A Toolkit for the Modern User's Ecosystem
Get people interested in their impact on the environment through visuals and comparisons, then spur action to reduce that impact by creating an energy information hub.
At the time of the performance of contextual inquiry, we had a preliminary name for the application and a completely different concept than we ultimately pursued.
View Raw Data View Script and Consent Form View Task Analysis View Task DescriptionsMuch has been said about the benefits of living "greener," but few people take significant action in that direction. This open problem is the inspiration behind our app, which is intended to help people increase their awareness about their resource usage and motivate change. The space contains some companies working on similar challenges, like OroEco, which we discovered in the early stages of our research. OroEco asks consumers to track and categorize all of their expenditures, allowing the app to estimate generated carbon dioxide from the user's purchases and direct action. Unfortunately, this approach encroaches on users' privacy, is tremendously labor-intensive for both the consumer and the company, and ultimately still produces no more than a rough estimate. Therefore, based on what we learned from their product, our team decided to take a more streamlined and holistic approach: our app will let people form a broad and intuitive understanding of their resource usage rather than overtracking metrics without much intuitive basis, like the average carbon footprint of a calorie (3.0 g CO2, according to OroEco).
Our team believes that one of the fundamental causes of wasteful and resource-inefficient behavior is users' general lack of context for thinking about resource usage. People rarely see comparisons between their own usage and others', which prevents them from making information-driven behavioral changes. Most people aren't even told where their electricity, water, and gas come from: the tendency for resources to be commoditized rather than visualized prevents consumers from seeing the bigger picture of how wide a web personal actions can cast.
Our solution: create that image and show users where their resources come from, inspiring increased interest in their environmental footprint. After piquing their curiosity, our app will offer layers of features that encourage behavior change, such as a hub for all of their personal energy information, and side-by-side comparisons to other app-users in the region to bring out competitive impulses. Additionally, this app would be ideally situated to offer extra services, such as listing all utilities options in one place, gathering information about particular details of each utility provider, allowing users to compare similar providers, and letting an individual compare their personal progress toward resource reduction month over month or year over year.
Our team investigated how such an app might function in the day-to-day lives of real people through the process of contextual inquiry, in which we employed the master-apprentice model to learn about how people interacted with their utility providers. To learn about their usage process, we asked questions designed to walk through their everyday habits without them directly what the app is intended to do. Do they track anything else in their lives, such as calories or time spent stuck in traffic? When considering their energy bills, what do they look at? How much do they know about where their resources come from or where they go? What would motivate them to use fewer resources or to switch to a more eco-friendly provider, if options are available?
We sampled a cross-section of people in the vicinity, including homeowners, renters, and students. Our interviewees included a middle-aged couple, a twenty-something PhD student in Electrical Engineering, a recent Stanford grad, a current Stanford student, and even an OroEco employee. As one might expect based on their varied experiences and demographic profiles, the responses varied greatly. Most of their habits naturally seemed to depend on how tight the interviewees thought their resources were. For example, a Stanford student who had grown up in arid New Mexico was accustomed to depending on a well on her family's property for water, so she was clearly very resource-conscious. Similarly, the middle-aged couple had a very strong environmental conscience, and therefore they were more cognizant of their environmental footprint than the general population. A grad student who paid a flat monthly for her utilities made fewer efforts to moderate her usage.
The interviewee from New Mexico is a currently pursuing a degree in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Her home in New Mexico is in a neighborhood where there are no lawns, although some people have trees. Because her family's water comes from a domestic well, which does not naturally recharge, there are finite restrictions on the amount of water available, which has helped shape her habit of taking short showers. This contextual inquiry interview took place in her bedroom in a house on Campus Drive. Guided by the master-apprentice model, the subject walked Megan through various aspects of her daily routine in her room. It became apparent that, in addition to being hyperconscious about water usage, she also dislikes using excessive lighting. She eschews the overhead light built into her room for a small desk lamp with a compact fluorescent bulb. Although she uses indoor light fixtures sparingly, she charges her phone and laptop regularly, and she depends on electricity to keep appliances such as her fridge, printer, and microwave running.
We also talked to a PhD student in Electrical Engineering, who overall seemed very uninterested in the idea of monitoring or changing his resource usage. He had previously lived in multiple rented apartments, and in each case had split all bills (rent and utilities) with roommates. He said they would check the cost of various bills the first month, and after that make sure it didn't deviate too far. In general, his philosophy toward resource use is to use only and exactly what he needs -- so any reductions would be a noticeably impingement on his time. As he put it, "there are easier ways to save money". Still, he expressed interest in knowing where exactly his resources came from and in having information about all of his bills in one place.
We also spoke to an employee of the company that is implementing the individual-expenditures model of impact tracking, Oroeco. He's also a professor at Stanford. Because he clearly cares very much about his impact and the impact of people in general, he was already aware of where his water and electricity came from and very conscious with his use of resources. Regarding his own company, he noted that Oroeco's version of resource awareness is time and effort intensive, on both the side of the service and the users: they have to trust the company enough to input all their expenses, and also believe in the algorithms that estimate impact. He felt that it could possibly be ahead of its time, but it's still a project he wants to be a part of and hopes will catch on.
Our third subject, a middle-aged couple visiting California, expressed interest in visualizing their energy data but not in actively tracking and minimizing it. They have paid their utility bills for over two decades together, but do not look closely at their usage as long as "the costs don't change drastically." In following the master-apprentice model, we asked them to walk us step-by-step in how they completed the task of paying their electricity bill. Our findings were that they generally glanced at the dollar amount but did not take subsequent actions to understand how much power or water was consumed. They said they were curious to see where their resources came from on a map and maybe enter some bill information, but would not track expenses and usage in the Oroeco model.
Among our subjects, an overall consensus on two points emerged: (1) tracking information is a hassle, but (2) having information available is nice. These conclusions helped shape our team's design for an app which provides broad information about utilities but does not track resource usage on a granular scale.