Risks and challenges
All the interactions explained in more detail.
The uscale is a product with a very specific purpose targeted at a niche. At its core it is an improvement to our ways of life and fundamentally it aims at creating a healthier environment in our lives in the kitchen. However, designing such a product does come with some risks and challenges.
Financial
This also directly translates to a financial issue, as not having enough users means that the “company” cannot sustain properly and cannot improve the system.
Now in an ideal world, the Uscale would not need to be a scale, where we could use cameras to recognize foods and volumes and the system will be fully automated, however in the current world that isn’t really a possibility for a consumer product service system.
Users
As mentioned before, the uscale is designed in a way that introduces a new dynamic to the kitchen. The user has to scan a product almost every time it is used or bought in order for the whole system to function.
Now, realistically there are smarter solutions out there that use automatic recognition, for instance the smart fridge of Samsung, however it is very highly priced and therefore not accessible by all people in the target demographic. And even in that “fancy” fridge, the technology isn’t advanced enough to recognize volumes of products.
In that fashion the Uscale is a get-around to those technological and financial limitations. Nonetheless, it is still a risk since almost no one in the general population uses a scale everytime they eat and prepare food, not to mention when they store groceries. As a direct result of this more extensive kitchen dynamic, the Uscale faces the risk of not being popular enough and, hence, not profitable.
Application
One of them being on the application side of things. What the application aims to do is combine a health app and a recipe app in one hub. This means the user can track their dietary health while being able to browse and choose recipes that can be cooked with what they already have. Since there are plenty of applications that do either one of those two things, we would be in competition on 2 fronts.
The application would need to be better than the average app for users to choose to use it.
Our unique selling point is that our app is linked to a device to weigh and track the food, meaning the user has to do less manually. As there are already many free apps for recipes, diet and health on the market, the question is if enough people are willing to pay for that.
Subscriptions
Adding to the aforementioned parts, the subscription based system is essential to the operation of the PSS as the scale depends on the app and the app on the scale. As there are already many free apps and cheap scales on the market, it might be hard to convince users to pay a monthly subscription fee for our PSS.
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Moreover, a subscription based system calls for constant upgrades and improvements to the system that the user is not responsible for. They are already paying every month, and therefore are expecting a return. If there is a lack of recipes or upgrades to the health portion of the application, maintaining a loyal user base is going to be challenging.
Sustainability
Another challenge is sustainability. As we want to implement a circular life economy to our PSS, we would need to collect the scales from users when they are not subscribed anymore or their scale is broken. This calls for a highly expensive and big chain of distribution and collection that doesn’t seem very feasible especially for a “start-up company”. This problem branches out even more, like what would be done to the scales if the user decides to stop paying and just doesn’t send it back, or what if there is a newer model of the scale, or what does that mean for production, storage, maintenance. We obviously have thought of these issues, but so far we do not have a proper answer to them.
Innovation
Nowadays, smart technologies, such as product recognition, are rapidly innovating. The smart fridge of Samsung was already mentioned beforehand, but currently it is not the perfect fit for all users. Our product might work currently for some people, however, there are no guarantees given that our product will be outdated next year.
Maybe the smart fridges and pantries of the future will include a scale so that the user would not have to do any weighing by themselves. Maybe there will be some technology, like a smart watch or a chip, that is able to recognize the amount of food a user consumes.
Besides these more radical innovations, newer scanners or cameras or new ways of scaling things, will impact our scale as well. A possible solution for that we thought of was to make a modular scale. This would make it easier to replace broken or outdated parts of the scale, which would make it more durable in the long haul and better in terms of sustainability.
However, making it modular does come with other challenges. Among other effects, making the scale modular could affect the strength and durability of some parts while it could also be less water resistant, dust proof and harder to keep clean.