LAWA: Connecting New Zealanders with their environment through scientific data.

LAWA (Land Air Water Aotearoa) is a website designed with the purpose of making scientific information on New Zealand’s environment available to the public in an easily comprehensible, credible and trustworthy way.

Overview

LAWA is a collaboration between New Zealand’s 16 regional councils and Unitary Authorities, the Cawthron Institute, Massey University and the Ministry for the Environment. When it launched in 2013, LAWA was a world first in terms of making national water quality information accessible on a single platform. It has since grown to include the water quality of lakes and beaches alongside rivers, air quality, and water quantity (available for consented use), with other indicators in the pipeline.

A fun introduction to LAWA.

In this project, the role of science communication was undertaken by designers, who acted as a facilitating bridge between government (scientists, communicators and management at the local government and ministry level) and the audiences or users of the website.

This project builds on the existing work by Open Lab. It looked to improve the user’s navigation and experience of LAWA through enhancements to the map interface — the defining feature of the site. This work required careful consideration of the existing information architecture and user journeys while introducing new map exploration mechanics.

LAWA’s Design Philosophy & Goals

• Improve public awareness of freshwater quality issues through access to data and contextualising information by filtering the vast amount of information available into digestible chunks so users are not overwhelmed.
• Provide robust and credible environmental information verified by scientists by ‘translating’ scientific data so it is clear for a lay user, with complex terms explained.
• Become the hub for freshwater, with information for the public, scientists, policymakers and other water users by ensuring that the structure makes the right information available for the user at the right time (drill-down).
• Have an attractive, user-friendly interface, accessible across different devices by using recreation information, stories, factsheets and events to contextualise, inform and engage.

The design process underpinning the LAWA project, as summarise by Jo Bailey.

My Role

Within the LAWA project I was tasked with designing site experience enhancements, introducing new scientific indicator modules/sections, and expanding on the platforms’s visual language. These project tasks required me to undertake design research, reassessment of the existing information architecture, UX and UI design, content direction, and coordination of web development.

This case study focuses on the Map Enhancements project, supplemented by Air Quality as an example scientific indicator module.

Map Enhancements

Ultimately LAWA aims to make a complex and diverse set of data accessible to a variety of users, particularly the general public. The goal of the LAWA Map Enhancements project was to enable extra methods of exploring and searching for information through the site’s map, and help users reach their goal of finding the relevant information to them. Existing feedback from users stated that there was an expectation that the map could be used to explore the information without the need to navigate through the content panel.

The two key areas of expansion were:

• Show and explore topic sites (eg. water quality sites) via the map regardless of where a user is on the website.
• Enable users to search any topic near their current geographical location.

LAWA utilises a dual-panel interface; map panel on the left, content panel on the right.

New & Existing Interactions

The main challenge of this project was working with exisiting rules of interactions with the site’s dual-panel interface. By-and-large, if something was clicked in the content panel, the content in the map would change to reflect the new content. With the proposed enhancements, it became apparent that interacting with the map meant the reverse also had to occur; clicking the map needed to change the content in the content panel at the right time, and to the appropriate content.

Defining panel behaviour; cause and effect of interactions on the two panels.

New Interface Elements

Navigating data through the map meant finding ways to help users navigate the growing number of sites and data types. This meant introducing a few new UI elements. Using the existing visual cues and style of LAWA, the following elements were introduced:

• The Map Navigation bar; used to filter the map’s sites by data type.
• Site Clusters; used to simplify tightly-packed sites on the map.
• Iconography; used to introduce users to the different types of sites.
• The Map Legend; used to clarify what types of sites the map is showing.
• Fullscreen; offers users the ability to explore the map without distraction.
• Near Me Now; used to show the user all sites near their current location.

Outcome

These enhancements sought to solve navigation issues and user expectations with the existing map through familiar map components, but these changes future-proof the map’s capacity LAWA’s for growth in data and site types in the coming years.

Air Quality Module

As LAWA expands the types of scientific data it reports on, new modules are added to the website. The challenge of these modules is how to make this complex scientific data relevant and understandable to a general audience—to tell its story.

“Everything as simple as it can be, but not simpler.”

Air is usually not visible to the naked eye, so describing its quality posed an interesting communication challenge. What is makes air healthy or not, what causes it, and what’s the best way to show this without making it complicated or simplistic? This LAWA project explored those questions, requiring us to delve deep into the science and understand ourselves to figure out how best to report it.

Process

Our process behind this module essentially consisted of sitting with the experts who take the measurements and report to their councils, and understanding from them what each type of data means or relates to. Councils themselves had already done a lot of ground work in reporting annual summaries, particularly around the causes of air pollution.

Something we realised from this process is that just reporting the trends and measurements would be a minimum outcome, and that LAWA has an opportunity to affect people’s attitudes and behavior. This was unlike other existing modules.

From this analysis we were able to synthesise the content into layers of information types, and make recommendations to the client as to what might be missing or useful to contextualise the data, and potentially affect change.

Overview of the ‘drill-down’ nature of LAWA in full-swing; regional summary, town summary, and scientific data from a specific site.

Outcome

Utilising the existing visual language across LAWA, the Air Quality module provides a drill-down of various aspects relevant across regions, towns, and specific sites. Emphasis is given to measures and trends of PM10 (the primary measure of particles in air) compared to other data, in addition to Sources of Air Pollution taking centre-stage in telling the story of what is causing it.

Ultimately, through making this story accessible and understandable to everyday New Zealanders LAWA can help us reduce air pollution.

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LAWA was recognised as the 2015 Excellence in Science Communication Award Winner by SCANZ and was a Best Awards finalist in 2015.

Jo Bailey was Design Lead on the project as we worked together on the project’s enhancements while at Open Lab.