Design a fridge for children.

  Amazon
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Answers (2)

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.

Clarification

I am going to make the assumption that we are talking about the standard sized fridge that you would find in a single family home. There are a variety of other fridges like minifridges, industrial restaurant grade meat lockers, etc, but I imagine the regular household fridge is the type most children are going to be interacting with.

We should clarify a bit further when we say children. You only legally become an adult in the United States when you’re 18 years old. I would argue practically any age from 0-10 can be considered a child. 11-12 is more preteen, 12+ is more teenager / young adult than child. Realistically, children between the ages of 0-5 aren’t going to be physically or mentally capable of using a fridge by themelves in a meaningful capacity so let’s focus on children being between the ages of 5 – 10.

 

Goal

Before we dive into it, let’s first take a step back and think about why are we doing this. What is our rational or motivation for this project and what are we hoping to achieve? Is there a certain area or aspect of children using fridges we want to focus on?

If we’re designing a fridge specifically with children in mind then I think its safe to assume that the current experience for children isn’t a very good so we should set our goal accordingly:

Goal: Provide a really good user experience

 

Users

Obviously we are going to be designing this fridge with children in mind, but we also need to consider the needs and pain points of the parent or guardian responsible for the child. They will be using the fridge too, but more importantly they are the one who cares about whats best for the child and are the one who will be purchasing the fridge. Based upon that let’s focus on the needs and pain points of the parents for this exercise.

 

Pain Points

  1. Want to make sure their child is making healthy eating choices
  2. Make sure their child isn’t eating anything harmful, raw-meat, alcoholic beverages look like soda cans, expired items
  3. If the parent isn’t physically there, the child should be able to access the food without issue
  4. Make sure the child doesn’t leave the fridge door open
  5. Some food items might require preparation beyond their kid’s ability
  6. Make sure the child is eating the right proportions
Solutions
  1. Fridge Alerts – Whenever something is taken out of the fridge or expires, the user would get an alert like a push notification on their phone telling them the details. For example, if little Johnny snuck downstairs in the middle of the night to treat himself to some ice cream you would get an alert as such.
  2. Food Recommender – A lot of times kids are hungry but don’t know what to eat. We could build a touch screen into the front of the fridge that could be used to recommend food items to the children. For example, if little Johnny is in the mood for something sweet the fridge could suggest that peach yogurt is located in the 2nd row on the back right and will satisfy his sweet tooth.
  3. Smart Lock Drawers – There could be lockable drawers inside of the fridge where parents could put items they don’t want their kids getting into, like alchohol, raw meat, or desserts. I’m imagining these could be unlocked automatically if a parent’s smart phone is detected nearby or remotely via the smart phone through an app.
  4. Portion Scale – On the outside of the fridge there could be scale inlayed into it. Children could type into the touch pad or verbally tell the fridge what they are eating then they could fill up their bowl on the scale and the fridge would tell them when to stop as they reach an appropriate portion amount.
Prioritization
In all likelihood we won’t have neither the bandwidth nor resources necessary to build out all four solutions in parallel so let’s pick one to focus on. To help guide that decision I’m going to use a comparison matrix
Ease of Implementation, User Satisfaction (Goal)
1.  D+, B+
2.  B-, A-
3.  A-, A
4.  C+, B-
Summary
In order to provide a better user experience for the parents of children, we are going to build fridge with smart lock drawers. These drawers will give the parents some peace of mind by allowing them to have a place to store items they don’t want their kids getting into such as alcohol, raw meat, and sweets.