Until Water is Free

Ideation & Research

Context & Challenge
In remote regions of NTT, communities trek kilometers for clean water or rely on expensive tanked supply—as highlighted by reports from Desa Tunabesi, Naisau, Banuan, Mbuit, and others. Solar-powered pumps built by Solar Chapter and partners aimed to bring water, but lacked real-time monitoring—making it hard to track pump status, measure access, or highlight gaps across villages.

There is also a gap between the vast availability of researched conducted over the years and how the information is spread out. In the beginning, we have discussed the matter with local governments in NTT and we found out that they do have their own comprehensive research, yet it is still in a read-only format and not a lot of visual representative. Therefore, we decided to path a new way to present such important and massive data into a website; in hopes that local field officers, other NGOs, or the common public can better understand the issue, until water is free.

User Interviews & Findings
The field officer and data analytics team conducted interviews with:

• Local village officials — needed transparent access data to plan maintenance and coordinate with NGOs or CSR donors.
• Field technicians — wanted alerts on pump downtime or low performance to reduce unplanned trips.
• District government reps — sought aggregated metrics (like pump-to-people ratios) to evaluate water coverage in official reporting.

From these sessions, we looked at our stakeholders and their main needs into an improved information architecture (IA):

• Dashboard home: aggregate KPIs (e.g., % villages with working pumps, active government programs).
• Village-level map/list: pump count, status (active/stalled), water source types.
• Detail page: pump health, uptime, people‑per‑pump ratio, remedy history.
• Report submission: field agents and citizens can log pump issues or upload photos.

By going through card sorting and affinity mapping to arrive at this hierarchy.

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Design

The design process was fast since we need to present all of the data into a running website in a short period of time. That's why I decided on skipping perfect preparations and focus on getting it delivered. There are two main focus which are producing wireframes & components and getting the details and consistency done for smooth handover to developers.

Wireframes

At first, I defined and create wireframe for the website which are based on the Information Architecture. From there, I worked on design details for our developers. Here are some of the high-fidelity sketches I designed with interactivity at glance and easy reporting workflows in focus:

• Map & list toggles for village navigation.
• Overview dashboard with top KPIs (e.g., “Villages without functioning pumps”, “Active water source types”).
• Detail pages with pump station diagrams, status icons, and historical uptime graphs.‍

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Design Handoff Details

To reduce confusion, save time, and keep the final product aligned with the intended user experience, I also documented details for developers

Leading a UX initiative in a compressed timeline taught me how to prioritize ruthlessly, focus on clarity, and deliver just enough design to move the product forward. By working with a distributed team across different timezones sharpened my communication—every handover needed to be clear, structured, and self-explanatory. I learned to document decisions and leave room for others to ask questions freely. This experience pushed me to design not just for users—but also for the people building the product after I sign off.