EPA Victoria

App Discovery and Design Sprints
Project time - 6 Weeks

My Role

• Explore and define the design challenge
• Map out a basic audience journey
• Sketch solutions and create a consolidated design concept
• Build a prototype of part of the audience journey
• Conduct 1-on-1 audience interviews to test the prototype
• Review and share learnings from the audience 

Background

The Delivery of fit for purpose data and information about the Victorian environment is critical for EPA to be seen as a trusted science based regulator.  We were tasked to discover how the community wish to use and view EPA environmental information to support their daily life. We also identified common objectives across the organisation and developed a set of guiding principles for communicating environmental information.

The Challenge

EPA creates and shares highly trusted and scientific environmental information to the community. However, many Victorians do not understand the information nor see the relevancy of it in their daily lives. We were tasked in creating a business case for the implementation of a platform agnostic product view and the environmental monitoring data and replace the current AirWatch website. First we needed to validate whether this would be a scientific research tool or a public facing information tool.

Interviewing stakeholders

We consulted eight different EPA program leads across the Applied Sciences Directorate to explore goals, objectives and desired future system capabilities. This was synthesised into five key themes and objectives. Those consulted were:

• Applied science
• Environmental public health surveillance
• Programs quality & operations - Airwatch
• Environmental monitoring
• Quality & operations
• Recreational water quality - Citizen science
• Yarra Bay beach report
• Edison (internal data API)

Focus groups

After the stakeholder interviews we went out recruited customers and held two customer design workshops to:
• Identify audience segments
• Understand audience needs
• Identify key themes & insights to inform development

Customer Journey

The workshop spanned two hours where we asked the attendees to review current tools which they where asked ahead of time to review. We then moved on to co-create a journey map by setting the context, what goals they we're attempting to achieve, what information would be valuable and what outcomes could be achieved. Those located in the lowest socioeconomic areas had the highest need for the information and found the greatest difficulty understanding it.

Workshop agenda

Customer Journey

"There was just so many graphs… It was all just too much to understand what was going on and find information that concerns me"

Three Audience Segments Defined

Personas

Guiding Principles

We identified six guiding principles which the solution should adhere to:

1. Simple then scientific
2. Relevant and localised
3. Available on the go
4. Proactive in communication
5. Trusted and unbiased
6. Actionable to empower the community

Sketching ideas

A sketch workshop was held with the EPA and IE team to achieve the following: test reception towards new features, and clarify what our guiding principles really mean.

Most Sketched Ideas

The primary features identified during sketching were as follow:

Creating the Prototype

User Testing

We tested 6 participants over the course of the day. Our focus was to validate how users interacted with and felt about: 

• Three levels of of information - which was   digestible
• What do certain labels actually mean e.g ‘Fair’ is it ambiguous and difficult to understand?
• Have we simplified the science enough?
• Is the information relevant and localised?
• Is geo-location more relevent?
• Preferences - do they want to tailor what  notifications they were recieving?
• User generated content
• Health messages

Insights

Alerts and push notifications
Alerts and push notifications are still seen as one of the most valued features to be prepared. Many participants were already familiar with CFA, Vic Emergency and Aus Emergency apps.

Quick report
This solution allows a user to quickly respond to pollution as it’s happening by quickly opening the camera in one click, or by clicking ‘make a report’ to go through the detailed process.

Make a report
Most participants were open to supplying health-related information, such as symptoms to EPA. They also said that if an anonymous option was available they might be more likely to report.

User generated content
This tested well with participants as they felt they could have an immediate impact supporting their local environment.

Mitigating risk & data collection points
Showing the nearby sensor allows users to better understand the accuracy of the data.

Health message
The health messages should clearly communicate associated health risks. Ambiguous wording when exposed to caution and risk pollution should be avoided.

Final Clickable Prototype