In India, water is provided to households in scheduled intervals. Most stand-alone homes use an underground sump tank to collect the government supplied water and pump that water into rooftop overhead tanks. This process is inefficient and involves uncertainties which cause inconvenience to residents.

The expectation of the Capstone project was to conduct research to identify the problem and develop a concept solution to address the problem.

Coming from a household with similar water setup and having experienced the problem first hand, I believed the solution was to automate the water-pump so that people didn't have to remember when to switch off the water pump.

In order to validate our hypothesis, we spoke to 5 Indian households. While I was fairly certain what the problem and solution were, I was still curious to validate my assumptions and hypothesis. My team and I conducted interviews & contextual inquiry with users in India remotely through a video call.

The research proved my hypothesis wrong. While people agreed that water waste occurs due to human errors, they did not occur as frequently as I initially believed. However, the research helped surface several other big issues that we were not aware of.

The insights from the research helped us create a journey map to get a closer understanding and visualize people's interaction with their water systems.

The research helped us identify 12 major user needs. In order to scope our solution, we created an online card-sorting test using Optimal Sort. From the data, we prioritized the top 6 user needs.

I created wireframes to accomplish five user tasks based off of the six prioritized user needs.

We tested the solution hypothesis with five people using the RITE method and these tests provided great insights and helped us iterate to make the app more intuitive.

We incorporated our findings from our low fidelity usability study and created a final, high fidelity prototype of the Pump It Up mobile app. We added information about the sump tank level, created a way to fill the overhead tank by percentage, and made some smaller, polish and color changes to bring the app together.

The diagram below explains how the app connects to the various touchpoints in the water management process in a typical home.

This project was a great opportunity for us to learn about a social issue and use Design Thinking to find a solution to the problem. I was very fortunate to work with a talented team of PMs and designers. I got to learn a lot about conducting research and pivoting at the right time.

The Pump It Up project won the Best Capstone Project Award that year during the Human-Centered Design & Engineering Capstone Showcase.