During my quarantine time, I am still in process of doing interviews. The positions I am interviewing ranged from Salesforce Admin, Salesforce Developer to Developer in general. Once in a while, I will get a product design question just so that they can see the way I am thinking. Product design type of questions are my favorite! It is extremely hard to get APM type of jobs, most of the time they would never even give you an interview. That’s part of the reason why I extremely appreciated when I get a product design questions! I love those, you can use all of your imagination during your interview.
This time, I got a question “Design a Spice Rack for Blind”, now this was a phone interview, so I couldn’t really draw on the whiteboard to show the interviewer what I was thinking. The best I can do is to describe it. Our product is aimed for the blind group, and the product is spice rack.
My more throughly analysis is as below:
Target Audience: blind people
Goals: Ease of using the product, provide convenience (user satisfaction)
Analyze needs:
- Help with people that’s blind to have easy access to the spice
- Help identify when the spice is going to run out
Vision of your product/features:
- Voice control
- Auto detect when spice is running low, based on weight
- Auto order the spice that’s running low
- The voice control system could also read out loud the recipes to help user to walk through what they are making
- Each spice bottle also have the Braille on top of the bottle cap so that the user can verify that this is the right spice
What product:
- User will say “Give me salt”, then the machine will push the salt out for the user, it will stay out like that until the bottle has been put back, you can even have a voice remind the user to put it back. It can only operates one at a time
- Each spice slot is linked with the base, the base is a weighting system, checking on if the spice is going to run out or not (the base has record of each bottle’s weight alone without the spices, when the weight with spice is close to that number, it will reorder that spice)
Constraints:
- The weight measuring system may or may not work → mechanics could fail (provide customer support)
- The voice control could have trouble hearing or having bugs → program could fail
- User may put the bottle in the wrong slot → one bottle at a time is critical, also provide the Braille on both the bottle and also the spice rack can help improve the accuracy
