Smart Hygiene

UX Research + UX Design

Overview

Smart Hygiene is a design method class project which created over the course of 10 weeks. For this project, my team started our research by looking at a community that we are familiar with, and based on our shared interest in cooking, we then picked the community to be college students who regularly cook for themselves. Based on our research and observation, we aim to address and solve the problems of food hygiene issues during the food preparation process – that we created an interactive tablet that focused on improving college students’ cleaning behavior during the food preparation stage and ultimately raising their awareness of food hygiene.

My Role:

UX Researcher + UX Designer

Duration:

September 2021 - December 2021 (10 weeks)

Team:

Ruihan Bao, Yuhan Wang

Tools:

Miro | Microsoft Excel | Figma

Project Timeline

Exploration

Preliminary Design Space

College students tend to cook healthy meals at home themselves rather than go out to eat during the pandemic. However, self-cooking also has the potential of getting the foodborne disease.

Our group decided that we would choose college students' kitchens and their cooking process as our preliminary design space to study and explore, to see the potential problems within the space which could lead to foodborne disease.

Stakeholder diagram for preliminary design space

Research the Design Space &
Scope Down Design Space

According to our desk research, we found that there is a gap between students’ perception of food hygiene and the reality of the negative impacts it could generate, and we decided to focus on the food preparation stage across the cooking process.

To get a better understanding of what students’ behavior is like across cooking and their intentions behind the actions, we decided to conduct contextual inquiries to learn more about students’ hygiene practices during their food preparation.

Desk research findings of our design space

Contextual Inquiry &
Problem Identification

After identifying and defining our design space, we conducted 5 contextual inquiries with 5 college students who live off-campus.

What we observed during contextual inquiry: How participants clean their kitchen space, how they do food preservation, how they deal with leftover and if they pay attention to hygiene during food preparation.

Contextual inquiry photos of different kitchen spaces

After finishing these 5 contextual inquiries, there are 2 major problems we found out which could lead to potential foodborne disease/food poisoning.

We want to find an approach to change students’ cleaning behaviors during the food preparation stage to address the cross-contamination issue.

Findings from contextual inquiry

Ideation

Brainstorming on Solution

Based on our observation, we find out that participants tend to wash their cutting boards more carefully when the cutting board is visibly dirty to them with food residues on it. Thus, our solution is based on the idea of “making invisible to visible”, that we would like to make invisible bacteria visible during the food preparation process to enhance people’s hygiene practices.

As we started to ideate our design ideas for intervention, we began by asking the following design questions.

Design questions

Ideas for Intervention

We got a few ideas on how we should intervene the space to address the problem based on our design idea and design questions.

Pros:
- Prototype is easy to make
Cons:
- Users are indifferent with the information shown on the form of stickers
- Short-term effect rather than long-term effect

Pros:
- Stronger visual appearance with dirty surfaces
Cons:
- Prototype is hard to make
- The scope of "cutting board" is too narrow

Pros:
- Could monitor the whole kitchen space
- Has the potential to perform more functions that are related to hygiene improvement
Cons:
- "Real-time bacteria detection" is hard to accomplish in the prototype

We finally decided to go with idea 3 since we see that the design option could bring more possibilities on different approaches on how to improve users' hygiene behavior and bring a new food preparation experience.

Prototyping

We finally developed our prototype of Smart Hygiene Tablet with a voice control system

Evaluation

Test Plan & Participant Recruitment

We did 5 usability testing in total. All of the participants are college students who live off-campus and cook for themselves. We followed the test steps as shown here: Detailed Test Plan. The objectives and goals of our usability testing are shown here.

Usability testing objectives

Usability Testing

iPhone magnifier to show dirt on cutting board

For our usability testing, we use iPhone magnifier to show the real-time "bacteria" image (which is the magnified dirt) of the connected kitchenware devices on cleanliness level pages.

Usability testing - Structured observation

4 of the usability testing are structured observations with follow-up interviews under the situation when the participants were going to cook their lunch/dinner

Usability testing - Prototype walkthrough

1 of the usability testing is the prototype walkthrough with a participant who got expertise experience in the food industry that let the participant imagine how she will use the product in her real-life food preparation scenario.

Findings & Insights

After conducting the usability testing, we did literature coding on our structured observation, interview, and prototype walkthrough, and there are five major findings from the results of our usability testing.
The usability testing results allowed us to gain insight on how to improve our prototype.

Usability testing findings

Insights on prototype improvement

Final Iteration

Below is the user flow for our final prototype:

Reflection

Smart Hygiene is my first UX research and design project, and I learned a lot about how to do UX research with limited resources and how to execute the UX design based on the UX research findings. There are a few things that I would do differently for the next project which I learned from the experience this time:

1. Always conduct pilot testing before the real usability testing. The biggest problem of our usability testing is that we could not tell if it is our prototype not working or the idea of making invisible to visible not working. If we could conduct pilot testing before real usability testing, we might find approaches to make our prototype work more like what we imagined to be without latency.

2. Reach out to Subject Matter Experts earlier in the research and design process when there’s a need. We only recruited one SME during the usability testing stage, but we realized if we could conduct some in-depth interviews with a few SMEs before developing our initial prototype, we might get more insights on our design on how to raise the awareness of the foodborne illness.

3. Create persona before recruiting and do screening questions to select participants. We did not sort our participants into different categories since we only got a small sample. However, we realize that personal health conditions and cleaning habits do affect people’s attitudes and interest in our prototype. We should create different persona right after contextual inquiry and do screening questions to recruit participants according to the persona and then create more specific and targeted features for our prototype.