Jiaqi Wu | UI/UX Designer
UTILITI
ABOUT THE PROJECT
Utiliti is a student project that is done in 2 months with a team of 3. Its object is to help people avoid the horrible situation of having an unbearable bill when their houses have suffered water issues like broken pipes.
MY ROLE
Researcher, UI/UX designer
PROJECT BACKGROUND
The ideation of this project actually started from my own personal experience. At the end of my first year in the US, a pipe went broken unnoticed for almost two months in the basement of my rented house. My roommates and I received a huge bill that set us in a horrible situation. Through research, we found that this kind of situation is not rare at all. After talking to my teammates, we decided to develop a product that can help people avoid this kind of situation.
RESEARCH METHODS
Online Survey
In the initial stage, we just wanted to touch base and get the general information about these victims and incidents. The online survey is a perfect research method in this phase because it's ability to get clear information in a short period of time. We developed an online survey to send to almost everyone we know, and we got 37 responses in total. Our initial goal for this survey was to get a general idea of:
-
How many percentage of people have suffered the water issues
-
What was causing the water issues
-
Do people have a general sense to intentionally prevent such thing from happening
-
To get people's contact information for follow-up interviews
 |  |
|---|
Face to Face Interview
After had a general understanding of the water leaking accident, it is a good time for us to dig deeper into the details of each individual event and find out the similarities and differences. And an in-person interview is a perfect way to get to that. We developed a set of questions beforehand for the interviewers.
Based on our last online survey, we found 6 interviewees who have had the problem and were willing to talk to us, we conducted individual interviews with them. For the interview, we emphasised on their individual problems with the water. We asked questions about the details of the incident, what did they do to resolve the problem, and did they get any kind of help from anywhere. By talking to these people, we hope to find out the general common issues about the water problem and where in the link would possibly go wrong and what made the consequences exacerbate.
Make Tool Exercize
After we compiled our result from last two types of research, we were considering to make a product that can present to the user the general what's goings-on in his house and also alarm him while things go wrong. To better understand users' need, we conducted a make tool exercise. We got 40 participants, each of them was first asked to draw a dashboard on his car and explain what data he need from the dashboard, then they were asked to draw a dashboard for their home and explain what do they want to have on this dashboard. By doing so, we hope to understand our users' needs more and what they expect from our product.
RESEARCH INSIGHTS
After analyzed all the date we gathered from research, we did a concept map of how a water incident would happen typically. By doing so, we hope to understand more about which link could possibly go wrong and what position should our product be to really alleviate the situation. And it turned out that the time matters. Normally when the accident was noticed earlier, people would suffer a lot less than people who were under the situation that the accident went on for a long time without being noticed. And also, another big problem is that people don't really look at the water meter--in fact, most of them don't even know where the water meter is. After considered all these, we think that our product should really target on these two points and make it much easier for our user to check on their current water status and also really try to catch the problem in the early stage to avoid the problem from worsening over time.
Insurance
We found that insurance would be the perfect fit for our product because it provides our users an extra protection in case the unpleasant surprise happens.
OUR SOLUTION
Regular Newsletter
Through research, we found that users would appear anxious if provided the ability to check their bills at any time. to avoid this kind of situation, we decided to use email instead of app to send users notification and updates. They can decide how often they want to hear from us.
Alarm System
We use multiple sensors to protect users' house and catch unusual signal immediately. Once we have detected suspicious situation, we send different levels of alarm notification to our users and give relative instructions.
Video was done by Tyler Porten
NEWLETTER TEMPLATE DESIGN
There are five different kinds of email newsletters. And all of them have similar structure and share a lot of visual elements.
Weekly update newsletter
This newsletter means to send users updates to help them keep track of their current bill. We would have an estimated number of this month's bill to give users a sense of how are they doing.
Users are able to customize on how often they receive this email.
Monthly bill newsletter
Most of the utilities are billed monthly. Thus, we hope to update our users with their monthly bill through monthly bill newsletter.
Repair notification
Through research, we found out there are a lot of incidents happen at a time where homeowners are away from their house hence unable to react. Under this kind of circumstances, UTILITI would send the handyman directly to users' house and they will get notified by this newsletter.
Follow up notification
After we have solved the issues in users' house, they would get this newsletter.
Unusual situation notification
Compared to the urgent situation in newsletter 2, this newsletter is designed for when the event is controllable or still in the early stage. We would remind the users to check the possible problematic spots and have a list of recommended experts that they can tend to.
