Elf - Refrigerator Inventory Application

About the project

The Project Elf, (fridge Inventory application) is a part of User Experience course which aims to assist the users with keeping track of their items in their refrigerator, nutrition intake, budget and user’s cooking needs.

The name ‘elf’, comes from the shoemaker’s tale, where elves helped the shoemaker by getting his chores done.

Similarly, the application helps the user to make their lives a little easier.

Target Audience: Primary — Working professionals,

People living in shared spaces

Secondary- Homemakers

Brief

A system which intends to help the user to keep a track of the items in the fridge. In addition it will also assist with maintaining your nutritional and budget records. Hence, making the user’s life more convenient.

About the application

The elf application is a standalone application and/or can be clubbed with the smart sensor. The item and its data can be fed automatically through sensors, through bill scanning as well as, manually through the app. The user may wish to shop from anywhere from local markets to online pantries, the app will be able to keep tracks of all the items present in fridge. The application allows the user to customise their virtual fridge, closest to what resembles their actual fridge. For the people who live in shared spaces, can also colour code their items, in-order to segregate the same.

The system will be able to calculate the shelf life through sensors and also by reading the manufacturing and expiry dates of packed goods. This also includes cooked and raw food items.

The application will help in keeping track of what is in your fridge, from wherever you are.

The system also automatically adds items to your shopping list as they get used. Users can keep a track of their nutritional intake and also their weekly/monthly/yearly expenditure.

It also provides recipe prompts based on the present inventory.

Design Process

As a group we started with identifying day to day problems and opportunity areas faced by people in general such as, therapy for youth, safe smoking, Alzheimer, baby health tracker,

plant care, water management, fast fashion, food waste management, design tool finding, kitchen recipe prompter, fake news filter, legal advices for layman, old-age health system, inclusive parent support platform, parking issues, travel checklist reminder, cupboard organiser, fridge organiser and so on.

We segregated the problem and opportunity areas into broader categories like Informative, Travel, Support system, Organising, Efficient life, Inspirational, Sustainable environment, Health/self care.

After categorising the areas, we brainstormed and found the most potential in organisational area and went ahead with our research.We did quantitative as well as qualitative research. We prepared a questionnaire in which we included questions related to the problems faced by people in their houses in day to day life.

We narrowed down to one problem area : Fridge organising system

To understand our topic better we studied more in depth. From types of refrigerators to other functionalities. We did this through market research as well as by taking interviews and surveys. We concluded few very prominent issues, which we aimed to solve through our system.

Problem areas :

Forgetting items kept in the fridge which rots with time.

Keeping a track of the items kept in the fridge.

Visibility issues.

Opportunity areas:

Keeping a track of one’s nutritional intake.

Providing customised recipes.

Keeping a track of one’s budget.

How will the system work

For instance, there are four people living together under one roof. The application will be installed in each of their phones. All of them would be able to keep a track of their respective items in the fridge. The shopping list would have the list of the items which need to be bought. This list would be customisable by the respective users.

Once, the items are shopped for, they would be added to the application inventory list as soon as the bill is generated at the supermarket or an online platform. If the user wishes to shop from a local market, the smart sensor which is capable of sensing the items will automatically register the items kept in the fridge.

The user will be notified when the items are about to reach their expiration date, by calculating shelf life of the packed goods or by sensors.

The users can also colour code their items in order to identify them. This would also prevent anyone from confusing other’s items as theirs. This would be reflected in the budget section in order to split the bill accordingly.

The application also provides a feature to track user’s nutritional intake of a specific time period. Recipe is a feature which provides customised recipe to the user according to the ingredients available in the fridge.

Designing interface

Step 1: Developing a navigation system for the application.

Step 2: Brainstorming the thumbnails.

Step 3: Building up wireframes.

Step 4: Setting up a visual language.

Step 5: Digitising

Conclusion

Elf, refrigerator inventory application is an user experience class room project, which integrates research methodologies to identify user experience related problem/opportunity areas. The project concludes with a futuristic approach towards refrigerators which we currently use. The system which we have developed connects technology with user behaviour, hence can be easily adopted by people in their day-to day life.