Refrigerators, What a Waste
Mandy, Jonathan, Jamie, and Joseph are students at UC Berkeley in User Interface Design and Development. We conducted 4 user interviews trying to discover how people use their refrigerators.
User 1: Jonathan interviewed a female adult working in the pharmaceutical industry on Sunday, 9/29/2019 at 4PM.
Interview Summary
From the interview, I learned that there exist varying attitudes on food waste. In particular, some people are okay with wasting food as a result of forgetting to eat food in the fridge, even to the extent where they deliberately don’t eat food that’s about to go bad because they would prefer to just eat out. I also discovered that in an environment with shared fridge space, some people choose to divide it evenly in order to avoid conflict.
User 1's Needs and Goals
- She needs to be able to share the fridge and cause as little conflict as possible.
- She needs to know what food items are about to go bad.
- She needs to have a better idea of what’s in the fridge.
Says: This section contains things that the user told me during the interview, like supposed attitudes on her habits.
Thinks: I documented the user’s thoughts when she repeated them out loud on a potential solution to her problems.
Feels: This contains the emotions I either observed or got the user to tell me during the interview when she told a story.
Does: Here, I tried to document the user’s habits.
Goals: These are the goals that the user conveyed as things she would like to achieve.
Detailed interview notes can be found here: https://pastebin.com/XdMrAbPa
User 2: Mandy interviewed a male adult in his early thirties in his home on Sunday, 9/29, at noon. The interviewee lives alone and works in communications at a local utility company.
Interview Summary
During my interview, I asked about my subject’s refrigerator habits as a means of understanding his attitudes towards food, food waste, and the fridge as a potentially contested space when shared with others. My interviewee currently lives by himself and thus has access to a personal fridge at home, but he shares a refrigerator with co-workers in his office. From our conversation, I learned that he wishes he threw out less food than he does now. His self-awareness has led him to buy fewer perishables, and while this behavior has alleviated the problem, it hasn’t entirely solved the issue. His habit of buying less food keeps his fridge pretty sparse and helps him conduct quick inventory of its contents. Yet, he still keeps some food for too long even though he’s aware of its existence in his fridge. (He also mentioned that he used to throw out more food because he wasn’t sure how long it was supposed to last.)
The inevitable need to clean up/throw out rotting food has led him to avoid buying meat because decomposing animal protein tends to be grosser than decomposing vegetables. He also eats out fairly often and keeps more dried/canned goods in his pantry; in his words, the “cabinets are where the action is at.” In addition to sharing his food storage habits, my interviewee described typical interactions with his refrigerator when preparing meals. He practices some improvisation when he cooks (i.e. staring at his collection of condiments and deciding if they’ll work with his meal) instead of following a fixed recipe; as a result, he often makes spur of the moment decisions about what to use from his fridge versus having a fixed plan. Finally, he mentioned the environment as a reason for eating meat less often and reducing food waste. Based on his estimates, however, he appears to already be on the low end of food waste (i.e. about one vegetable a week goes in the compost).
User 2’s Needs and Goals
Based on my interview and empathy map, I identified the following user needs/goals.
- He needs a way to consume the perishables he buys on a more timely basis to avoid the mess that comes with rotting food.
- He needs a way to devise quick meals based on the ingredients he has on hand and their potential shelf-life, so that he can more efficiently use his produce and reduce the guilt that comes with throwing food out.
- He needs a way to plan his grocery shopping and meals that can accommodate a dynamic schedule, so that his food habits align with a desire to live a more ethical, environmentally responsible life.
Says: He keeps his fridge sparse, but still throws out food more often than he would like.
Thinks: He may wonder if he can still eat food that has been there for a while, but knows there probably won’t be much in the fridge.
Feels: He wishes he used all the food he bought; not doing so inspires anxiety and guilt about the waste.
Does: He only interacts with the fridge when he is putting away groceries, cooking, or taking out leftovers.
Notes for our full interview can be found here.
User 3: The user was interviewed at her home in San Francisco, CA on 9/29/19. She is a busy professional in her 30’s working for a top consulting company in San Francisco, CA.
Interview Summary
User 3 was only aware of about ⅓ of the items she has in her refrigerator. She usually opens her fridge when she is hungry or planning to prepare food and is usually not aware of the content before opening, she never digs into the back unless she does have something specific in mind.
She typically cleans the fridge out when she notices a bad smell or looks moldy or she is running out of space for newly purchased food items. Food is thrown away weekly and the fridge is cleaned about once a month by a housekeeper.
When opening the fridge to prepare food, she usually creates a dish using a few easily seen items she thinks will go well together and may be combined with non-refrigerated food from other storage areas. She often has fresh fruits and vegetables from delivery services (Farm Fresh) and an unknown quantity gets thrown out.
User 3’s Needs and Goals
- Needs to be able to know what is in her fridge so she can plan meals.
- She needs to be able to get rid of spoiled items before they smell or mold.
- She needs to know what is in the back of the fridge as she doesn’t explore unseen areas until she cleans and the food is already spoiled.
- Needs to be able to know about more than ⅓ of her refrigerated food items.
- Needs to know when take-out food was put into the fridge so it can be safely consumed.
- Needs to be more aware of what is in her fridge.
Says: She often preps meals based on what she can see when she opens the fridge.
Thinks: She throws out a lot of food and isn’t sure what is in her fridge without looking.
Feels: Embarrassed that she has to see mold or smell spoiled food before she cleans her fridge.
Does: Throws out spoiled food weekly and spends a lot of money on food delivery services.
Detailed interview notes can be found here.
User 4: User 4 is university administrative staff member, woman in 40s-50s, long-married with 2 children (one living at home). The interview was conducted at the user’s office on the UC Berkeley campus.
Interview Summary
I learned that persons in long-running intimate relationships (e.g. marriages) need an established, stable dynamic of compromise in order to use the fridge in a way that doesn’t cause conflict. For this user in particular, this means allowing her husband to handle what gets thrown out or not, since he feels much more strongly about it than she does. The user also has difficulty keeping her personal work fridge clean because she uses it so little. Though she shares a common, poorly-maintained break room fridge with her coworkers, she does not particularly care about its status since she hardly uses it. It also seems that for users who tend to eat at home, food waste is directly correlated to quantity and frequency of grocery purchase. A change in the typical routine is required in order to keep food waste down.
User 4’s Needs and Goals
- Administrative staff member needs a way to remember the contents of her personal office fridge, as well as to clean it, because she uses it too rarely to establish a routine.
- Married couple that recently sent a child off to college needs to adjust to decreased household size by shopping/cooking food in smaller batches and more frequently, in order to keep food waste down.
- Working wife needs to be able to identify and anticipate potential spots of conflict in food disposal between her and her husband as the result of wildly different upbringings.
Says: User acknowledges the necessity of compromise and routine when maintaining a fridge with others.
Thinks: I extrapolate that the user’s fridge concerns are primarily logistical as opposed to moral.
Feels: User seems overall satisfied with her current situation but acknowledges a need to change her habits in response to circumstances.
Does: User demonstrates directed behavior in order to satisfy her goals.
Goals: User has concrete goals when it comes to changing her fridge habits.
Detailed interview notes can be found here: https://pastebin.com/DBATqqtw
How might we improve refrigerator user experience and help reduce food waste?
Solution Prototypes
After an intense session of analyzing our user’s needs and ideating on them, we came up with ten different possible solutions of which we created prototypes for four.
Prototype 1: Jonathan’s Vending Machine Refrigerator
Jonathan created a Wizard of Oz vending machine refrigerator that would dispense a selected item from a list of available items. Of our prototypes, we think a vending machine fridge is most likely to work. This prototype intends to solve two problems we encountered during our user interviews:
- Users reported that they had trouble remembering what was inside of their refrigerators.
- Users often neglect items in the back of their refrigerators, they had a habit of choosing what to eat from what was right in front of them.
For the Wizard of Oz prototype testing, the user “presses” on the fake touch screen of the fridge and says out loud what they need. The person behind the fridge puts their requested item into the fridge and then the user takes the item out of the fridge.
This prototype is intended to address the following user needs:
User need 1: to avoid forgetting about things in the fridge. The prototype aims to address this by showing every item in the fridge on its screen, so instead of things in the back of the fridge being blocked by other items, the user can see everything in the fridge on a list.
User need 2: Waste less food. The prototype aims to address this by showing everything in the fridge on its list so that no food is wasted because it is forgotten. It is less likely for the user to forget about something in the back of the fridge if it is always visible on the screen.
User need 3: Avoid conflict with fridge-mates. With this prototype, nobody will encroach on other people’s space because it is a vending machine and so it’s impossible for people to touch other people’s stuff unless they dispense it from the fridge. It would be easy to implement a password system so that people can’t steal each other’s food.
Prototype 2: Mandy’s shopping list logging and comparison app, SnapPea
This prototype attempts to address the problem of how we might change a user’s grocery shopping habits so that they shop more efficiently and reduce the amount of food discarded.
Since this was an initial prototype of our app, we wanted to test whether or not this product was actually useful to the user. Would the app’s features of allowing users to log their grocery purchases via snapshot of a receipt and loading these items into a new grocery list for their next shopping trip encourage them to be more mindful of the food they might already have in their refrigerator? To that end, we wanted to focus on the user flow of grocery receipt logging and shopping list generation in this version of the prototype.
In this version of our prototype, we wanted to focus on the user flow of grocery receipt logging and shopping list generation in this version of the prototype. Our first Figma screen shows the home screen for the app and includes icons for recipe searching, receipt logging, creating a new grocery list, and viewing analytics about one’s food purchase habits. Once the user clicks on the basket icon, this turns on the user’s camera, which allows them to take a photo of a receipt. (This is represented through the second Figma screen). The third screen, shows a confirmation message once a photo is successfully taken and items logged for a new grocery list. When the user presses the Home button on the third Figma screen, they will return to the home screen; they can click tap the list icon to create a new shopping list. This is shown through the fourth and fifth Figma screens where the user may select items to be deleted from the list or add new ones.
Based on the empathy map I created from my user interview, I identified a need for him to plan his grocery shopping and meals in a way that could accommodate a dynamic schedule and encourage habits that align with a desire to live a more ethical and environmentally responsible life. Our prototype is designed to address this need by allowing busy users to conveniently track their grocery purchases by taking a photo of a receipt. The app will also automatically load these purchases into a new grocery list, which could be a useful tool when my user decides to go grocery shopping again. He can quickly review the list, remove items that he still hasn’t consumed from the last trip, and also add new ones. The exercise of using and reviewing a grocery list would help my user be more mindful of the items that are already in his refrigerator and avoid purchasing additional unnecessary items.
Prototype 3: Joseph’s Computer Vision Smart Camera
The most common issue we discovered with users is that they have a poor sense of what is in their refrigerator. To solve this issue, we thought a smart computer vision camera could help by tracking the items that are put into and removed from the refrigerator. The first step we took in designing a camera system was to test how a user would install it on their own refrigerator. There are many different types of refrigerators and installations, a camera would need to be flexible enough to work with as many different refrigerators as possible.
We built 4 different prototypes of various shapes and sizes for the first round of user testing to answer these questions:
- What should the dimensions of the camera system be?
- Where should the camera be mounted on the refrigerator? (This initial prototype is intended to be mounted on the outside of the refrigerator)
3. What type of power connection should the camera have?
The initial prototypes varied in dimensions and camera lens positioning. Each prototype was given to the user and they were asked to position it on their refrigerator with the only constraint being that the camera lens had to point at the area between the body and the door of the refrigerator with the door open. The users gave feedback on how they thought the prototype placement and design would work with their existing refrigerator and surrounding restrictions such as cabinetry and power source.
Of the 4 initial cameras prototypes, cameras 2 and 3 received the most promising feedback. One of our users had zero clearance on the top of their refrigerator due to a custom cabinet installation so none of the prototypes could be mounted on top as initially intended. This was most surprising so we were able to observe the user coming up with alternate solutions. Fortunately all of the prototypes could be mounted on the door-opening side of their refrigerator.
Users liked the slim profile and easy to position camera of prototype 2 but suggested that a wireless/battery powered model would be needed for them to install it on their refrigerators. Users liked the remote (via a wire) camera of prototype 3 where the larger body of the module could be placed near a power source and the camera could be routed to the proper position on the refrigerator near the door opening.
We modified prototypes 2 and 3 as suggested by the users. Prototype 2.5 is wireless and prototype 3 was modified to have a long cable between the hardware unit and the camera so that the hardware could be plugged in near a power source. The original prototypes did not have mounting options (that is going to be tested at a later time) but the inability to mount the cameras on top of a refrigerator has already provided great information for how we might approach mounting solutions when the time comes.
