Design and Research
Spring 2022
Frustration Free composting
Helping Ann Arbor residents take advantage of free composting services
The City of Ann Arbor provides composting to its residents in a couple of ways; through bins that can be placed on the street and picked up with your trash collection or by dropping it off directly to the facility.
What could be so confusing about dropping off compost?
In order to drop off compost, residents must drive through gates at the entrance, onto a scale to get the weight of their car, drive through the complex to the compost pile, and check in with a compost site employee to drop off their waste.
However facility employees noticed many residents would arrive with only a couple small bags of compost and drive past the scale, This would mean that to do the right thing they would have to drive half a mile back to the scale, navigate the weighing process, and return to the compost center hoping they had done what was needed. For those who are short on time, have a language barrier, or were simply scared by the commercial scale, a seemingly quick task became too daunting to complete or even do again.
Why is the scale so spooky? Well if you were a resident in your small sedan and arrived to the facility and were presented with this, you might go around the scale too, even if you knew you had to weigh in.
Some people are brave enough to get onto the scale
For some people who knew they needed to get onto the scale and get a tare weight, they were met with another task not designed for the ordinary person – getting a ticket for your tare weight. Residents pull up the to screen and are hit with a wave of information not for them, a giant camera watching you, and a screen that isn’t a touch screen. If a resident sticks around long enough to read the content they might see what I’ve highlighted in blue, the instructions meant for residential drop-off
What can we do to make this experience more friendly to the general public, while not making it more difficult for the employees who have to use the scale everyday?
Effective way-finding
Interviews showed participants had a difficult time finding and reading signs due to their locations closer to the road. Moving signage closer to the scale would give residents a better opportunity to read directions meant for them.
8/10 participants didn’t noticed the informational signage on the first attempt of driving to the scale.
Painting directional lines
Currently, the significant lack of signage caused participants to be unsure of where to go upon entering the gates. Additional direction by painting lines and adding targeted signage would encourage the residents to drive onto the scale, mimicking the expectation of traditional road directions that are familiar to residents.
On-screen instructions
Implementing photos for each material options makes the selection process clearer and more accessible allowing residents of different abilities to utilize the kiosk.
Kiosk usage is 1 min faster when using the simplified prototype vs the original in user testing.
Reduce stimulation to direct attention
Resident interactions with the scale were both confusing and time consuming. Two problems that can solved with a simplified kiosk interface. By reducing the amount of text and directing attention to the screen, kiosk interaction time was reduced from 1:58 to 52 seconds on average.
The average time it took to read the instructional labels was 1:19, if you were to read them all.
The “help button” log and additional research
The “call for help” button on the scale was used often and connected the scale user to the department of public works office just around the corner. The department kept a log of all the calls that came in and their reason, we used this log to inform the direction of our research.
Our research couldn’t be conducted on site easily so we did guided interviews with 10 residents of Ann Arbor of different ages. We had videos recorded of the process and would ask them to virtually place themselves in the environment and see how they would move about and interact with the scale and its screen. While this data isn’t the most accurate from an intent and experience perspective, we compared it with the call log to verify these experiences we saw in testing were real experiences residents were calling in about.
This call log could be used as an indicator of the success of the UX suggestions. If calls decrease and compost drop offs remain the same or increase, we can begin to assume the improvements are just that, improvements to the experience.