Intro

This is a 1-year long capstone project sponsored by DC Water, during Fall 2021 and Spring 2022 at the University of Maryland, College Park. I worked with 3 graduate students in Fall 2021. After regrouping at the end of Fall 2021, I worked with 5 graduate students in Spring 2022.


My role and contributions:
Conduct expert interviews, analyze data points, develop prototype, plan and conduct usability testings, etc.

Problem

DC Water provides District residents and visitors with drinking water, sewage collection, sewage treatment and public fire hydrant maintenance services. Most Washington D.C. residents and visitors report emergency water problems by calling DC Water instead of filling out the web based form, which can overwhelm command center staff during large scale emergencies. 
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Emergency reports that contain insufficient information can cause a delay in assessment and response time.
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Goal: Quickly and accurately capture emergency-only reports for better situational awareness and to increase customer reporting.

Final Solution

A refined reporting system includes choices of different scenarios from both indoor and outdoor situations. DC Water customers and other users can report a problem with just a few taps. If the situation is rather unique, the system also allows users to input information manually. If the customer desires, they can also track their ticket and getting updates about the repair and other issues.

Mapping

At the beginning of the process we received a sorted set of issues types, provided by DC Water team. We had them cleaned up and produced into a prototype and tested with users. From the user feedback, we realized a lot of possible issues are missing, and are not organized in a way that is easy to understand. We brainstormed and listed major water emergency events and organized under the 2 big types: indoor vs. outdoor‍

Terminology

Another issue that came up after testing using DC Water provided categories, was terminology. People have little to no idea what is a "catch basin" or "main break". In order to find the words that people commonly use and understand, we conducted several rounds of vocabulary related testing and activities.

Round 1
Group and name: Users were given 20 pictures of water related issues. They group the ones they believe that are similar, and then give it a few words of definition. We collected those definitions and picked the top used words into a wordbank.

Round 2
Brainstorm and data gathering: Using the report spreadsheet that was provided by DC Water, we collect wording from comments that were left by residents. We also took a look at DC Water on Twitter and farmed words from Twitter reports. We then brainstorm in front of a white board, putting down any possible related words on it.

Round 3
Word bank matching: We put together a word bank after sorting words from round 1 and 2 using Miro board. We also put 12 images right next to the word bank and invited more users to do this matching activity. User put words next to the picture that they would associate with.

After the 3 rounds of activities, we had a better idea of what words we want to move forward with the improved prototype.

Additional Functions

Special Thanks