About the project

Implemented a user-centered design process for the development of a decision support tool, conducting research, analysis, design, testing, and implementation stages, while incorporating best practices for such tools and addressing common problems, resulting in increased stakeholder buy-in, better understanding of user needs, and efficient collaboration among stakeholders.

Common problems in decision support tools:

• Excess complexity built into these tools overwhelm even the expert user
• Excessive number of  variables may hinder usability
• Only some studies do incorporate stakeholders in the design and development stages

Key goals of decision support tools:

• Gain insight into the nature of the planning object
• Learn about other stakeholders
• Increase collaboration among stakeholders
• Share information and knowledge among various stakeholder better
• Find agreement on key problems and best solutions
• Perform key tasks more efficiently
• Make better informed plans or decisions

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Impact

Involving users in the early stages of the product development had a number of positive impacts such as:

1. Better understanding of user needs: user research helped us identify the needs and frustrations of ‘trilateral’ group who would be using this Decision Support tool.
2. Increased stakeholder buy-in: if the stakeholders feel that their concerns,needs and frustrations are taken into consideration, they are more likely to provide more feedback and answer questions that might arise throughout theproject.
3. Iterate and validate designs: testing and validating designs early on with the users increased the chance of getting the design right and saved time and cost later at the development stage.

This project is still in early stages of development. Further testing of the working version will allow us to understand the users and the context in which this tool would be used even better.

If we are successful and can create an effective decision support tool for evidence-led water neutral place making, it can have a number of positive impacts:

• Improve water management
• Reduce water consumption
• Save costs
• Enhance resilience to climate change
• Reduce pollution

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Lessons learned

The primary obstacle in this project was fostering efficient communication among user researchers, scientists, and developers. During various phases of the project, conflicts arose regarding the prioritisation of features in the minimum viable product. To resolve these disputes, we consistently reminded ourselves of the needs of the key users and the issues they were attempting to address. Our goal was to enhance collaboration among the “trilateral” group and to enable them to make data-driven decisions without adjusting the mathematical models supporting this tool. Ideas that did not align with these objective were de-prioritized.