Soap Hope Redesign
The Challenge
Soap Hope is a small company which focusses on empowering poor women by providing them donations. The donations are collected by earning profits by selling household products.
Even if their cause is good, their vision was not so clear because of the user interface of their website. This was an individual class assignment where our challenge was to redesign the user experience of the website of Soap Hope which will help them convey their ideas in a better way and gain user's trust.
The image on the side is the redesigned website.
The Problem
On the analysis of their website, I found that the main goal of their website was not clear. The website was filled with a lot of clutter. There were many unnecessary tabs and advertisements because of which people will not trust spending money on this website.
Their primary goal of empowering poor women appears secondary. The website doesn't look inviting at all because of the colors used.
The products shown on their home page were not categorized resulting in a terrible user experience.
The Solution
For the redesign of the Soap Hope website, I had the following ideas in mind.
1. Make the main purpose of the site clearly visible
2. Sort the items in categories
3. Reduce the clutter on the webpage
4. Make navigation easy
5. Reduce the number of tabs
6. Make the site navigation easy
With the new design, I made the purpose of the site clear by stating it upfront. I tried to get viewers empathy by showing the pictures of the people who get the benefit from the donations and quotes from the people who support the cause. With categorized items and less navigation options, we made the site look clean and easy to navigate.
Description
This is a vending machine from the future which makes you a Jedi. All you need is the force and you can vend items from the vending machine. You can point an item in the vending machine with your hand and then try to grab the item and apply force and the item will come to you.
The vending machine is made using the Intel Perceptual Camera and an Arduino. The camera detects your hand and where it is pointing, and based on its position, it lights up that particular section. As you close your hand for some time, once it is pointing to a section in the vending machine, it shoots the item to you. The camera detects the position of your hand and how open it is, and based on that, the arduino lights up a particular section and triggers the valve of the pneumatic air cannon which releases air at high pressure and shoot the item to you.
This experience of using a natural user interface beyond the screen is more entertaining and creates an out of the box interaction.
Our team got First prize from Intel Perceptual Computing Lab for this project.
We think that a concept like this can be very useful in movie theaters attracting people to vend items and also improving business of the vending machine. For a common person, such an experience will be refreshing and exciting.
My Contribution
I helped ideating the concept and sketching its form. I did all the programing for the vending machine in Processing and Arduino IDE to use the Perceptual Camera to detect the hand position and the using the Arduino to light up specific sections of the vending machine and then triggering the valve of the pneumatic air cannon. I also helped constructing the all the circuits required, pneumatic air cannon, and the exterior of the vending machine giving it its final form.
The Process
We used several brainstorming techniques to generate ideas which can be done with the 3D camera Intel gave us. Finally we narrowed down on vending machines, car system control and remote surgery. We finally selected Vending Machines
Ideation
Concepting
We generated several concepts of the vending machine and got a general idea on what we have to make and build to make the Jedi vending machine possible and what are the things we need.
Research
We observed people using traditional vending machines and did some exemplar research on some already existing vending machines which were cool.
Prototyping
We built the final prototype with an old shoe rack a custom made light panel and circuit board and a custon built pneumatic air cannon operated using an arduino. The camera side of the programming was done in processing and the communication betwwen Arduino and processing was done using the serial port.
Team Mates
Matt Jennex, Travis Ritchie, Sijie Yang