Faisal Ramadan & Mykola Blokhin
Date: 09/05/2021
Background
At any given moment of time humanity has about 1,386,000,000 cubic kilometers of water on Earth. That includes water on, in, and above the Earth. Liquid fresh water can be found in rivers, lakes, swamps, and groundwater and it accounts for only 10,633,450 cubic kilometers. (U.S. Geological Survey (2021) USGS)
Now, with a current world population of over 7.8 billion people and predicted 9.7 billion by 2050, it is clear that humanity will face some challenges with water supplies in the nearest future. (Chamie Joseph (2020) yaleglobal.yale)
Not to mention problems with access to clean water in developing countries.
Today our task is to help educate the general public about water, current issues that humanity is facing, and how people can contribute to eliminating the water crisis in the future.
Research Plan
Research Goals
To kick start with the research, we used 5Ws & H method (Hart, 2002) to build up important questions that we want to answer:
Why is it important to raise awareness about water use?
Who is responsible for water scarcity?
What is done or should be done to prevent water wastage?
Where is a water-related crisis likely to happen?
When is a water-related crisis predicted to happen?
How can we educate people on water consumption?
We will also add 2 more questions in our research that will be more specific to the country we are focusing on - Norway:
Why are people wasting water?
When are people wasting water?
Research Methods
To begin with our research, we are using an exploratory research method (Stebbins, 2001), which includes primary and secondary research. Primary research will be used in order to collect our own data, which we will analyse after. Secondary research will be used in order to gather available data and analyse it further. After this we will be able to analyse all collected data and draw conclusions out of it.
For now our tasks are:
1. Perform literature review (qualitative secondary research)
2. Conduct survey (quantitative primary research)
3. Conduct interviews (qualitative data about users)
4. Analyse data using affinity mapping technique
5. Interpret facts using abductive reasoning
6. List recommendations on how to use insights drawn from the facts
Participants and Recruiting
In order to conduct a survey and get enough data for further research, we are aiming to gather between 150-200 responses. As the primary source of finding participants we are using Facebook, since it is the most popular social media in Norway as of 2021. (Social Media Stats in Norway (2020) gs.statcounter).
We are using our personal contacts and asking members of different Facebook groups to participate in the survey. Since we have a larger network among expats living in Norway, the vast majority of the survey participants are foreigners living in Norway.
We are using 1 full week to perform the research and analyse data. It will include both literature review and survey. The survey will be conducted by volunteers and we will not include any monetary or other incentives in our budget. As for resources, we will use Google Forms in order to gather responses, and Microsoft Excel in order to analyse data.
Timeframe of the research:
In order to better empathise with our users, we are taking extra steps in the research and performing a set of interviews.
Research
Next to literature review we are also conducting a survey on water consumption in Norway https://forms.gle/TCWcWPbpe9Bt623h9
It will help us to:
- Gather more qualitative and quantitative data
- Understand who our target users are
- See how much they know about water scarcity issue
We organised our survey form in a way that it gives us insights on the age, gender, occupation, and even education of our potential users. Before the final version of the survey was ready, we tested it on 3 people (friends and family) and adjusted some of the questions that weren't understandable enough. With the help of non-leading questions we got to see people's perspective on the problem and the way of dealing with it. We did not provide any incentives for the participants and used social media in order to find those who wanted to participate. In the end, we were able to collect 157 responses by the time we started with analysis. To make these responses into meaningful facts we analysed them in the spreadsheet, filtering and grouping different questions.
Some findings after we conducted the survey:
Other important findings about our potential users:
1- Demographics: 55.4% are 25-34 years old, 52.9% are male
2- Occupation: 62.4% are employed for wages
3- Education: 49% have Bachelor's, 24.8% Master's
4- Household: 51.6% households consist of 2 people, 19.7% of 1 person only
Why are people wasting water?
When are people wasting water?
We are conducting semi-structured interviews with predefined script and a set of questions that focus around our goals. This will help us to adapt to the situation and be more flexible during the interview. Mykola is the interviewer and Faisal takes notes about the answers to questions and facial expressions of the users. In order to get enough insights, we need to interview 5 people. (Nielsen Jakob (2000) nngroup).
and to find the right participants, we are using finding about users from the survey. For the interviews we will contact our personal network and agree on meeting 5 people and discuss with 1 extra person the possibility of doing an interview in case someone will have to cancel. No incentives will be given since we are asking our friends and family to help us with school work. We ran a pilot interview and managed to change a few questions for it. The final script can be found on Google Docs https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Od8uIXrwH0ZMZCqYWtdKP0fKlIR0mqHS7uDp1lnFuts/edit?usp=sharing
From the notes that we were taking during the interviews (link:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c4S7BzP5ZVfK8hB6SA-V9c_vbjR08Z-O/view?usp=sharing ) we were able to organise everything in a separate spreadsheet https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IHF89XsF43li6yWPV6ClW1mtSwcXFYsnFGr0ycdXRYw/edit?usp=sharing
We are using Atomic research approach in order to organise our data from both literature review and survey. The final result of this stage is 55 facts that can we found on Google Sheets https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_zdbPOSsPtcyY-t2Vo33Cd1V5kpZSY1Z8XO5jqhmgzE/edit?usp=sharing
Data Analysis & Fact Interpretation
1. What is the current situation with water scarcity
- Who is responsible for water scarcity?
- Where is a water-related crisis likely to happen?
- What is done to prevent water wastage?
- When are people wasting water?
2. How can we motivate people to waste less water?
- Why is it important to raise awareness about water use?
- Why are people wasting water?
- When is a water-related crisis predicted to happen?
- How can we educate people on water consumption?
Following steps from Lesson "Affinity Mapping", we created next affinity map, that can be found on Miro: https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lLz406o=/
Next, we organised themes with descriptions and facts in spreadsheet in order to keep track of the groups of facts https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1o06CLbJpL320qwDX_gBfzRgSUuqGm9dIBWybQYLLIhw/edit?usp=sharing
After synthesising all the data from previous steps, we were able to uncover meaningful insights that will shape our solution for the problem. Insights are presented in the spreadsheet https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GS6X7VwTkuCnNMWGharvtfMYYM_MenZwkh2L6kR-YcA/edit?usp=sharing
Recommendations
We were able to collect 55 facts about water scarcity after conducting our research. After, we grouped together relevant facts and came up with 3 key themes for them: obstructions, solutions, and awareness. This made us identify and draw 14 meaningful insights. Now, we would like to create conclusions out of these 14 insights. These conclusions can be used as recommendations towards how to deal with water scarcity problems.
Primary persona
In order to create our fictional persona, we are using findings from the survey and make assumptions. Our primary persona (central user) will be male, since 55.4% of all the respondents to the survey were male. Other characteristics include:
- Age between 25-34 years
- Employed for wages
- Has a degree
- Lives with 1 other person
We are using https://generated.photos/faces/ to make a photo of the person and a .psd template similar to User Persona Type from xtensio.com
User scenarios
In order to have a better understanding of our primary persona, we created a context and a key path scenario. It will help us to see what user's goals are and how our product might help to achieve them.
Context scenario "A day in a life of Arvid Vannhallen":
- Arvid wakes up at 7 a.m. for his short morning run before work. He checks his phone's notifications and sees a few notifications from Facebook, Instagram, and his news app, which says "Flash droughts set to increase in India, finds study".
- While running, Arvid thinks about the news article. He understands that water shortage is a global problem and that all the countries in the world will face one day, but he doesn't really know what he can do in order to help it.
- Arvid starts working at 8 a.m. in his open space office. At lunch time he is having a chat with one of his colleagues and it appears that she also read that same article about droughts in India. Both of them feel frustrated that if it wasn't for the news app, they wouldn't know about this problem at all. Arvid and his colleague agree that Norwegian government doesn't do much to educate people about this problem. She also suggests Arvid to look into water saving devices, since she is using a few.
- After work Arvid is having dinner with his girlfriend. They have been dreaming about buying their own house for a few years now, but they don't really know how to save up more money than they do now. Arvid mentions his colleague's suggestion about buying a water saving device. They discuss it and then Arvid asks his girlfriend to look more into it since he doesn't want to use his laptop today after a long day at work.
Key path scenario
Task: Open news app to check latest news about the environment before going to work.
Goal: To be more Eco-friendly while learning about environmental issues.
- Arvid opens a news app on his phone when he wakes up in the morning.
- Using the app he reads the article about water scarcity problem in India.
- In the bottom of the article Arvid sees Google Ads block with different water saving products for sale.
- He clicks on one of the products to read more about it.
- Link redirects him to his phone's browser with the site he clicked on.
- Arvid checks the product's characteristics and decides to talk about it with his girlfriend.
- He closes the phone's browser and carries on with his day.
Task: Open a browser to find a web shop that sells water saving devices.
Goal: Save up money to buy a house and be able to be more Eco-friendly at the same time.
- Arvid opens his phone's browser to find in the history site that he saw in the morning.
- He looks through it again and considers to make an order.
- Arvid shows site to his girlfriend to discuss the product
- They check the product's characteristics to see how much water they could save up.
- They calculate how much money they could save up with this device using the phone's calculator.
- They decide to give it a try since it will help them to pay less in bills and save money for a house.
- Arvid and his girlfriend place an order from the site using Arvid's phone.
- After they are done they close the site and continue with their evening routine.
Problem statement
While formulating our problem statement we looked into it from 3 different ways to frame our design challenge:
1. From the user's perspective: "I am a young professional living in Norway. I want to learn more about the ways of preserving water for future generations. I also want to have a more sustainable way of living, which will reduce my daily spendings and help me save money to buy a house. I don't really know how to do it or where to start and it makes me anxious and frustrated."
2. User research perspective: "Young professionals need a way to learn how to be more Eco-friendly and save up money while being so because they feel overwhelmed while trying to find relevant information."
3. Four Ws (who, what, where and why): "Our young professional is living in Norway and experiencing problems with finding relevant information about sustainable living and ways of preserving water, which can lead to increased savings. The reason for that is the excessive amount of information, which is difficult to digest. Our solution should focus on an efficient way of presenting information about the water problems, ways of sustainable living, and how it can benefit user's savings."
After we synthesised these 3 ways we came up with the next defined problem and vision statements:
Problem statement (The Point of View): Young professional needs an organised source of knowledge about ways of dealing with water problems because he wants to be more Eco-friendly and be able to save up money. If we can find a solution for it, it will benefit young professionals by providing a source of useful information. It would benefit our business by finding a targeted audience interested in Eco-friendly products and solutions.
Vision statement
Based (Kaley Anna (2020) nngroup) Our vision is to create a simple everyday solution for educating about water saving necessity and Eco lifestyle for many people.
Before starting generating ideas for our design challenge, we are using our problem statement to answer How Might We (HMW) Questions. It will kick start the ideate stage on our next step.
HMW Questions:
- How might we make it easy for young adults to deal with the water scarcity problems?
- How might we help them to be more Eco-friendly?
- How might we make this experience more financially rewarding?
Ideation
- After work Arvid is having dinner with his girlfriend. They have been dreaming about buying their own house for a few years now, but they don't really know how to save up more money than they do now. Arvid mentions his colleague's suggestion about buying a water saving device. They discuss it and then Arvid asks his girlfriend to look more into it since he doesn't want to use his laptop today after a long day at work.
Ideation session
In order to generate many ideas for the solution of our problem we go through the next stage of the design thinking process, ideation.
Ideation planning:
1. First thing we did while preparing for the ideation session, we defined main goals of our workshop:
- generate and discuss wide set of ideas;
- brainstorm ideas for possible design solution;
- diverge and then converge our generated ideas.
2. Second, we invited one extra person, Arvid Halleland, who works as a digital marketer at Netthvalen AS. It would help us to get more varied creative ideas and compensate for a small study group of 2 people.
3. Next we appointed Mykola Blokhin as the facilitator, who would explain the goals of the workshop and lead it through the process.
4. Then we decided on time and place. At first, we wanted to have an outdoor workshop, but the weather in Bergen wasn't any good in the nearest forecast. So we decided to go to Mykola's place on Saturday 11am so everyone would be the most productive and not tired after work.
5. For warm-up we decided to have a short chat about recent rapid weather changes in Bergen while drinking our coffee. It served as an icebreaker since Faisal and Arvid haven't met before. We also agreed that there weren't stupid ideas and we could freely suggest whatever we wanted.
6. We agreed on the next ideation techniques:
Brainstorming + $100 Test and Mind mapping.
We also agreed how we were going to critique them and choose the best.
We summarised and organised our plan in Miro's digital work space https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lKzHOqA=/
Ideation techniques conducted:
1. Brainstorming.
Brainstorming is probably the most popular and the most used ideation technique among UX specialists. We started it with our facilitator Mykola explaining to us the goals of the workshop. Then he proceeded with telling us about our problem statement and How Might We questions from the previous stage "Problem statement". The brainstorming session was set to be 30 minutes where each of us got a different colour set of post-it notes to write all our creative ideas.
All together we came up with 39 creative ideas, the most funny of which were:
- Write a book “Buy a house by helping nature”
- Huge monument to people struggling from drought
Then we summarised them and made categories for similar solutions. The result can be seen on the picture (high resolution available at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ao9tcy3OElRe3Rq6sf2WmotpDoWRsC5N/view?usp=sharing ).
In order to choose the best idea we used the $100 test and adapted it for our needs. We gave each of the participants 5 banknotes, each representing $20 (in total everyone got $100 each, so all together we had $300). Anyone could spend these money on any idea that they liked the most. With one limitation: it was not possible to spend more than $40 on one idea.
Ideas that got "investments":
$120 Complex app with news, tips, marketplace buy and sell
$80 App with tips and shop that sells eco devices like water saving devices
$40 Ecological social network for young people in Norway
$40 Device that connects to the internet and sets daily reminders on how to be eco-friendly
$20 Write a book “Buy a house by helping nature”
2. Mind Mapping.
Our second choice of ideation technique was Mind mapping. We decided to do it in the Tree Model, which begins in a centred point and then goes towards different branches-ideas. We decided to use Miro again and it lead up to the next solution https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lbHNLSw=/
After generating so many different ideas we are moving towards creating our product. But before we jump into designing our potential solution to the problem we are going through the Requirements Definition Process. It will help us understand what the product is and what it should do.
Requirements Definition Process
Since our ideation sessions were complete, we were thinking about the product and about the platform we wanted to use for it. We believe that the most convenient and modern solution would be made as a mobile application. It backs up with data: 4.64 million mobile phone users in Norway in 2018 (with population being 5.296 million the same year) and 85% using mobile Internet every day. (Statista (2019) Statista)
In the end we managed to write down next requirements https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1feWfgah0LZ4GBonhyWfwo90eKP68A15Wnl1l1gvC-GY/edit?usp=sharing
We will start building our application based on our top idea combined from both ideation sessions. In general, it’s a mobile app with news feed on water scarcity issues and ecological news, tips on sustainable living with options to buy special products, and edutainment (educational game) about water scarcity. After research that we conducted, we strongly believe that by educating our users on more than one ecological problem (water scarcity) will lead to better results. It’s backed up on the fact that Norwegians on a large scale do not care about water scarcity and believe that water is an infinite resource. Educating them on the water issue as a part of a more viable ecological problem will help us solve our task.
Information Architecture
Now we are going to organise and structure information for our app. We are using online tool http://draw.io
We build next IA for our app https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bJRnDa0dBrxueN11bYlXgwulwuUiDaum/view?usp=sharing
User Flow
To show our potential user’s journey on our app we created a User Flow of a first-time user. For that we used online solution Flowmapp and created next flowhttps://app.flowmapp.com/share/769cad6858edcfae29ca0697d02bfe93/userflow/144939/
Wireframing
Before we dive into wireframing, we want to visualise features that we want to prioritise in our app. For that we are using MoSCoW Technique, so we created next table:
According to Norman's Three Levels of Design
(link:)https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/norman-s-three-levels-of-desig
we should focus on 3 cognitive levels to evoke positive emotions in our users:
- Visceral. In order to get an emotional response on visceral level, we will focus on general visual appealing of the app. Since it’s in aesthetics of the application, we want to make it with nice graphic elements in the high-fidelity wireframe. Especially, in our edutainment feature, since it will be used to attract more users.
- Behavioral. Our users are supposed to get positive emotions while using the app. We can achieve it by applying best practises and using working practises. This will help us to gain user’s interest and willingness to use the app again.
- Reflective. We have to convince users to stick with our app in the future. So they have to have some other than functional benefits of using it.
Our first sketch of the app:
Mobile first
Since we are creating a mobile app, we are obviously focusing on a mobile-first approach. While doing so, we are taking into account limitations in regard to the screen size and information that is supposed to fit in there. Content will be our number one priority to focus on.
Wireframes and wire Flows can be found on https://mykola510210.invisionapp.com/freehand/BergenVann-OC5sG0QhN
as well as which design elements we used and why we used them. Overall, we were inspired by such apps as Facebook, Telegram, and Coinbase. We also used approaches made common among UX designers and understandable for the average user.
Wireframes:
Wireframes made by using IN Vision App, see the layout on:
https://mykola510210.invisionapp.com/freehand/BergenVann-OC5sG0QhN
Usability testing
Throughout our previous steps we were trying to find a proper way to raise awareness around water scarcity in Norway. We came up with a solution that we believe is interesting enough to keep people using it. Now after we built wireframes using best practises in the field, we would like to go through usability testing in order to make our app even better. As of Nielsen Norman Group’s recommendation (Nielsen Jakob (2000) nngrou) we are using 5 participants to conduct our usability testing. We used our previous connections, which we made during the research stage, and were able to get us 7 people willing to participate, so we arranged testing with 5 of them and “kept” the rest 2 on standby in case something would go wrong (it didn’t). We also made a consent form in order to keep up with GDPR. It is based on template from (Methods.18f (2019) methods.18f) and can be found on Google Docs: https://docs.google.com/document/d/18_aDp5z82lu9cx5GYKo5z6BthMEF4sxaezKmlo0XgCs/edit?usp=sharing
Approach
We decided to go with an unmoderated in person usability test approach called “observation”. For this method we need to observe how participants interact with our app and take notes on their body language. At the beginning of preparation for usability tests we defined next indicators:
Goals: start using Bergen Vann app and learn about water scarcity.
Tasks: register in the app, check app’s features, play edutainment game, and make virtual coins.
Metrics: success or failure during using the app, time to complete tasks, and general satisfaction with the app.
First of all, we created a usability testing script, which can be found on Google Docs https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w4RO6lgUMssujYhDzH1dvnEEKnfjKgCA_lpibxn-Iak/edit?usp=sharing
and then proceed with cheat sheet based on The Usability Test Plan Dashboard from(Travis David (2021) userfocus), which can be found on Google Drive https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dqY5GasmJYES-PDuG-_lVHys7papprVU/view?usp=sharing
We are using the Concurrent Think Aloud (CTA) method for our sessions. In this method participants narrate what they are doing during the process. They also try to explain why they decided to perform this or that action, and what they expected as the outcome. Downside of this method is that it significantly increases time spent on the testing and also accuracy in responses is affected too.
Before conducting actual usability testing, we again invited Arvid Halleland to help us with pilot testing. After the pilot was conducted we noted on how to take notes in pair (one writing on actions and another one on emotions), and how to be less intrusive into user’s space, since Arvid made a comment on that.
After synthesising our findings with a help of affinity mapping technique, we decided to make a separate usability testing report, which is available at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RT7WI2smNJHCrDe6eIEOSo1cA9-ceYemOM-4jZBfSNM/edit?usp=sharing
After usability testing we were happy to have all these results, even though they showed there is still plenty to work on. Main concern that users had was about our edutainment and its functionality. We can revise our design and make it better in our next version.
Conclusion and constraints
After finishing with our assignment, we have a few important notes to make.
- Our initial target group was among expats, since we are expats ourselves. It showed that expats are generally more concerned about water problems than Norwegians, especially expats from the countries with water scarcity problems.
- Vast majority of people don't really care about water issues. Some people are concerned about other environmental problems though. We strongly believe that we shouldn’t focus all the effort on solutions to raise awareness around the issue of water scarcity. We want to have more people interested in the topic, that’s why we have to take into account other environmental problems and also look for people, who want to be eco-friendly. These people would be easier to educate on the water problem itself. In other words, we want to engage with more people.
- It was a fun and challenging task and we are happy with the process we went through even though usability testing showed we had a lot to work on in regarding to our wireframe.