Clean Helper

Problem Statement

There are many forests and lakes in Finland which make residents enjoy pure and fresh air. Nowadays there are a lot of rubbish in forests and wild parks of Tampere,Finland.In order to make people pay more attention to environment issue.We came up with a planned system which gives people the opportunity to change the situation and write feedback about the places, where rubbish appears.

 

Project Goals

• Designing an app for Tampere residents reporting their environment issue.
• Making the forest become clean and fresh.

 

Research methods

In this project, we use three method to collect data.First is interview,the goal of the interview is to ask people more general questions about the rubbish situation in Tampere forests , wild parks and their personal attitude to the problem. Second is observation ,the goal of the observation is to investigate the context, when people throw rubbish away - is there any trash bins near the place of action, if yes, are they full or empty, what conditions make people act like this. Third is questionnaire,the goal of the questionnaire is to identify the intention of using the planned system.

 

Research findings

The data of interviews  are categorized under theme. We have analysed the answers and found the related theme of them.Therefore, the findings are the following:

 

 

 

The interviewees are young (20~25 years old) and spend in Tampere more than a year. They find the environmental situation almost clean in the deep forest, and dirty at the beginning of the trail path and in the wild parks, so they note that some beer cans and cigarette-leftovers can be found there. The interviewees take a walk in the forest several times a month, but every time they do it, they see some rubbish. The interviewees take a walk in the forests or wild parks to relax, have some authentic experience, enjoy the sightseeing, spend their free time, or walk a dog. The interviewees feel bad or sad when seeing some rubbish around the forest but they wouldn’t want to pick up other’s rubbish. As their own experience, they have never thrown rubbish away in the forest or wild park, except the bio-waste.

As for the improvement of the current situation, the respondents mentioned setting some signs (like “do not pollute forest”) and more trash cans, improve the situation with the accessibility of recycling procedure.
As for the idea of the feedback application on the problem of forest pollution, the respondents suggest adding the function of giving the feedback on the mentioned problem to the municipality and marking the location of trash found.

The main result that can influence the future system design: such functions as writing to the municipality directly and marking the location of the trash found and full trash bins can be really added to the system. The interviewees confirm the need of functions, that were marked as planned at the research plan.

Speaking of observation,the observations helped to identify the current problem of Tampere forests and wild parks: there is not enough trash bins, so people throw rubbish away, mostly in the popular places. The trash bins were empty, so they are cleaned in a proper way, but in some cases, it is hard to see or find the nearest bin, this may lead to the act of throwing rubbish away on the ground. The observers noticed that it is hard to notice the action of throwing rubbish away because people do it while nobody sees them. As for observers, they found that it is unpleasant to pick up the rubbish which was thrown by someone unknown. The popular places are polluted more than the deep forest.

After, collecting data from interview and observation, we deduct two direction which Finnish would need in the planned system:

• Reporting feedback: They would like to report the environment situation they saw in the forest.
• Controlling the status of the report: After they report the feedback, they would like to check the  status of their report.(delivered / in progress / decision made )

We did a questionnaire to check the intention of using our planned system and the function they want.The main facts that can be concluded after holding the questionnaire are following: the most part of the respondents see rubbish in the forests and wild parks of Tampere while walking, the most of them have never throw rubbish away, but only the half would pick up rubbish. The questionnaire analyses proves the fact that Finnish people who live in Tampere need the planned feedback system with the functionality of sending the photo and location, controlling the status of the complaint on the problem of throwing rubbish away.

 

Conceptual model

In the first case, it is necessary to take a photo of the rubbished place, mark the location of the place where rubbish was found, then he or she can write some comments about the situation and finish the feedback by sending button. In the second case, the user writes the probable observations, notes or recommendations (do the trash cans are full or empty in the forest or wild park now, is there a lot of trash or not, is there a lot of trash cans or not), and ask some questions about the environmental situation. Both chat and the feedback form go to the municipality. The municipality processes the complaint and chat letter and decide what to do, send a response to the user. After the responding, the status is changed (decision made), the user can see it in the system.

 

Wirframe

We only depicted main functions of wireframe in this part.The following wireframes are Peraonal page,Feedback page,Chat page and Status page.

Prototype

This is our prototype video.

 

 

Way forward

This project is to design a planned system for UX course,so we didn’t get through the test process.The prototype needs to be tested with the target segment or related people for discovering errors and possible improvements in usability and interaction.