Design a fridge for children.
- Tina Greist
1. Clarifying questions: Why do we want to design a fridge specifically for children? There are already refrigerators in the market that can also be used by children to some extent, anything we have in mind specifically?
To this interviewer says that we want to design it from scratch, our company thinks it is a good area to venture into.
I then ask him if they have any constraints that I should keep in mind before proceeding.
The interviewer says no, we just want the fridge to be as useful as possible for the kids.
2. Identify the customers: Kids is a very broad user group, I have the following segments in mind for choosing as our customers:
a. Kids who are alone at home for a couple of hours before their parents arrive back from the office: Probably in the 8-15yrs age group, manage their lunch on their own.
b. Kids who wake up at night to have some food/water due to late-night cravings.
c. Kids who are using the fridge in their schools, keep their lunch in the fridge for it to stay fresh.
I would like to go with segment a. since I think it is the segment we can have the most reach and there’s the most scope for having a significant impact. Does that sound okay to you?
Interviewer: Yes, go ahead.
3. Report customer needs:
The kids using the fridge alone have the following pain points when using the fridge while their parents are away.
a. They don’t know what is meant for them to eat.
b. They can’t reach the top shelves and see/access what’s there.
c. They have a hard time telling if the food looks good or has it gone stale.
4. Cut through prioritization:
I think making them aware of what is meant for them to eat is the most important need, hence I would like to tackle it first. The other two needs are somewhat taken care of by their parents who make sure to keep frequently accessed food on lower shelves and removing any stale food ASAP.
5. List solutions:
a. Color coded bulbs for different part of the fridge, parents can turn a particular color (say green) if the stuff is for the kids to eat in lunch, another for dinner etc.
b. Have a section for lunch/dinner. Parents keep stuff in those sections and kids know what they need to have.
c. (Moonshot) Instant feedback from parents. Kids keep an the food in question in a designated space and the parents respond from their app. Response can either be voice call or just a yes/no based on the picture.
6. Tradeoffs:
a. Needs additional efforts from parents and kids to learn the encoding.
b. The space is reserved even if not in use. If something else is kept there, kids might eat it by mistake.
c. Needs the parents to be always available.
Choose one based on RICE.
7. Summarize:
The problem statement was that we are designing a fridge for the kids from scratch.
We chose kids who stay at home alone without parents as our target user group.
The most important need for them that we identified was that they are unable to decide what food is for them to eat without feedback from parents.
We suggested the {Solution} might be able to solve their problem but it has a few {tradeoffs} that we need to keep in mind.