Initial Concept
Automated Ingredient Dispensation for Commercial Bakeries
The purpose of this device was to save time when mixing ingredients for large quantities of baked goods. This would allow users to store dry ingredients in once place that would automatically dispense the optimal amount of each ingredient for any recipe requested.
However,
None of the bakeries we interviewed make their food from scratch. Most businesses get their baked goods frozen and bake them on-site. We found that our product was unfortunately, irrelevant.
So we had to pivot, we went back to the drawing board and explored new user groups. Our final product was designed for personal use in a home kitchen. We drastically reduced the size & scale of the machine and improved its aesthetics to produce something that people would be more interested in using.
A brief Reflection
We could have avoided needing to pivot entirely if we had done better research into our problem space when starting this project. The project prompt was very open-ended, it didn’t give us a problem to solve so we had to find our own. Instead of finding a problem that people actually had, we accidentally invented one to solve. The first step of any good UX design process is understanding the users, and we forgot that. We got too excited by our ideas & solutions and ended up not paying enough attention to the people we were designing for until we had already taken the project in the wrong direction.
This was a great learning experience though, its a strong reminder to keep my design process centered on the users and talk to them throughout the design process. I also think we did a good job pivoting and adapting to the realization that our design didn’t have a market and we created something in the end that is much more likely to succeed.