This is one of the class projects during my grad school at University of Washington. I, with another 3 ladies from the class have suffered quite some unpleasant experience using microwave in the cafeterias around the campus, especially during the busy lunch hours. We spent 2 weeks on research by sitting and observing people using the microwaves and summarized the observations and key pain points. 1 week on ideation and sketching activities and the last week to propose our final design and presentation.

As the first step of the project, we each individually sat at a different cafeteria around campus for 2 days during the busiest lunch hours, and captures numerous photos and videos of different usage behaviors that help and led us to identify the design opportunities.

After identifying the key pain points from the observations above, we wanted to create some design concepts to help improving the overall experience. We brainstormed and defined our design principles as following:
‍
1. Low maintenance
2. Hygiene/Liability
3. East access/Location
4. Low waiting time
5. Ease of use.

Based on these 5 criteria, we created over dozens of sketches that primarily focuses on the architectural design of the oven and the microwave station, as well as some accessories that could assist with the user experience.

We then evaluated our own designs using this matrix below, against the 5 design principles. Each design focuses on different aspects of the user needs, but my favorite is definitely the scanner, for its super ease to use, and low learning curve; as well as the super fun DDR concept, duh!

We spent the last week of the project putting together a short fun video that captured a few of our design concepts above. In lieu of a fancy video, we had to opt for something that's quick and easy to create within a week while all team members were also working full time during the grad school program. Here is the final video we created, stitching together over dozens of hand sketch frames. Enjoy