Garbage Validation

To make the polls as seamless as possible, our first goal was to blend in with a day to day activity such as throwing away garbage.

We made this MVP and set it up in a PSG Tech bakery to test the following hypothesis: With an interesting question and a clear divider, people will vote once they need to throw away their garbage.

The initial setup pretty much disproved our entire hypothesis. Here’s what we learned.

• people were not confused with the top level divider because all the garbage fell into the same bin. They cared about whether their vote counted or not.
• people noticed the poll long before they had garbage in their hand. By the time they finished eating and were ready to throw away their garbage, their interest in the poll had died.
• the ones who didn’t care about the poll but had to throw away their garbage didn’t have any other option than to use this garbage can.
• the funny options got people interested. They showed it to their friends and some of them even took photos of the poll.
• everybody who saw the poll read it thoroughly (title, options, and instruction).

Using this learning, we made the following assumptions.

• to eliminate uninterested voters, we need to make a poll booth that’s specific purpose is to share opinions. Regardless if people are spamming or genuinely voting, we will know they are interacting with the booth with the sole purpose of voting.
• without a barrier for entry (trash), people will vote immediately once they read the question.
• once people vote, they will be curious about the result.

We designed this booth to test the assumptions we made above in order to validate the following hypothesis:

People who see this button press poll booth will show the same interest as the trashcan booth and they will cast their vote immediately.

The LED surrounding the front of the booth will blink as an indicator that their vote has been registered.

Once they vote, they will be curious about the results of the poll and will scan the QR code to check.

Alright, we’ll let you know how this turns out in the next article! Peace 🐸