The goal that our design solution is aiming to solve is to increase recycling on campus, more specifically the UQ physio refectory, by leveraging data visualisation. To do this we designed, prototyped and tested a Bin Weight Sensor and Interactive Web App that would measure the weight of users waste and inform them of the correct bin that their items should go into.

Our design went through several iterations of the co the semester in response to the user testing that was conducted. A review of these iterations have been provided at the end of this page.

https://github.com/GabrielMcHugh/Garbinger

[Week 6]

[Week 7]

[Week 8 (Standup)]

[Week 9]

[Week 10 (Standup 2)]

[Week 11]

[Week 12 (Finished Product)]

The team of two was perfectly balanced with one designer and one developer. Raunaq Bahl led the visual and interaction design process by ideating the concept, refining the solution, designing wireframes, low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes of the solution, and conducting prototype evaluations. He led the think aloud sessions and the guerrilla user testing sessions.

Gabriel McHugh led the development process of the prototype by developing the front-end in React.js, connecting the front-end to a node.js server, and in-turn connecting it to the arduino and weight sensor. He co-led the think aloud sessions and the guerrilla user testing sessions.

Both the team members devoted an equal amount of effort to the design documentation process. Both of the team members maintained the project Kanban, and contributed equally to the final expo preparation.

By the end of Week 6, We had just finished our project proposal. Distilled from our preliminary research, which included conducting interviews with Dr Julia Loginova from the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences and the UQ Sustainability Team, we aimed to develop a bin on UQ campus that would display waste disposal information next to that would aid in students visualising their waste disposal habits.

Our foundation so far was developed through interviews with people familiar with our domain space and research done on similar waste management systems that involved data visualisation. For more specific information about the interviews, check out Week 6.

By Week 7, we had begun to narrow down on the project. We needed to start constructing a framework for our design and this meant investigating the different types of bins that were around campus. To that end, we planned how we're going to do this and created a survey to gather data with.

We began to think more about location dependence and research the bins around campus along with thinking about their contexts. By now, we were still unsure of what problem we were trying to solve, so we made the survey questions as broad as possible in order to brainstorm for the following:

This week, we also conducted some more research on problems around recycling. There seemed to a unique location-specific problem that was quite common:

This was an interesting direction to head in, and so we framed the last couple of questions of our survey around this issue, such as:

We were on to something here. We ourselves were quite often confused about what to put in which bin. This confusion only surfaced itself when we got to a bin and actually had to make a decision about recycling. This was further confirmed by our survey results from Week 8.

We thought of how we could incorporate bins into this process. So we investigated different bin contexts on campus and settled on the UQ refectory bins for our location-specific design.

This is when we honed in on our domain space, defining it better and limiting its scope.

Raun worked on the ideation of the prototype, thinking of personas, user flows and interaction scenarios to come up with a basic idea.

We finally chose to settle down with a tangible interface situated on top a garbage bin which people could interact with. The interface would be designed to help them navigate through the waste disposal process. We also thought about involving the waste collector as a stakeholder in the process.

This is where we also developed wireframes and some low fidelity mockups.

Gabriel set about implementing these designs. He researched and began implementing the hardware using an aruduino, and began developing the front end using react.

After feedback from last week, we refined the aim of our design to increase the amount of recycled waste relative to non-recycled waste. This addressed our design context better. More about the prototype design and development can be found in Week 9.

How our design evolved during week 9 and 10

We refined our goals further this week. We now were aiming to

Week 11 was the last week of coding for us but we still went through some significant development in our prototype and testing.

We finished implementing the hardware, frontend and linked it to the backend.

We got the node server to detect input.

We got some guerrilla user testing done. The results can be found below.

https://www.notion.so/37ba0490568a4d3baa2544d2cef89374?v=9eefb74c6d904190887d808724af8d6b

We also conducted two think aloud interviews, for which the results can be found below:

Testing has been discussed in depth in Week 11.

After our week 11 studio we tweaked the UI and flow of the main design, added some bins to the prototype and tested it one final time.

Key Findings

One of the main feedback received from the testing was that people didn't want to engage for that long or linger for that amount of time near the bin. They found the concept useful and engaging but wanted it to be faster.

The thing that people liked the most about the prototype was that it was actually educational for them since it takes the process of waste disposal and makes it engaging and interactive.

[1] UQ Waste Audit Report. UQ Sustainability Team. 2018.