Hi, thank you for your interest in our study.
My name is Muyang Li.
I am going to present this study, “Awareness, understanding, and action: a conceptual framework
of user experiences and expectations about indoor air quality visualization”.
This is a join work of professor Sunyoung Kim from Rutgers University and myself.
We are facing several facts regarding to this topic.
People are spending majority of their time indoors so that indoor air pollution may seriously
impact their health.
Lots of indoor air quality monitors can be found on the market for people's daily life.
However, there is an absence of studying the design principles for effective indoor air quality visualization
to help people to better understand and improve their indoor air quality.
This paper is studying this issue.
Our study builds on previous work about persuasive technology and eco-feedback systems.
Persuasive technology is the technology designed to change attitudes or behaviors of the users
through persuasion and social influence.
Eco-feedback systems is the technology that provides feedback on people’s behavior and
how their behavior will affect the environment.
Previous studies have figured out several design components that relate to the design
of indoor air quality visualization.
They are historical comparison, normative comparison, reward and penalization,
incentives and disaggregation.
To collect data, we searched monitors on the US Amazon, and applied criteria to get a list
of 10 devices as the image shown here.
By considering the degree of users' engagement, we dropped the 3 devices on the far-right
side of the 10, because they just simply displayed air pollutants data on the screen without
any further design.
We collected a total number of 1,447 reviews of these 7 devices from Amazon and
used grounded theory to analyze them.
After the analysis, we got 3 themes as a procedure of how users process indoor air quality visualization, including
awareness, understanding, and action, and 2 themes as outcomes of using indoor air quality visualization,
including knowledge gain and feeling of relief.
As we can see from the figure in the PowerPoint, several design components or considerations
have emerged within each theme.
We found that the users’ first reaction to using an indoor air quality monitor
was an increase in awareness about indoor air quality related issues.
The first design component to increase awareness was the use of ambient light.
We found that all devices adopted ambient light as an important design component
to provide the current status of indoor air quality.
Examples can be found on the PowerPoint.
Majority of the users left positive comments about the effectiveness of ambient light to
allow them to easy engage.
There was also a number of complaints said that the change of ambient light unintentionally
interrupt their sleep.
Some devices have taken this problem into consideration by adopting an automatic dimming feature.
The 2nd design component was the use of color code.
Every device with an ambient light feature we've studied adopted the color-coded theme.
It changed the color of ambient light based on the level of indoor air quality.
Usually green and blue for good indoor air quality, orange for moderate, and purple for bad.
Majority of the users had positive comments because it was simply, intuitive, and easy to use.
The 3rd design component was the use of notification.
Many devices designed a notification feature to inform users of critical information
when an abnormal indoor air quality event happened.
Particular design of notification included playing a beeping sound, blinking LED light,
and sending an alert notification to a mobile application.
Many users left positive comments on the effectiveness of the notification.
One of the reviews said that “We love the ability to get notifications when the
air quality index goes over a user-defined threshold, so we don’t have to always check on it.”
Having the increased awareness, users intent to build the better understanding of the specific
indoor air quality situations.
We got 3 themes that influence the understanding of indoor air quality information, including data quality,
data type, and data presentation.
We got 2 aspects of data quality that contributed to understanding indoor air quality, including
accuracy of data and completeness of data.
Indoor air quality visualization applied design components, such as historical comparison
and normative comparison, to help users approximate accuracy, which will be mentioned later.
Users said that devices monitored a wide range of air pollutants had good quality data.
Proper visualization can effectively inform users which types of air pollutants a monitor measures.
Users can easily understand the scope of pollutants.
The 2nd theme to increase understanding of indoor air quality visualization was the data type.
We got 3 types of them.
The most commonly used type was numerical sensor readings.
For example, CO is 28 PPM.
Senor readings like this might not be effective because users had limited knowledge to interpret
the meaning of the number.
To improve such situation, many devices applied icons and color codes to convey
contextual information along with the number.
Good examples can be found within the study.
The monitor on the left side in this PowerPoint used a fresh-leaf icon to represent for good indoor air quality.
And the monitor in the middle used a yellow frowning-face for a moderate indoor air quality.
Another common type of data was indoor air quality score.
Most devices presented a percentile of the score to provide an overall rate of indoor air quality.
For example the monitor on the right side of PowerPoint, it measured the indoor air quality level as 86 out of 100.
The indoor air quality score was easier for users to interpret than numerical readings,
but it still caused problems of interpreting the meaning behind the score.
This problem can be solved by using a design component of disaggregation,
which will be mentioned later.
The 3rd data type was air quality index, short for AQI, an index to report the condition
of air quality.
The table image on the left side of PowerPoint was the AQI
published by United States Environmental Protection Agency.
It provided information to corresponding air quality values, health concerns, and colors
as national air quality standards.
All the devices we've studied adopted this AQI’s colors as color codes for visual components
such as an icon, graph, and ambient light.
We didn't find any reviews about AQI.
The 3rd theme to increase understanding of indoor air quality visualization was the data presentation.
It was the key part of information visualization to help users to interpret the meaning of data.
We got 3 design components there.
Historical comparison was designed to provide a current indoor air quality status relative to the past
using a graphical chart.
The monitor on the left side of the PowerPoint designed the historical comparison
as abstract as dots.
And the monitor on the right side presented historical comparison at the bottom of the display.
The historical comparison turned out to be an effective method to allow users to easily
explore, track, and analyze the patterns of indoor air quality changes.
The 2nd design component was normative comparison that compare one’s indoor air quality with other places'.
We found that the majority of devices were limited to provide outdoor air quality for
normative comparison.
One of the reviews positively mentioned that “it has a fun feature that allows you to
view the global air quality in a Google earth like perspective.”
The 3rd design component was disaggregation, to allow users to disaggregate the overall
information into specific detailed sub-categories.
But we didn't find it in any of the devices we studied.
However, we found numbers of complaints about the lack of disaggregation in the reviews.
Followed by the awareness and understanding, users quickly took proper actions to
lower indoor air pollution.
We got 3 design components to improve user action, including recommendation, automation,
and data export.
We found that several monitors and their mobile application provided relevant tips and recommendations
to improve indoor air quality.
Many users mentioned they need those recommendations a lot when dealing with the air quality issues.
We also found that the contents of some recommendations were limited to simple suggestions such as
open or close the window.
One of the reviews said that “I found the 'tips' in the APP to be a little bit too simplistic.
I wish the tips were a bit more explicit and individualized.”
The 2nd design component was automation.
Some of the newly released monitors were equipped with this feature to turn on or off the indoor air quality related
equipment, such as an air purifier.
Users left extremely positive reviews on this feature because they made no physical effort
to initiate the actions of improving IAQ.
The 3rd design component was data export.
Some users turned out to be very proactive about monitoring their IAQ and wanted to actively
engage in analyzing the current and historical indoor air quality data.
With all the devices we analyzed, no one provided the download feature.
Finally, I would like to introduce the outcomes we identified that users would enjoy in an
indoor air quality monitor.
Our findings confirmed that users considered knowledge gain as the crucial benefit of using
an indoor air quality monitor.
Many users reported various types of information and knowledge associated with possible sources
of indoor air pollution and interventions for poor indoor air quality they newly uncovered.
These information finally turned into their own knowledge to deal with indoor air quality related issue.
The 2nd outcome was users’ intention of gaining emotional feeling of relief.
One of the reviews said that “keeping my indoor air quality monitor on all of the time and
checking it occasionally allows my family to rest easy, especially with a toddler around the house.”
Our findings echoes the importance of ambient awareness, the unique design component of
persuasive technology to make user aware of qualities of the environment.
We suggest that it is essential to take into consideration of ambient light as an important
design component of indoor air quality visualization as an ambient display.
We also note that automation can be very important for the future design due to the increasing
popularity of smart-home technology.
It is very important to balance the amount of automation and user engagement to avoid users' feeling
of overwhelmed and to facilitate their abilities of understanding the problems.
Our findings of the 3 design components of data presentation, including historical comparison,
normative comparison, and disaggregation, are no surprisingly overlap the design components
of eco-feedback systems.
The other 2 design components of eco-feedback systems, including reward and incentives,
are not emerged from our study.
We assume that there are potential to expanding and combining these 2 design components with
other design components to facilitate the users engagement.
This paper is the first attempt to conceptually frame design considerations for indoor air quality visualization.
We hope the framework of explaining the process with the proposed set of design considerations
can provide valuable design strategies for the future design.
Thank you for your listening.