College dining halls provide students a convenient place to get cooked meals, take a break from homework, and catch up with friends. One crucial but less evident part of the dining hall experience comes at the end of the meal when students put away their used dishes. This human use analysis will focus on the dish conveyer belt setup in Next House Dining.
To briefly illustrate the setup, Next House Dining's dish conveyer belt set up includes the dish conveyer belt itself, the surrounding area, its placement in the dining hall, the recycling and compost bins, and the signage on the walls.
The main function of the conveyer belt is to accept used dishes from and bring them to the kitchen to be washed. This allows the dishes to be put away when they’re no longer in use, and brought back out once cleaned for the next group of students.
A more detailed list of functions can be found when we analyze how the dish conveyer belt serves its two key users: students who eat at the dining hall, and the employees who wash the dishes.
Students want a simple, quick and clean way to return their dishes. As students who are often in a rush, the conveyer belt should be quick to use. This also means it should be an intuitive process. As dining halls are also busy places, the dish conveyer belt setup should be able to accommodate multiple students at once.
The employees who wash the dishes want a setup that helps make their job as easy and efficient as possible. As someone who washes hundreds of dishes each day, the dish conveyer belt should both help them keep pace and simplify their job.
Although Next House Dining's conveyer belt has two main users, we will focus on the user experience of the student.
I will discuss a couple of the main limitations of the current Next House Dining conveyer belt setup.
The most frequent problem students face with the setup relates to the compost and recycling bins. Often times, students are unsure what can be recycled and what can be composted. There is also no option of throwing something into the trash so students also choose between leaving trash on their dishes, which adds an additional step for the employee who washes the dishes, or recycling something that isn’t recyclable.
To make the experience more confusing, the recycling and compost bins sometimes swap places, so a student who got used to the compost on the left will accidentally throw their leftovers into the recycling bin.
The area can become easily crowded if several students arrive at once. When this happens, students have to wait before being able to return their dishes. In addition, the compost and recycling bins are positioned in a way where it makes it difficult for more than one student to use them at a time. Since composting and recycling is the first step in this process, this creates a bottleneck and makes students wait even longer.
The conveyer belt smells very unpleasant and greatly worsens the user experience. This also causes students to rush the process, so often times food and waste will just be left on the plates. In the cases where students are not rushing, they are forced to smell the stench of the conveyer belt, or hold their breath. This also causes problems when there is a wait and students are stuck waiting for their turn in this poor smelling environment.
A couple of potential improvements center around the previously mentioned limitations
Easy to understand signs indicating the recycling bin and the compost bin would be helpful. The signs could use colours and symbols or images to help students with knowing what goes into which bin. In addition, the signs should be more of a permanent feature of the space, so that the bins are also always placed in the same location to reduce confusion if they were to switch spots.
Though the space probably cannot be enlarged, the compost and recycling bins can be rearranged so more than one person can use them at a time. A simple solution could be to have a set of compost and recycling bins on both sides of the conveyer belt so that two people can use them at once. This would also help decrease the crowd that often forms the area around the current compost and recycling bins.
Scent is an important factor in this user experience. A potential way to improve this would be to design the conveyer belt to be more easily removed and washed. In addition, the inside of the conveyer belt is hard to reach and clean due to the low top and its depth. The top of be made higher to make cleaning easier.