Promoting Water Resource recovery with a Web App
Industry: Civil Engineering, Information Technology
Category: Web app, Open-source
Services Offered: Heuristic Evaluation, Design Sprints, Usability Testing
Date: 2021
This project demonstrates the value of user experience research (UXR) for open-source applications. It is an exciting and challenging project that allowed us to be innovative with remote methods due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The USF-CAREER Project funded by the National Science Foundation was developing a web-based application for optimizing water resource recovery. The WasteWATER is an open-source tool intended to help civil engineers, utility officials, and policymakers make sustainable decisions in the design of integrated wastewater management systems.
Challenge
The challenge was that the development began without any form of user experience research (UXR). As a result, the initial design lacked personalization because the target audience and their needs were not quite clear. Our project scope was, however, limited to usability testing with potential users and stakeholders in cities across the US.
Solution
We needed to go back to basics without delaying the project any further. We had a discussion with the project team and convinced them to add two quick challenges to the scope of the study to improve the app before user testing. Testing an improved version of the app would be greatly beneficial in reducing usability issues that would have overwhelmed the participants.
Design Challenge #1: understand the user, their attitudes, and needs.
What we did: held a remote brainstorming session with the project team to co-create personas and empathize with potential users and map their journeys.
Design Challenge #2: identify usability issues before involving users
What we did: using a set of usability best practices, we performed heuristic evaluations to provide quick feedback to the development team on usability issues, their severity, and recommendations for improvements.
Design Challenge #3: get feedback from users
What we are doing: designing and conducting user testing via user testing.com
Our role:
obtaining the appropriate research licenses and compliance with the Institutional Review Board (IRB)
Ensuring all research abided by ethical and professional standards provided by the Institutional Review Board (IRB)
Preparing participant recruitment materials, informed consent study protocols (interview guides and focus scripts)
Screening a recruiting participant for user testing
Conducting explorative research including stakeholder interviews
Moderating remote usability testing sessions
Transcribing interviews and writing up notes and rapid qualitative analysis
Providing UX insights to the team including developers, and researchers from civil and environmental engineering
Outcomes and Impact
Selected Outcomes
An Aesthetic and minimalist design. We cut down information, established information hierarchy, and readability through font size and color.
Visibility of system status using a progress bar to keep users informed about what is going on.
Error prevention by adding asterisks (*) to indicate a required field and help information.
Recognition rather than recall by making actions and options visible.
