Arizona Water Blueprint
Overview
The Arizona Water Blueprint is a comprehensive strategy to improve water management in Arizona over the long term. Mainly used by technical municipal users whose goals are to find ways to better manage water, make the state more water-secure, and safeguard the state's water supply. This new effort builds on their earlier work by illustrating potential future outcomes for urban areas in relation to water use.
Challenge
To predict water scenarios and offer insights into how these scenarios will affect Arizonans and the state's water supply, a new tool called AZ CuRVE was being created at Arizona State University in addition to the various existing forecasting systems that are already in use.
Uncertainty was found to exist in the AZ CuRVE. To this end, we plan to investigate what potential users hope to gain from the tool and see if it can be combined with any others already in use.
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Stakeholders at Arizona State University were given a design solution that harmonizes with the university's current aesthetic. To ensure a smooth transition from one project to the next, my team and I made extensive use of the preexisting design system and components, while also implementing enhancements to deliver a better result overall.
Role
UX Researcher
Project Duration
4 months
Process
Research, Ideate, Define, Design, Redesign, Reflection
Tools used
Figma, Miro
Research
Heuristic evaluation
Our team started off with a meeting in order to go over the project plan and familiarize ourselves with the product. We started with a heuristic evaluation of the AZ CuRVE to understand the current challenges of the product as well as whether the existing product can be revamped to create a unified product.
Comparative analysis
We next moved on to analyzing the competition. We developed a comparative analysis to better understand our rivals' strengths and weaknesses and the issues they can address. We also documented the inspiration of regular products being used for design brainstorming and ideation process.
User interviews
We were able to conduct 5 user interviews with municipal users working in a variety of roles and representing a wide range of cities thanks to the user testing scripts and questions we developed. The user findings document recorded several very illuminating results. The user questions were divided into three categories:
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Introduction based questions
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Data based questions
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Other questions
User findings
1
Planning
Operational staff manages all our water resources, places water orders, and coordinates with CAP (Central Arizona Project) on legal rights.
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Funding prioritization
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Impact of water cut and Forecast
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Custom Water model
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Demand curve
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Bureau of Reclamation
2
Communication
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Water advisors
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Communicating to Customer
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Incentive programs for customers
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Cost Relating finances to water infrastructure, financial narrative communication is the future.
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What are the expenses of the proposed water supply alternatives compared to what we already pay?
Define
Persona
Based on the interview findings, we started by distilling all the points and transforming our findings into a persona that was a technical municipal user.
Task flows
Based on persona and user interview findings, we built a comprehensive task flow and determine different pathways based on user goals.
Other artefacts derived from the research
Design
Sketch
Wireframes
High fidelity prototype
Feedback and redesign
Final_Final_design
Reflection
The significance of thorough research was driven home to me by this assignment. You can be motivated to create a marketable product by learning as much as you can about the issue at hand. It taught me the importance of maintaining composure in the face of potentially huge amounts of data. In the end, I basically approached things one step at a time, and the end result was a design that the client loved. The same can be said about keeping your staff on the same page with regular communication and updates. In the end, it felt good to figure out ways to fix the problems we'd encountered. Another thing I picked up is that it's okay to seek assistance when you're having trouble. In exchange, I'd be proactive in offering help whenever it was requested.
ASU professors and interviews were very helpful and quick to respond to inquiries or provide clarification whenever the team needed it. Members of the team were a great resource for me in learning more about dashboard design and general design principles. Together, we kept the file neat and tidy so that we could get our work done. I'm grateful to have worked with such a dedicated and pleasant group of people.