The Aquapod is a web application that aims to assist the severe clean water and sanitation scarcity by providing local resources for both those in need of clean water, and for those who can help to make a difference.
Client
King County
Project Type
Front-End Development
Team
5 students
Timeline
Sept - Dec 2023 (3 months)
About
Problem
Water resources, specifically sanitized and clean drinking water, are not easily accessible to the majority of people. As the UN explains, “2.2 billion people still lacked safely managed drinking water services, 3.5 billion lacked safely managed sanitation services, and 2.0 billion lacked basic hygiene services in 2022” (Water and Sanitation - UN Sustainable Development). Although access to water is a basic necessity, the resources and supplies may not be publicly known, which can be a major barrier for those in need of them and thus negatively impacting our ecosystems and sustainable development. Likewise, there are many capable people who are willing to help donate these supplies or uncover services. However, information on where they can provide support may be limited or scattered, furthering the outward affect of the problem within our communities.
Solution
To start with the focus of the problem, we start with the MVP: How might we educate the people of King County on water facilities to ensure they can locate necessary sanitation resources and opportunities to donate? Because many may not have daily access to clean water and sanitation, or many may want to give support to their community, our team's objective is to adopt a solution to promote the location of water, sanitization, and hygiene resources throughout King County in Washington.
Onboard
Resources
Donate
Learn
The Onboarding Process
Users are presented firsthand with an overview of the water and sanitation issue at hand, alongside a youtube video that properly explains the problem in depth.
Below, users can scroll down to see what kinds of features our application provides, and how users can navigate to each of them. Finally, users may click on our action button to start their story on our website, where we provide them three scenarios they may take: whether they are looking for resources, looking for donations, or looking to learn more about the cause.
Research
Understanding the Problem
Before we could decide on what kinds of functionalities we wanted to implement within our application in order for it hold as a solution, it was important for us to first understand what kinds of causes of the problem to tackle.
To grasp a better understanding of what purpose our solution will hold and how we can approach it, we address the following:
Cause 1
A huge factor to this problem is that water availability continues to be uncertain in areas that are scarce of water accessibility in the first place, thus negatively impacting sustainable development and ecosystems.
Response: We hope to promote daily access to water, sanitization, and hygiene resources throughout King County as a starting point.
Cause 2
There is not much awareness being generated towards communities who may want to help, or methods being publicized to those who want to participate in providing sanitation and clean water.
Response: We hope to create a platform to emphasize where people can find ways to help donate supplies or be proactive about accessible water services.
Stakeholders & Personas
To ensure that our app will be user-friendly towards our target audience, we evaluated personas that would be the majority to interact with our app. This allowed our team to make sure we value their interest and time on the cruise during the ideation process. Passengers will be made up of two primary groups: singles and families.
We soley used these two stakeholders as they directly correlated to the type of users we were targeting for our app. Given the nature of cruise ships, we believed that the main types of groups were singles and families, which are those who would most likely be intrigued to use the app for their own personal use.
Ideation
Initial Whiteboard & User Flow
To begin creating a solution to our stakeholders, we started off with a rough outline of what main features the app should present. By discussing what each of us envisioned as a group for Cruise Companion to be successful, this initiation pushed us into our first iteration of the app's development.
Though initially messy, we further developed our ideas by defining what journeys the user may go through when using the app. This helped us construct what each feature would mean to our audience and how they would interact with the feature. For example:
By making multiple prototypes, it allowed us to give a more clear visual of how to produce a coherent theme and user journey. As I iterated through my "Schedule View" sketch, I found that it would be easiest for users to be able to access their confirmed event details through their calendar through just a click, rather than having the user go through typing up a search to find their event for their details. This way, we avoid users from taking unnecessary steps, when the information they want can be shown from one location in one easy course of action.
Usability Testing
Before we continued with the full design process, we interviewed a group of 10+ of casual cruisers and non-cruisers to gather feedback and improve on areas we were currently lacking. This process helped us immensely, as we gathered data about what feasible updates we could make to improve the experience of our future users.
What they liked
Fun, consistent aesthetics and branding
Simple filtering, and personalized activity recommendations based on past activities
The possibilities of the map functionalities
Itinerary customization
What could be improved
A function to easily contact ship staff in case of emergencies
Notification screen for ship announcements
Being able to locate travel group through the map, while keeping privacy a high priority
We proceeded to do additional rounds of feedback through every iteration, averaging around 3 rounds of interviews.
Takeaways
This project proved to be a learning curve for me in developing skills on how to consider a user's perspective when they start their journey with our application design. It became important for me to recognize what design choices would make sense for a wide range of users, and what purpose each design implementation should hold. As a team, some takeaways we discovered include:
The customer comes first • By embracing user-centered design, we learned to collect solutions based on our customer interest to make meaningful impacts on their lives. In order for our design to be user-friendly, we had to thoroughly understand the user's interest through personas and multiple interview processes of potential stakeholders.
A failed design is not a failure • We believed after every iteration, that one was the best final iteration. But through various user testings, we quickly learned how that design actually missed another user need. Rather than taking it as a "back to square one" thinking, we approached this setback as a stepping stone to a better final design.
Understanding design decisions • My team had many ideas we wanted to incorporate into our single app, however, it became difficult for us to make the decision on what features we wanted over others as we all had our own personal design outlooks. By creating an open environment to understand the decisions made by a team member, I was able to not only learn from them, but apply their thinking into my own work and future contributions to the team.