Jal: Decentralised water delivery application
Project Goal
This was a pet project, aimed at understanding designing for blockchain based applications. By undertaking the problem of drinking water supply covered in an article from 2015 as the starting point. Creating an application that ensures, accountability of all the parties involved right from the beginning and giving the end consumer a quality of water they can trust.
Customer & end users
Borewell owners, private bottling manufacturers, local retailer and customers ordering water cans through app.
Methodology
To create an application which ensures water quality right from the start can only begin with ethical practices from the people involved in it and a steady intervention from the health corporation.
The process started with outlining the as-is journey and circling out main parties to be held accountable.
Where certain consequences (law intervention) for certain actions were determined.
For eg : Standardising volumes of water to be pulled out from the bore well, maintaining recommended chlorination, updated shelf life of bubble-top containers before being delivered to end user.
All with the help of IOT sensors deployed at various stages.
Four personas were created, out of which I focused on the private bottling manufacturer and end-user. This then determined the interface designing, how should the buttons be placed, how will the app guide the manufacturer in uploading his product on the distributed ledger, information display, confirmation feedback to securely upload and avoid any mistakes respectively.
For the end user, once she scans the product. What to be displayed above the fold, below the fold and in the information section. In decreasing order of importance.
Success Metrics
Accountability, visibility of transactions to all parties and quality assurance straight from the source.
Individual contribution
Conceptualisation, UX and visual design.
Team
Solo
Journey map
Covering the ideal journey of water right from the time it is extracted to the time it reaches the consumer. With constant updates about the pH levels, shelf life and location of the moving package onto the distributed ledger
between the approved parties.
Wireframing
Creating rough wireframes and a screen flow helped me figure out which user flows can I finalise upon. Out of the four user types I decided to create 'manufacturer flow' and 'consumer flow'.
Final output
The manufacturer side of the application is more focused on letting him put his product onto the blockchain and the consumer side of the screens focus more on letting the consumer know the product info and its shelf life.
