Aqua Care

A public kiosk providing virtual care to the houseless.

Team: Isabelle Marsh, Hanan Dogar, Pranav Mudiam, Cher Phakhasetthakarn, Manaal Joyo

Discipline: UX Research, Human Centered Design, Design Thinking

Duration: Aug 21’ - Dec 21’

Tools: Figma, Mural, UX Research Methods, Affinity Mapping

My Role

Over the duration of a few months, I:

  • Conducted 2 extensive user interviews

  • led affinity mapping sprints to find pain points

  • organized and led my peers in meetings

  • produced 1 physical prototpe

  • conducted user testing and iterated the design

Purpose

This project was the sole focus of UC Berkeley Haas School of Business’ course "Innovation and Design Thinking in Business" which is a course introduces students to the tools and practices of design thinking and the innovation process. Students work collaboratively in small teams to identify, understand, and then solve complex sustainability problems. We learned:

• user-centered research
• deep customer insight
• broad divergent ideation
• disciplined decision-making
• skillful prototyping
• hypothesis-driven experimenting
• inspired innovation storytelling
• authentic collaboration



Problem Space

MaryAnn is an elderly woman who has been homeless for 30 years now. Attaining water is a daily struggle for her. She either begs for money or goes to the few water fountains that are available around the city.



Background


Challenge

How might we tackle the cycle of water inaccessibility for the homeless in Berkeley?



User Research

To get a better understanding of the issue, our team split up and conducted 10 ethnographic interviews with a diverse group of houseless people around Berkeley. The following are some of the important quotes we collected:

Photo from one of my interviews in People’s Park, near UC Berkeley Campus.

Affinity Mapping

Each member wrote down all the data points we could extract from the research on sticky notes, and we organized them into clusters to visualize which issues were more prevalent. The themes we identified were:

  1. People jump to conclusions about the houseless

  2. The houseless resort to other sources for water, such as dirty creeks

  3. An average day in the life of a houseless person


Key Insights

After individually brainstorming 20 key insights from our interviews, our team consolidated them into 3 strong points.

Personas

Once we conducted interviews and identified patterns we saw from the data, we defined two user personas and mapped them to their respective needs.

Credit: Isabelle Marsh

Solution Ideation

After extracting key insights from our research and thoroughly understanding the problem, we began to ideate solutions.

My team and I conducted several ideation sprints, in which we utilized various methods to formulate a list of 100 possibilities. This was the diverging portion of the sprint.

Initial Solutions:

Using dot voting to determine which solution would address our problem statement, we came up with a two part solution surrounding (1) access and (2) communication.

  1. Digital Kiosk

    • Accommodate individuals who do not have cell phones

    • Bulletin boards that specify where clean, free drinking water can be found

  2. Solar-Powered Water Fountains

    • Purify ground water

    • Installed at bus stops, bart stations, and areas where large groups of homeless people reside. 

Prototyping

We then used recycled materials to build different versions of our initial prototypes.

My prototypes: top left and the one to its right


User Feedback

After going back into the field and attaining user feedback from the homeless population in Berkeley, as well as discussing with our peers, we adjusted our initial solution.

Feedback from Peers

  • Feasibility of solution

  • Funding of product

  • Maintenance of bulletin board

  • Cost of sustainable water fountain

Feedback from Users

  • Oftentimes, houseless people don’t have the mental wherewithal to interact with a complex interface

  • Kiosk should be as simple as possible

  • Kiosk itself should be very sturdy to prevent potential damage

Final Solution:

After considering the feedback, we decided to cut out the solar powered water fountains and instead focus solely on the digital kiosk because it:

  • Removes significant costs

  • Is more efficient as existing water infrastructure will be better allocated. 

  • Focuses on access to existing resources available for them.

The Digital Kiosk will include:

  • Interactive Map with directions and list of resources to homeless shelters

  • Reservations for shower

  • Awareness Campaign on water insecurity

  • Onsite Wi-Fi + outlets to charge phones

  • ability to call shelter or help

The interface of the kiosk was intentionally made to be very simple and straight forward considering that the users may not be equipped to interact with complicated technology (especially for the ones facing mental illness). It addresses the issue of lack of accessibility, and connects the houseless population with the resources that are available to them.

Final Project Presentation Board:

As our final project, my team and I presented our design process and solution at a design show case and won 3rd place out of 15 teams!

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