Keywords

1 Introduction

In recent years, the usage has gradually become a research hotspot in the industry and academia. By analyzing the usage of the products of the target users, it can help designers further clarify the needs of users and overcome the defects of subjective judgment deviation caused by the traditional design process relying on actual design experience or expert knowledge [1].

At present, there is a lack of research on the product usage of personal domestic waste management at home and abroad. Most of the research related to domestic waste management focuses on the centralized treatment and sustainable utilization of public waste [2]. Most of the researches concerning personal life management are from the perspectives of ideology and system [3]. Lack of analysis from the perspective of personal life management, so it is necessary to study the management of personal domestic waste from a new perspective. Product usage has been a hot topic in recent years, which can provide a powerful design basis for designers to define design goals.

2 Research Framework

The research framework is shown in Fig. 1. The first step is to obtain the data of the target users. The initial data of the sample users are collected through “A day in the life”. The second step is to extract the obtained data and conduct a mind map for the behavior trend, so as to obtain the user’s product usage in the aspect of domestic waste management. And through literature research on the current situation of contemporary college students in domestic waste management to get the possible needs of users, and then through in-depth interviews to clarify the needs of the target user group; the third step is to design, after clear the needs of the user group The initial design, first through the “image and mood boards” to get inspiration, form a initial design concept, and then expressed through “sketching”, obtained a initial design results. After the design is clearly defined, we need to show the design in a better form. This study first produced “sketching modeling” for the user to experience, and then presented a better visual effect in the “mock up” way; the fourth step is usability testing. The method used in this paper is to make a prototype for sample users to experience, and verify whether the design results meet the requirements put forward in the early stage by analyzing the degree of test completed by users.

Fig. 1.
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Research framework.

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3 Data Collection

3.1 A Day in Life

“A day in life” is to obtain behavioral data of sample people by following their daily work behaviors. Recording techniques include but are not limited to taking photos, photographing, recording, etc. This design method can reveal unexpected problems that people may encounter in daily life. After recording the behavioral data of the sample population, use “Trend spotting” to summarize the behavioral trends of the sample users. In this study, the two methods were mainly used to obtain data. The first step is to randomly select three working days to take photos and record the main actions of the sample users in the whole day. Table 1 is a data table obtained from the survey. After screening, the relevant pictures of the sample user’s domestic waste are extracted for data statistics:

Table 1. A day in life of the user.
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The first step is to start from the user’s “life behavior” as the center, and analyze the user’s data from four aspects: clothing, food, housing and travel, and the obtained mind map is shown in Fig. 2, so as to obtain the product with the highest usage in the domestic waste treatment of the user.

Fig. 2.
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Mind mapping of a day behavior.

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To summarize the mind map, the most used appliances for the user’s domestic waste management are garbage bags and garbage cans, among which the most direct domestic waste disposal appliances are garbage bags. At the same time, the proportion of time that the sample users generated domestic waste in daily life can be obtained. As shown in Fig. 3, no matter from the perspective of users’ life behavior or time, the use of garbage bags and garbage cans is the highest usage in the aspect of domestic waste management.

Fig. 3.
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Time period of generating domestic waste in a day.

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3.2 In-Depth Interview

At present, some useful methods to evaluate product usage mainly rely on the data analysis of questionnaire survey [4]. However, in fact, questionnaire survey is limited by cost and time, and sometimes the answer sheet will deviate from objectivity, ultimately affecting the effectiveness of the analysis results. This paper adopts the in-depth interview method [5]. The interview is divided into two parts: interview outline design and formal interview. The interview structure and questions are listed in Table 2. The interviewees are nine full-time graduate students.

Table 2. The interview structure and questions.
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The interview was recorded by recording, and then the recording was arranged into documents to avoid missing important information raised by users. And the content analysis method was used to analyze the user interview. The results are briefly summarized in Table 3, which are: all the interviewees’ daily domestic waste is handled by themselves; eight out of nine interviewees believe that the healthiest waste management needs to process the daily waste on the same day; all of them have experienced forgetting to dispose of waste; all the them have also experienced the same forgotten in other things, including six of them will use sticky notes, memos and other means to remind themselves, but will not use these tools in the waste management, which can be used for reference in design; eight out of nine users expressed the hope that their situation of forgetting to throw waste could be improved; and features of the design objectives include but are not limited to simple, cheap, beautiful and not disturbing daily life.

Table 3. The summary of interview questions’ results.
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The interview results indicate perspective of usage aspects, which are: users’ daily use of garbage bags is relatively high; if the user achieves a healthy lifestyle of waste management, the garbage bag shall be replaced at least once a day; users often forget to deal with garbage, reducing the use of garbage bags; and users do not have enough use of auxiliary tools in waste management. Therefore, users can improve their use of garbage bags by increasing the use of auxiliary tools.

4 Design Process

4.1 Concept Design

The design method used for the concept design is the image and mood boards, which is a kind of layout where designers carefully integrate the collected color, text, pictures, images and digital resources [6]. As shown in Fig. 4, relevant materials and data are connected in a tiled way, such as post-it notes, trash cans, snacks, take-out food, and etc., to find the correlation and extract the important relevant factors.

Fig. 4.
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Image and mood boards for the design process.

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By analyzing the available information keywords obtained by the image and mood boards, the design is in line with the elements extracted from the image and mood boards combined with the user’s needs in the user interview, which are:

  1. (1)

    Calendar: record the date, remind the itinerary, update every day;

  2. (2)

    Trash can: used for garbage and non-disposable use;

  3. (3)

    Garbage bag: used to hold garbage, updated every day, can be torn;

  4. (4)

    Food waste: It needs to be packed separately, and the smell is not suitable for direct use of the trash can;

  5. (5)

    Succulent plants: the user’s hobby, decoration, good-looking, quality of life;

  6. (6)

    Snacks: preferences, environment, meals, smells.

The design outcome of this research is a WeChat applet, and the target users are contemporary college students. As a new communication medium, WeChat has exerted an important influence on college students’ life, study, interpersonal communication and values [7]. In early 2018, the applet began to grow explosively. Its simple operation mode and one-touch access greatly reduce the time cost of users, which coincides with the time fragmentation of users [8]. Therefore, it greatly conforms to the design requirements proposed by the target users of this study, such as economy, non-interference with life and low sense of existence. The small program design comes from the calendar notes of the elements, and the official accounts jointly remind users to update the garbage bag every day. As shown in Fig. 5, the official accounts associated with the applet needs to send WeChat message to the user every day to remind the user to replace the garbage bag. Applet needs to have a calendar, sticky notes function, calendar can view the day and other dates; Notes can be added, edited and deleted; Note editing requires a description of the event.

Fig. 5.
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Applet architecture of the design concept.

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4.2 Design Development

“Sketching modeling” can be used to demonstrate the feasibility of the design after the designer has clearly defined the design goal [9]. As shown in Fig. 6, drawing software is used to demonstrate and illustrate the use process of the design prototype.

Fig. 6.
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The architecture of the design development.

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5 Feasibility Study

Since the design of this study is aimed at the experience of special samples, the feasibility depends on the user experience. The feasibility verification of this study is divided into two parts. The first is to give the user the usability test in the form of a model. Then the user’s usability of garbage bags is obtained through the interview. The focus of usability testing is to record the time and fluency of users in completing test tasks, because fluency is of great concern to users among many factors affecting the experience of intelligent terminals [10]. The object of this usability test and interview is the same as that of the previous interview. The recording is also used in the process, and then the audio file is converted into the transcript for sorting.

This usability test is divided into following three parts:

Task 1: The users have an applet called “little housekeeper”, it is associated with a official account of the same name, please enter the applet through the official account now, press the prompt after changing the garbage bag and click the corresponding button.

Task 2: Today is January 1st, 2019. Please add a note on January 20th, with the title: the tutor has a meeting at 12:30. Venue: 3rd floor; Time: today and Monday repeat; Note: the tutor requires the meeting to be held in room 312 on the third floor of the science building.

Task 3: Please delete the new notes in task 2, exit the applet, and return to the front page of WeChat.

The test process are shown in Table 4, in which the user’s usability test process was smooth, without discomfort and the time was moderate. The individual tasks were slightly extended due to the network speed and the task distribution of the host, and the overall experience was good. The interview outline of usability test is shown below:

Table 4. The feasibility study process.
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  1. 1.

    Will you click to see all the unread messages on WeChat?

  2. 2.

    Did this product cause any discomfort to you during your use?

  3. 3.

    Is there any discomfort, unaccustomed or repugnance caused by the shape and appearance of this product?

  4. 4.

    In your opinion, does this product remind you to replace the garbage bag?

  5. 5.

    In your opinion, does this product meet your requirements of “simple, easy to use and low cost”?

If this product is made for you, will you use it?

The interview results are shown in Table 5. Through the analysis of the interview results, it is known that the user is positive and acceptable to the design result, so the feasibility of the design is verified.

Table 5. The interview results of usability test.
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The interview results indicate the perspective of usage aspects:

  1. (1)

    All users can use WeChat, the usage of the official account is high;

  2. (2)

    Meet the user’s usage habits and needs;

  3. (3)

    The user’s willingness to use is high;

  4. (4)

    The associated user will replace the garbage bag, thereby increasing the usage of the garbage bag.

Therefore, this design drives users to improve the usage of garbage bags through the high usage of WeChat official account, so as to promote users to develop a healthy lifestyle of waste management by changing garbage bags every day. In addition, users have better experience of the design results in usability tests and interviews. Therefore, the experience design method based on product usage is scientifically useful.

6 Discussion

Through literature review, it can be concluded that in the research field of domestic waste management, existing researches mainly focus on material processing, recycling and system, but lack of analysis on users’ life management, behavior analysis and product use, resulting in a single research perspective in this field. This study takes it as the focus of analysis, demonstrating the importance of analyzing users’ life, behavior and product use in the research of domestic waste management. The case of design practice starts from the brand new perspective of product usage analysis. By analyzing the daily behavior data of users, the user’s usage on related products can be obtained, so as to deeply explore the user’s needs on the behavior and experience of domestic waste management and design according to the needs. The principle of the final design result is to encourage users to develop the domestic waste management habit of changing garbage bags every day by improving the user’s usage of garbage bags in life, neither conflict with the scientific viewpoint of existing research and made up for the inadequacy of the research caused by single angle. It provides a theoretical basis for mixed analysis of design research with user experience as the core. At the same time, the usage is a research star issue in the industry and academia in recent years. It is very valuable in reference. This study combines various international innovative design techniques in the design process to improve the usage analysis method and overcome the use of traditional analysis because of excessive dependence on the questionnaire investigation and cause analysis of subjective and disadvantages such as easily affected by time, and provides a methodological reference for the introduction of usage in other fields.

7 Conclusion

Usage analysis is an important perspective for user needs, which can further improve the quality of the design and change the user experience. Through the analysis of the user’s product usage, the potential needs of users in life management, behavior, and experience can be further obtained, and targeted products can be designed to improve the user experience. In this study, by promoting the user’s use of garbage bags, the user is encouraged to develop the domestic waste management habit of replacing the garbage bags, and the importance of analyzing the user’s product usage in the design with the user experience as the core is demonstrated. At the same time, this study combines a variety of international innovative design methods in the process of usage analysis, overcoming the shortcomings of traditional cost analysis methods that are limited by cost and time. It has a methodological reference for the application of usage analysis, and provides a theoretical basis for the usage in the application of user experience design research.