Design a blender for the visually impaired.

What is a blender? A blender is used for grinding watery foods to make them liquid. It is mainly used for making shakes, smoothies etc.

Where is a blender used? It can be used in one of the following places:
1. At homes
2. At restaurants

User segment: Visually impaired people. So, I am assuming that this new blender will be mostly used in homes.

How does a typical blender work?
Step 1: A blender is basically a tall glass with blades that gets connected to a machine. So, if you want to grind something, you need that tall glass, the machine and the ingredients that you want to grind.
Step 2: Make sure that the blender is not cracked and is in perfect working condition. The machine should be plugged in and user's hands should not be wet while plugging in.
Step 3: Put all your ingredients inside. 
Step 4: Make sure the lid is completely closed.
Step 5: Make sure that the blender and machine are properly attached.
Step 6: Start blending! If there are lumps in the liquid, increase the speed.
Step 7: Make sure that the blender is turned off before you put any spoon or any other material inside it.
Step 8: Open it up and pour the liquid into the glass.

What are the pain points of a visually impaired person in using this blender?
1. Is the blender in the perfect working condition?
2. Is the machine plugged in?
3. Is the lid completely closed?
4. Does the liquid have lumps?
5. Is the blender turned off?

Now, I can identify two ways to resolve these pain points:
1. Either build a voice responsive AI like Alexa into the blender
2. Or use IoT to connect the blender with a mobile app and build a voice responsive AI into the mobile app

I would go for second option. This is because it will help us in segrating the AI machine and the physical device so that if there is any problem in one, other is not affected. However, note that we would still need to install some sensors into the blender.

So, the features of this app and the type of sensors required for this would be:
1. The user should be able to control this app with his/her voice.
2. If there is any crack in the device, the app should notify the user.
3. The user should be able to turn on/off the blender from the app.
4. When the machine is properly plugged in, the app should notify the user
5. When the lid is completely closed, it should notify the user
6. Regarding the problem of lumps, we will need to modify the device a bit. We can attach a small pipe at the bottom of the blender, the radius of whose opening can be modified by the user. So, suppose the radius is so small that only liquid can pass through it. Then any solid lumps will be left in the pipe. Our app should be able to notify that as well. 

Understanding the Situation

What do we mean by visually impaired? There are varying levels of blindness. Let's assume the product is for all ranges of visual impairment. What kind of blender is this? Is this for at home personal use or is this the type of restaurant grade blender you could find in any sort of food establishment? Let's assume personal use.

What is our rational for this project? Are we the blender company? What other constraints should we consider when talking through this problem? Should we focus on engagement or monetization? This is a write up so we won't have any feedback, but let's just focus on engagement for the sake of this problem.

Personas

1. There are a variety of different visually impaired users who use blenders, so let's try to group them into different personas:
2. The Gourmand: Really into cooking, likes to prepare all kinds of fancy food and sauces with their blender. Cooking for more than one.
3. Health Nut: Very much so into taking care of their body and staying healthy. Think large servings of green kale juice.
4. Bodybuilder: Trying to pack on muscle through the use of protein shakes. Twice a day, pre-work out and post work out.
5. Smoothie Fan: Likes to drink smoothies as a solid breakfast in the morning.

Affecting all of the above personas specific to this question is their level of visual impairment. This could range from completely blind to just needing really strong glasses.

Out of the above user personas, let's go ahead and focus on the bodybuilder. With pre-work out, post-work out, and maybe some bedtime casein, the bodybuilder user segment looks like it will use the blender the most often.

Pain Points/Needs

1. Need to know when their shake has reached their desired consistency
2. Need to know that they have successfully locked the blender in and put the lid on tight enough
3. Cannot fully see the buttons and UI on the blender itself
4. Need to know they are using the correct ingredient amounts for their shakes
5. The user can not rely as heavily on their sight so they will need to better rely on their other senses like touching and hearing.

Solutions

Now that we have a better understanding of some of the pain points and needs that visually impaired bodybuilders may have, let's start brainstorming some solutions for them with the goal of increasing engagement in mind:

1. Place sensors inside different parts of the blender itself to let the user know when parts are locked into place. For example, when the lid is tighly secured the blender could let out a small beep as confirmation.
2. Incorporate voice commands into the blender, "Blend on medium for 30 seconds"
3. Connect the blender to the users phone. The users phone is already likely ADA compliant and has a UI they are already familiar interacting with. From there we can 

We don't have enough resources to build out all of the solutions in parallel so we need to pick just one to prioritize. Let's use a matrix comparing some of the trade offs to help us decide:

Based upon the above comparison, I'm going to suggest we focus on prioritizing building solution #3. This solution will directly increase our customer engagement levels by making the product easy. Since we are leveraging the UI of their phone which they are already familiar with, there wouldn't a steep learning curve for using our blender.Through the voice activated controls on their phone or a magnified screen, users will be able to control all of the functionality of the blender from the familiarity of their mobile device. 

If we do a great job of integrating our blender with the smart phones accessibility features there is a greater play here for us to become an IOT accessibility platform. We could license our integration to other blender manufacturers and begin expanding our integration platform to other devices as well.

Summary

In order to increase engagement amongst the visually impaired bodybuilder user segment, we're going to create a mobile app that connects to the users blender and allows them to control all of the functionality of the blender from the familiarity of their ADA accesibility standards enabled phone.