Empowering Rural Communities
Enhancing Water Communication in Ghana | HCDE @ UW Capstone Project
76% of households in Ghana are at risk for drinking contaminated water. My capstone team, in partnership with PATH and Cova, aimed to increase transparency and empower communities to make educated decisions about water. To accomplish this, we developed a suite of signage and an educational “build your own sign” kit. I focused on the iconography to increase the accessibility of our designs.
Role
Client Liaison
Key Skills
Iconography
Timeline
15 weeks
Background
In rural Ghana, a community may have 1-3 public sources of water where people can fetch their household’s water.
For my capstone project, I worked with a group of 4 on signage standards for communicating about safe water. This project was sponsored by PATH, whose brief helped us develop our original design question of “How might we design communication strategies to help water quality facilitators in Central America and Africa convey information about water quality?” We started with secondary research; our takeaways are as follows.
In Ghana, women are generally responsible for fetching water. However, they tend to be less involved in water management.
Women & Water
Studies in Kenya and Portland found that a long-term multi-modal approach to communications is important for building trust in the water.
Communication
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines 4 categories of contaminants and provides a framework for defining acceptable values for specific geographic areas.
Regulation
User Research
We conducted 2 focus group interviews with water quality facilitators in Ghana and Honduras. Our most important findings are as follows:
“There are often, particularly older, adults... who say things like “I've never gotten sick. This water flows straight out of this spring in the mountain. It's not contaminated. We don't have to worry about it…” [They are] people with seniority in the community. The rest of the community often kind of follow suit and follow their leadership.”
There tends to be a lack of willingness to change, especially amongst older generations.
“They see the results and it's easier that way because people usually want to believe what they've seen with their eyes. And it's easier for them to relay to their friends and family when they do go back.”
Currently, community members attend water board meetings where water testing is done. Other communication methods, such as word of mouth, radio or posters, relay what was shared during those meetings.
“We are even intentional to leave the [water samples that were tested on] with community members. We don't take those samples. Just so they know that the sample was kept with them, it wasn't interfered with.”
Facilitators, who work for NGOs, discussed the lack of trust that community members feel around NGOs. One facilitator explained that conducting testing at community meetings is a way they aim to combat this.
Problem Re-definition
Our original design question was more focused on standardizing how water communication was handled, but with the research we had done, we realized this was much too simplistic and likely ineffective. The lack of trust and generational lack of change was a sign that we needed to think about longer term solutions. We also wanted to consider solutions that would require less involvement from NGOs.
How might we design tools to inform people in rural communities in Ghana about water contamination risks?
Ideation
We met as a team to do some brainstorming and then independently developed some of these ideas into low fidelity prototypes. My idea focused on utilizing label paper to create stickers that facilitators could use to quickly update communities on water testing.
We ended up taking a few pieces of these prototypes and combining them for a “build your own sign” educational kit with a suite of new water quality signage. The goal is to teach community members about water, how to interpret signage and how to treat and transport their water. The kit walks through creating a sign for water quality testing at a water source.
User Testing
We tested our designs with a few groups of PATH employees, both in Uganda and in Seattle. In-person testing included simulating the educational activity so that the testers could get a sense of how it would play out. The following are the biggest takeaways from our testing:
The prototype concept was confusing for testers at first, but when explained, they generally felt it would be effective. Testers especially thought the educational program could be helpful with children.
Initial Confusion
The signs have areas for checkmarks and strike-throughs, text and icons. Many participants found it difficult to identify these areas or to understand what was supposed to be filled in.
Filling In Blanks
The icons for bacterial, chemical and radiological contaminants were easily identified. The other icons, including usability ratings, were sometimes confusing and we discussed ways to make them more obvious.
Iconography
Iteration & Iconography
With this feedback, we started working on some iterations. I was mainly responsible for iconography.
Initial Icons
These are the icons we were using at first. The large ones I designed and the small ones were pulled from online resources.
Second Iteration
Feedback focused on how the icons could tell a story. For example, the agriculture icon was changed from just a sprinkler to a plant being watered to better show what the use case. The smaller icons generally remained the same, but I did new versions of each icon to ensure they all stylistically matched.
Final Icons
We had an additional round of feedback with stakeholders and advisors (more info below), which resulted in some reprioritization of the icons and a small change to the large “No Drinking” icon.
Feedback
After our first round of iteration, we received additional feedback from our teaching team, sponsors and advisors. A key point we discussed is how our original signage emphasized levels of water quality. In the US and other rich countries, we’d likely not accept water that is not drinkable. Some research has shown that non-drinkable water, when brought into the home, increases the risk for contamination. It’s important to hold water to the same standard in every part of the world. We ended up reframing the recommendation to focus specifically on drinkability (see above icons). We still provide a further breakdown of the water quality for transparency, as well as incorporating further guidelines for transportation and storage.
Final Signage
Our final signage includes a medium size and larger sign. Both use magnets for the icons to make the signs easy to edit. The medium size sign (seen below) would be posted at any water sources in the community and the larger sign would go at a community center to provide an overview.
Final Education Kit
Our education program kit includes an instruction booklet, signs, informational handouts, and stickers for each participant. These materials are relatively cheap and accessible, and anybody with a printer could make their own kit. View the full kit here.
Next Steps
In user testing and feedback, we received positive feedback about our design work, which we hope indicates that the teams at PATH and Cova will implement them. In that case, we’d recommend further work as to the following:
We were not able to conduct as much user research as we wanted to and we’d recommend additional research to ensure our results can be replicated.
Primary Research
The feedback in regards to iconography was limited, so we would recommend further rounds of user testing to ensure the icons are easily identifiable.
Iconography
We believe that our ideas would work across rural Africa and Central America, but that further work would ensure it’s relevance to every community.
Localization
Reflection
Having a team to lean on when making a big pivot was very helpful.
We already felt behind going into user research and the idea of having to redefine our problem space was scary. Being able to discuss these concerns with my teammates was critical. It was great to have 4 brains working on new solutions and to have the encouragement and support when things seemed out of reach.
