Design a refrigerator for blind people

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This is a pretty common question in PM interviews. There are many answers available against it. But I find most of them to be very impractical. So here I am trying to dive deep and find some logical and reasonable solutions.

Clarifying Questions:

  1. Our target audience is fully blind or partially blind?
    • We are talking about being fully blind.
  2. What about other senses like smell, touch, and hearing?
    • Other senses are working fine.
  3. Are we a refrigerator-making company?
    • No, we are doing this to show support to the community.
  4. Who is going to put food items in the refrigerator? An individual can live with family or in a group where he/ she will have support. Otherwise, he/ she can live independently, where one can manage every activity.
    • We should explore both options.
  5. Is there any specific age group we are targeting?
    • Not specifically.
  6. What is my role here? 
    • You are working as a PM
  7. Are there any budget/ resource constraints?
    • No.

Assumptions

  1. As we are not a refrigerator manufacturer, we need to collaborate with an existing manufacturer like Samsung, LG, etc. We shall only provide the specifications or functionalities with them.
  2. The features should be as minimalistic as possible to keep the production cost minimum.

Target Audience

Our target audience are fully blind people who live independently or in a group

Pain points and Solutions

  1. Finding the refrigerator at home
    1. The first thing that comes to my mind is to connect the refrigerator with a Voice assistant like ‘Alexa’ or ‘Okay, Google’. The consumers can connect and get directions from the voice assistant. But it will increase the cost a lot.
    2. The second solution that comes to my mind is to use elevated stickers. The stickers will be placed from the drawing-room or kitchen to the refrigerator. The consumers can easily follow the directions using their sticks.
  2. Keeping the food in the refrigerator and finding it when needed
    1. There should be specific buckets with elevated labels. It is important to keep things in place to take them out later.
  3. Keeping track of any food items that the consumers might forget
    1. In a bucket, the unused/ left out items are slowly being pushed back. In a pile/ stack of items, the ones are dropped down to the bottom. So if we can rotate the box or the stack to bring the unused items in front then the consumers can track the left-out food items.

The Final Product

  1. The fridge should have a rotating container.
  2. Food items will be grouped into several sets like fruit, dairy product, vegetables, etc. and the rotating container is divided into smaller blocks for each type.
  3. The consumer will put the items from the top and take them out from the bottom, like a stack. 
  4. There is going to be a button panel where the name of the groups are written in a dotted way so that it is readable to the consumers. When a consumer press any button, the container will rotate and bring the respective block in front.

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