Dine Safe King County came out of Sarah Schacht's public advocacy for posted restaurant inspection scores. Her successful petition to King County for posted inspection scores caused King County to start a stakeholder committee process to provide suggestions for restaurant inspection score design and a new rating system. At the end of months on the committee, Sarah was disapointed to find she was the only member of the public on the committee, and saw a need for public feedback on and testing of restaurant inspection scores and signs.
Reaching out to University of Washington's Human Centered Design Department, Sarah recruited graduate students and undergrads in their senior year to leverage their education in user research to implement a usability study/user research study. WSU's Prof. Susie Craig a specialist in public health, mentored the research team and reviewed their work.
To fund the research, Schacht sought crowd funding, raising over $800, just enough to complete early research. See the crowd funding campaign here.
Thanks to the project's crowdfunders, Dine Safe was able to cover costs of public outreach and recruitment, participant gratuities, materials, and researcher transportation costs. Special thanks to Benson Chan, Grace Stahre, and Laura Williams for contributing at the "Report Rocker" level! Thank you again to all our funders!
King County, Washington, will implement restaurant inspection score signs in late 2015 to early 2016. This transparency and public health project will be a first in our region, but in other municipal areas, like Toronto, inspection score signs at restaurants have been around for over a decade. Some research suggests these signs bring down overall cases of food poisoning, by as much as 30%.
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