Vince: A friendly and more accessible vending machine
Our goal is to design a vending machine that is accessible, simple and offers a frictionless experience for blind people. We want to ensure that our vending machine addresses the key pain points of blind people while supporting a variety of language types.
We believe that in the future we can personalize the vending machine experience for each user. With speech recognition models, we can start to answer complex queries for users about the quantity of the remaining items and offer discounts to upsell the customer. Our goal is to make sure users actually enjoy using the vending machine and, as a result, start transacting more. This vision will ensure we create a vending machine that is delightful to interact with and help us solidify a strong brand amongst the blind community.
Below we paint a picture of our target users through a set of user personas:
Dan is 35 years old. He has been blind since birth, but is employed and has a positive attitude. He lives with a friend of his and currently works as an engineer at a big public corporation. Safety is important to Dan.
Pain Points: Dan is frustrated about how he can drop his card while inserting it into a vending machine. Dan is worried someone might steal his card when he takes it out. Dan dislikes having to debug issues with the vending machine (e.g. no remaining items), and doesn’t know what’s inside if the vending machine doesn’t include braille.
Goals: Dan wants to be able to use the vending machine without fear of safety.Dan wants to minimize the number of times he inputs various details on the machine. Dan wants the vending machine to communicate with him more clearly about the availability of different items.
Melinda is 60 years old and she lost her eyesight due to macular degeneration. She retired from work and lives at a retirement home. Melinda also immigrated from China and cannot communicate in English. She is not very technically competent and struggles to use complex products.
Pain Points: Melinda is frustrated by how most vending machines in America do not support Chinese.Melinda in general is frustrated by vending machines - she hasn’t used them until moving into her new retirement home, so they’re less common for her to interact with. Melinda also is frustrated by how she might press the wrong buttons and get the wrong vending machine item.
Goals: Melinda wants her vending machine to be able to support Chinese and additional languages. Melinda wants the process of geting items from a vending machine to be a lot more simple as she feels it’s too complex. Melinda wants to ensure that the vending machine is able to offer a clear confirmation message to her about what she’s received.
Below is a list of some common use cases to get a better understanding of the key functionality we need to provide: