Waterfoil

The Rite of Hand Purification

Waterfoil is a ritualistic wash basin for public spaces such as restaurants, galleries, and resorts. Hiro, the industrial designer was inspired by the Japanese culture of  Chōzu  and attempted to create a unique and automatic hand-wash product.

Project Responsibility

Working with the designer, my responsibility is to create the user experience that deliver the sense of Chōzu. This required several tasks:

1. User study—understand how people wash hands.

2. Define hand-wash sequence and design user attention system.

3. Conduct user testing and help to refine the experience.

Take a Secret Look

The challenge about researching on washing hands is that it is a semi-autonomous behavior happening in a private space. I used video observation to avoid users’ statements of “front-stage behaviors”(E. Goffman, 1956) and to focus on the actual actions and the time required.

Here is what I found: in 195 observed cases, only 1/3 of them used soap. 2/3 of people spent around 5 seconds washing their hands before drying, in contrary to what WHO recommended a 40 seconds hand-wash procedure.

In conclusion, time is an important factor of hand-wash and a baseline for us to design the experience. It should be short enough to keep users’ engagement but long enough to achieve effective hygiene.

Trapped in Time

To notify users how much time required for each step of washing hand, we used LED array as the visual clue. However, the result of user testing is disappointing. Most interviewees had trouble to complete the procedure without instruction and those who had been briefed beforehand also took two or three attempts to complete.

There were several key findings of why users were rather confused than informed:

1. Users were constantly distracted by the automation and not sure what to do next.

2. Users weren’t aware of which step it is at the moment.

3. Most importantly, users didn’t understand the LED array was trying to indicate the remaining time.

In conclusion, the confusion comes from when a person is using a novel product for the first time, he/she often misinterprets the overwhelming numbers of clues.

Iteration and Improvement

Since our targeted users are people in public or commercial spaces, eliminating the difficulty of learning to use the washing station is very important.

To minimize the distractions, I decided to only inform users what is the current stage of the automatic procedure. I used 3 states of LED light: off, on, and blinking to indicate the function is off, on, and about to occur.

After several user testing on icons and LED blinking sequence, here is the final result.