: Inventory and Home Organizer

How might we use the user-centered design process to create a product
that would help with a bad habit people have?

Context

At the University of Washington, I researched and developed an inventory management system for a person's home or apartment.  Meant to be used to keep track of your items, food, and trash in the context of reducing consumer waste.  For this project, waste was defined as "any item, whether perishable or non, that sits around until the item goes bad (ex. food) or remains unused for a varying amount of time (ex. clothes).  The end goal was to provide a way  for users to sell or donate the non-perishables, and to be aware of the amount of perishables they are throwing away to help them reduce the amount they are purchasing.  Documented below is the process that brought myself and my team to our end product.

Purpose

The purpose of this project was meant to introduce me to the full user-centered design process.

My Role

Project Manager & User Researcher

Problem Space

I came up with the concept based on an initial idea from a team mate.  How might we reduce the amount of food waste people get from overbuying?  This sparked the idea of how much stuff I have in my apartment just lying around, never being used.  That issue has caused me, many times, to rebuy an item only to realize that I already have one.  I also thought of an idea to add a community sharing aspect to the product. To discover the solution, we started our initial research.

Process

This project went through a user-centered design process: initial research, early design ideation, user feedback, design refinement, and final evaluation.

Initial Research

The goal of this phase is to discover requirements people would want in a product to prevent overbuying.  In addition to understanding and developing personas for our product's target audience.  

Research Questions

• What do people think about waste?
• What are the existing ways people try to reduce waste?
• Why do people produce waste?
• What kind of products do people waste?
• When do people waste the most?
• Where do people waste?

Methods

Diary Study: By having six participants complete a diary study we were able to gain insight potential users actions and experiences.  We asked the participants to log every item they purchased, why they purchased it, what they threw away, and why they threw the item away over a two week period.  The diary study was perfect longitudinal method to gain this information. 

Survey: Using typeform.com, we needed to make sure that people waste food or products.   Over a two week period we got over 200 responses to our survey.  Questions were a mix of Likert style statements (5 - strongly agree & 1 - strongly disagree), multiple choice questions, and opened ended questions.  With statements such as, "I regularly throw away food because it expires." Multiple choice statements such as, "I think my main cause of unused or barely used item was is: A) Bulk discounts B) I forgot what I had C) I did not like the product D) Overestimation e) Other." The survey was the perfect method to find participants attitudes and behaviors, including thoughts, opinions, and comments, about our research questions.

Semi-structured Interviews: Twelve potential users were interviewed over a two week period in the Greater Seattle area.  By interviewing potential users, not only do we get to know our users, we were able to gain their main objectives, motivations, and what are their pain points.  The best reason to conduct a user interview is that it allowed us to dive deep and focus on asking "Why?" in ways surveys could not.

As Arnie Lund said, "Know thy user, and you are not thy user."

Results

Based on the triangulation of our diary study, survey, and user interviews, we found that participants:

• Often forgot about the items that they own.
• Bought bulk food items only to not use them all.
• Impulse buys products.
• Often buy items online, but does not return even if unwanted.
• Would get busy and go out to eat instead of cook at home which caused products to be wasted.
• Would be interested in sharing (specific types) items that they do not use.
• Attempt to donate bigger items that they do not use if they remember or have the time.
• Attempt to reduce waste, but often their lifestyles get in the way..

Competitive Analysis

In the interest of better understanding our target space, we performed competitive analysis. With the goal of finding market gaps and what features we should focus on first in developing our minimum viable product.  We studied some of the online portals such as craigslist and Facebook communities that attempt to reduce unused/barely used products among urban residences.

Personas

Based on the results, we came up with two primary, and one secondary persona.  We chose to focus on Edward and Raj.  While Jessica was a great secondary persona she did not differ enough from Raj.

Ideation & Design

After brainstorming, affinity mapping, and experience mapping,
we focused on:

• Inventory capabilities
• Object recognition
• Ability to share items
• Tracking how much you waste

Usability Testing

Test Findings

• Clearer instructions on how the "Dot" scanner worked.
• Landing page felt cluttered and unnecessary.
• Iconography was not clear.
• Navigation between pages was difficult.
• Statistics on the waste report were hard to read and understand.
• Waste report was clear how it works or what it means.
• Inventory screen was useful, but hard to browse for products.
• Sharing application was not clear on how it works.

Impact

Lessons Learned

• User feedback is invaluable.  Given the scope of the course, more testing and research could have been done.  
• Don't bite more than you can chew.  As the project manager, I let the scope of the project get too big.  If we focused more on the inventory and less on the sharing we could have created a more focused product.
• Don't reinvent the wheel.  After the round of user testing, I had to down scope the project.  The built in sharing application felt underwhelming to users. I decided that the best solution would be to integrate with craigslist sell or give away items.
• Paper prototyping is amazing.  They are quick and easy to make, and they allow you to do tests and iterate quickly.