A1: Proposal

Students

Kelly Bryant
Helen Hye Kim
Shufei Lei
Lilia Manguy

Problem Statement (Revision 2)

American consumers are bombarded with a bewildering array of products from which to choose. As companies continue to globalize and take advantage of more loosely regulated labor policies in other countries, how can we ensure that the manufacturing of the products we buy are not having negative impacts on communities and the environment?

Project iBuyRight was initiated by Assistant Professor Dara O’Rourke (at the Environmental Labor & Policy Department at UC Berkeley) and Alastair Iles, Ph.D. to address the need for consumers to know more about the social and environmental impacts caused by the manufacturing, use and disposal of products purchased. The project aims to empower consumers by facilitating access to information that will help them make informed purchases.

Primary Users and their Goals:

The primary users for this phase of the project will be UC Berkeley undergraduate students. Though the ideal target is the general population, we chose undergraduate students as our primary users because they represent a sampling of the most desirable marketing demographic (ages 18-24), are likely to have access to the web and mobile phones, and are readily accessible to us for data gathering.

User characteristics:

between the ages of 18-24
undergraduate students at UC Berkeley
have access to mobile phones and the Internet
have basic to intermediate computer skills
care about social and environmental issues to some degree

The goal of these users is to be able to easily access product information on their mobile phone while shopping. The iBuyRight application will enable consumers to scan in product barcode id's with their cell phone to retrieve relevant social and environmental manufacturing information. By using this data within the shopping context, the user can choose the product that is the most appropriate for their concerns based on information about manufacturing, price and quality.

How we will find participants:

We have already made some contacts through the Environmental Labor and Policy department at UC Berkeley, and will continue to find participants via referrals from friends (i.e. “snowballing”) and through other social networks on campus, such as socially and environmentally concerned student groups. Given the large number of undergraduates on campus, we are confident that we will be able to find enough participants for user testing. However, if we are unable to find enough participants among the undergraduates, we will also consider recruiting among graduate students (Haas, SIMS) that fit the profile.

Initial Design:

For the delivery of this information, we will use the mobile phone to display and access the data. By turning the phone into an access point for product information, consumers can use this data at the point of purchase. The goal of the initial design is to develop an interface that effectively displays relevant data about a product on the small screen of a mobile phone. This interface will facilitate further interaction with the data and will also be customizable according to individual preferences.

Before we decide how to display the data, we will need to identify the types of information that our users will want to access while shopping. We will analyze our needs assessment data from last semester to help design our sample database. To keep the project within scope, we will be focusing on providing information for only one product category, e.g. shoes or shampoo (depending on the sample database of manufacturing information used).

Using the product's barcode id, the mobile application will retrieve sample manufacturing data from a small mySQL database and display it on the phone's screen. We anticipate that much of the information processing will take place on the web server (using PHP scripts) so that data transfers between the phone and the web server are minimized. We will be investigating several existing software applications to facilitate the barcode scanning input for our prototype.

Project members and Roles

Team Member	Role	Core Competencies
Kelly Bryant	Group and Project Manager	Scheduling, project management and organizational expertise; PHP, mySQL, HTML, CSS, Photoshop, Illustrator, Python
Helen Hye Kim	Web and Evaluation Manager	Client and server-side web technologies expertise; PHP, mySQL, HTML, Javascript, Python, XML, XSL, Photoshop
Shufei Lei	Database, Server-side technologies and Documentation Manager	Networking, technical and programming expertise; Java, C/C++, PHP, mySQL, XML, XSL
Lilia Manguy	Design Manager and Public Relations Manager	Visual and interaction design; usability; marketing and public relations experience; CSS, HTML, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Python