UX Research

Construction Communication in New York City

Practical UX Ethnography
Project Overview
The Department of Design and Construction(DDC) is responsible building and improving public infrastructure and civic facilities in New York City. They wanted to know how they can better communicate with New York citizens about construction.
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We interviewed New Yorkers about their thoughts and feelings on construction, conducted diary studies with commuters and residents, and completed a co-design workshop to cast different perspectives in viewing construction sites.
My Contributions

UX Research       Ethnography Research       Diary Studies
Co-design workshop       Conceptual Design



Duration: Sept. 2022  – Dec. 2022
Team: Sharon, Stacy, Sagarika
What's the goal?
How can we better understand New Yorkers' needs?
With our research goals in mind, we used multiple research methodologies to not only verify the data we collected, but also deepen our knowledge in the subject when it comes to communication about construction(Triangulation):
Field Observations
Why did we choose to do field trips?
01. We chose to observe, and then converse in an attempt to understand a combination of:
· what they do
· what they say
· what they express
02. By speaking with the participants on site, we could further understand their backing for why they behave in a certain way.
What did we find on construction?
Our team observed a construction site on Front St. and York St.. We interviewed residents, business owners, police officer, commuters, and visitors about their thoughts on:
· Impressions of Construction: Did people have any standout positive or negative interactions with construction sites?
· Impacts brought by Construction: To what level did people's life been affected by construction sites?
· Willingness to change: How strong would people willing to change their daily life because of the construction sites and how?
· Construction Communications: Are people satisfied with the construction communication right now? How and What would be most helpful for them to know?
The attitudes of New York citizens toward construction sites are split into 4 directions: Confused, Annoyed, Worried, and Indifferent. They want to access information about construction through innovative platforms such as through mobile apps, email, websites, signs, or social media. We learned that the construction sites brought huge impacts to New Yorkers' life and work, they specifically want to know the duration of the construction, affected time and areas, and what should to be done when construction is going on.
“Sometimes when they use the saw, the noise is loud. I can’t hear what customer are talking about.”
“I hate the construction, it blocks traffic and causes street closures.”
Diary Studies
Why did we conduct dairy studies?
Based on the dairy studies, participants faced varied challenges passing through construction sites, such as the narrow space to allow everyone for passing during rush hours. Participants reacted negatively towards the blockage of the stores due to the construction fences and scaffolding, meanwhile they complained about inadequate time on planning for re-routes, as they weren't effective enough in redirecting traffic smoothly.

There are certain days participants feel indifferent on construction, since they wouldn’t be impacted once they walked past. However, residents turned annoyed and irritated when being impacted a lot but not able to get sufficient information about construction. Noise and disruptions to their daily routines are primary reasons for them to understand and expect to deal with negative effects of construction.

Method:
Workbook and had our participant fill in 5 days worth of data in a worksheet with emotion mapping, a reflective prompt through ‘show and tell’ and a projective prompt through ‘ideal affect’ thinking.

Process:
We recruited individuals who commute past or live by construction sites to gain a better understanding of how New Yorkers are affected by construction in their day-to-day lives.
Our participants completed diary studies where they described their interactions with construction, detailed and voiced out standout moments, used a sticker and emotional scale to represent their feelings, and came up with new perspectives to improve the situation in the end.
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01. Diary studies take place over time and offer insight into people’s 
day-to-day lives: we can understand their behavior longitudinally to observe patterns, attitudes and perception.
02. They’re researcher prompted and user generated: meaning the participants show us their experience in their own words.
What did we find on New Yorker's life being affected by the construction?
We utilized a matrix - affinity map to analyze our data by grouping observations, thoughts, feelings and drawing insights.

Co - Design Workshop

Co-design Workshop
Why do we need an "alien" research workshop?
01. By positioning the workshop participants as Aliens visiting Earth we hope to elicit thinking from a different perspective as a pedestrian who doesn’t speak the language that most signage is in.
02. This activity also helped us understand how language barriers and complex signage could affect communication with the public.
We asked participants to imagine themselves as an alien who arrived at the earth within 24 hours, having lots of questions on the city appearances, constructions and other related topics. After they jotted down the questions, workshop participants were asked to switch the roles from alien to earth citizens to answer the questions that being asked by "aliens". During the workshop, participants were asked to be creative and to consider the alien's needs and challenges and to explore possible responses.
Bottom-up Analysis
We took the bottom-up analysis method to group the data, and narrow down as main insights, finally to represent in visual representations.

Findings & Recommendations

Key Findings
What did we find based on previous combined research methods?


People tend to be annoyed or feel irritated when the construction affect their lives; but when they understand the situation better, they’re relieved.


People don’t want to be educated, but they want to be aware.


People want feed-forward information, they don’t want to ‘look’ for it
Recommendations
Care about people's emotional needs, make the situation clearer to them, give them notifications or updates about live construction before-hand, and provide a ‘big picture goal’ and the time schedule of the construction to people will improve New Yorkers' experiences with construction sites.​
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1. Show you care about people’s emotional needs, make
the situation clearer to them to relieve their irritation and annoyance.
Example: Making the signage bigger and obvious especially during late afternoon and night; 
A notification on their mobile device when they’re around the construction site or third party integration to apps like Citizen.
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2. Do not educate them about the details of the construction site, but give them notifications or updates about live construction before-hand.
Example: Utilizing map applications to provide notifications throughout journey planning and give more details to the user if they want to understand more.
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3. Provide a ‘big picture goal’ and the time schedule (yearly, monthly, daily) of the construction to people, including some reminders of what they could do to avoid the affects throughout.
Example: Basic map overlay indicating traffic delays with the option to learn more about project and timeline details.
Conclusion
How about client's reaction?
We delivered our project to client, and they're curious and willing to her more in what we had found, and they expressed interests in our recommendations. They were very excited that we did qualitative research on New Yorkers about the constructions, and were looking forward to diving into our data.
My takeaways?
To go out into the field and conduct observation method in human's natural environment has always been one of my huge interests in research field. It was very enlightening to utilize such ethnography method to view and note how people interact with construction, whether as a hindrance or an accepted part of everyday life.
Meanwhile, it was such an interesting and delightful experience of co-design workshop to shift the focus and to look at things beyond the scope, especially as it is communication with construction in New York City which create accessible physical and digital spaces for New Yorkers.
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