February 23

Today was our first day at the electronics recycling center down the street. The place did not seem that big at first with the small storefront, but then we went into the back and witnessed the giant amount of space and warehouse used to store, discard, repair, and sell any product. The center has one room with an entrance to the storefront and an entrance to the back that acts as a testing and repair room. In the back of the building, the warehouse holds almost all of the equipment, working and non. In one section, they designated an area of the warehouse to disabled children who take apart broken computers and put the parts of the broken computers into respective bins. In another area of the building, there is a room holding working equipment that just has not made it out to the storefront. In general, the warehouse is not in terrible condition, but there are definitely some things that need to be reorganized. They do a great job on making sure their parts are in the right places and bins, but they take less care for that with their actual equipment and products. Many times they often have too much of one product in bulk that they try to sell it to one buyers but don’t have a proper means of communicating that info. For example, they had 2 full carts worth of stretcher remotes that would turn up a lot of profit if sold correctly. This might be something to look into, such as proper website of selling for the center.

 

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March 14

Today was my first actual day of work. In the repair room, going with the rest of my team, we worked on a nespresso machine and 3 home audio/video stereos. While working on our devices, I noticed the condition of the repair/testing room and found some good things and some bad. The good news was that they had almost all the tools that we needed to work on and test our devices. The bad news was that some of these tools were very hard to find. Many of them were not put in their respective bins or drawers; and whenever they were put into their respective bins, the bins were messy and disorganized as well. There was also not much space for working on each receiver at once, causing some time delay. The fact that we only had one speaker to test the stereos with was quite annoying. We were able to successfully test some of the devices, but many of the other devices were questionable in how they were working. Several had the ability to power up but were not able to perform their main actions. If the testing/repair room was a bit more organized and had more room, we would have forsure known which devices were working and which weren’t.


 

March 28

Today is my final day for achieving my hours. I stuck around for a full 2 hours. For a good thirty minutes of that time, I helped with the interviews that we conducted for our users. The interviews that we conducted were very insightful and gave us a good amount of knowledge for the needs and wants of our users. Later on, we’ll be making personas from these interviews, which seems pretty interesting. The interviews were also very natural and free-flowing, because we followed the advice that was given to us and made several questions beforehand. I feel like the trick to having a good interview with anyone is by having several introductory questions to start understanding the motives and desires of the interviewee and later using those tools to further understanding and empathizing with the interviewee. After interviewing several staff members, I got back to where I worked before, which was the testing area. Unlike before, it was just myself and one of the staff members, named Raymond. While I was working, he showed me how to list prices of the items that were being tested. As I was testing items and listing their prices, I began to think of the way the recycling center makes their profit. I then decided to conduct a little interview of my own, by asking Raymond how the center attains most of their profit. Raymond responded by telling me that the center receives their profit by selling through their storefront and through eBay. He mentioned a common problem that often occurs where many of the products are often switched and mixed up between the storefront and the eBay. This often creates a problem, because many times a product would be sold through the storefront when it’s already listed on eBay. Occurrences like these are not uncommon, often causing many inventory problems and even profit losses, as many products would gain more profit on eBay than through the storefront. This gave me an idea of how we could make our user design project by creating a better inventory and log for the items that make profit to the store and keep it up and running.