The Shield Laundry Campaign
This project revolves around the washing habits of 60+ year old women in the UK, looking specifically at hygienic practices and how new eco-friendly advice may affect hygienic behaviour.
Introduction
The Problem
Most of things that keep laundry clean; washing at high temperatures, using bleach detergents, washing clothes for longer; come into conflict with the goals of saving money and being eco-friendly. The consumer now is advised to wash at lower temperatures to save money and chemical detergent is seen as less safe to themselves and the environment. However we have yet to consider the impact this has on hygiene and disease transmission; particularly in vulnerable groups.
I designed the infographic below to visualise the four key health risks arising from laundry practices:
The Process
The process followed the design double diamond, with two key stages the research stage, consisting of data collection and analysis and the design stage consisting of developing and assessing the intervention. I used input from users throughout these two stages, to gain initial insight into behaviours and mindset, and then to test and develop my intervention.
Research
Design
Research
Data Collection
As hygiene is a complex topic I first reviewed secondary sources to get an understanding of the problem and to explore existing research about washing behaviours. I used ethnographic techniques, such as semi-structured interviews and observation of the washing process with 3 users, comparing what they said to what they did.
I focussed particularly on their mindset and mental model of hygiene, though this was mostly questioned indirectly with the interview initially not giving focus to hygiene or eco-washing so as to not bias users.
Data Analysis
I initially used an affinity diagram to bring together findings and identify patterns, twenty insights were developed from these thematic groupings, which were prioritised using two prioritisation matrices:
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To identify the most hygienically effective opportunity with the least impact to users current habits.
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To contrast hygiene efficacy with environmental impact, to ensure the intervention did not promote environmental damage.
Finally, I compared the matrices, with the insights classed best in both, selected for further development. The prioritised insights helped put together the experience from a human perspective highlighting consistent risks and why they occurred. Of the insight derived from user research, how users conceptualised clothes washing remained consistently central showing users mental models of clothes washing were dissociated from hygienic efficacy.
Key Insights
Research
Intervention Development
Taking the first steps towards a design solution, I focused on clarifying the problematic and target behaviours. Finding one behaviour to target was initially difficult because of the interplay between behaviours, however a breakthrough came when I framed the behaviours as a progression and saw that the root cause stemmed from perception of risk.
I realised that a more general focus on raising awareness of hygienic practices would achieve the greatest change. This reframed the focus of the intervention to not just shift users’ problematic behaviour to adopting the target behaviour but also shift their motivation.
At this stage, I explored a number of behavioural change theories to underpin an intervention strategy. I used Fogg’s behavioural model to evaluate interventions as it mapped well to the users’ experience; with user motivation relatively low highlighting two routes to change:
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Making the target behaviour as simple as possible, or
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Increasing the motivation of users.
The Solution
The Shield Laundry campaign is a postal campaign to spread awareness of, encourage and enable more hygienic laundry practices specifically targeting those at greater risk of infection and disease, being over 60 year old.
Conceived as being delivered by a health/community organisation such as the NHS, with potential extra funding from sponsorship from detergent companies. Participants would be identified as being at higher risk by age group (60+) or increased hospital visits and sent the Shield materials by post.
The intervention itself is made up of two primary parts:
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A Shield Laundry bag for the separation of high and low-risk laundry
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Informational cards, including laundry ‘recipe cards’ and partnership with a low immunity buddy who they are invited to help shield through better habits.
1.The Shield Laundry Bag
The laundry bag facilitates the main behavioural steering element of constraining contact with high risk items throughout the laundry process, by physically separating high and low risk items into separate compartments, and as the entire bag can be washed, removing the need for further contact. By hooking onto the side of a laundry basket, the bag is designed to fit into the user’s current sorting habits providing a low effort intervention as promoted in Fogg’s behavioural change method. The bag also takes advantage of a feedback mentality by highlighting the positive consequences of the behaviour through matching shield iconography on the bag and laundry buddy materials.
2. Hygienic Laundry Cards
The informational cards help to inform the user of risk, and give simple tips to act as a spark to build motivation. This motivation is centred around a ‘laundry buddy’ a person with an impaired immune system, to help build empathy to protect others through hygienic behaviours. The choice to focus on helping others rather than personal risk, was selected as it was shown users overestimated their own immunity. I also wanted to avoid unnecessarily increasing the users fear which is associated with emphasising personal risk.
The use of ‘recipe’ style cards to give users a clearer mental model of how washing works was seen as particularly helpful in user feedback, as it gave them the tools to make more informed decisions, and through offering different types of washing got them to question their norm.
I also explored models of habit formation, hygiene specific models and past interventions in medical spaces to gain insight into effective motivators, seeing a mirroring of users not being good at judging personal hygienic risk. This helped me develop an intervention specification, determining that the intervention must:
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Have an emotive or social trigger to push action.
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Increase hygiene awareness without an information burden.
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Be part of current habits where possible.
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Work beyond information-based interventions alone, to steer user behaviour.
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Not alarm users about hygiene/health unethically.
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Not unnecessarily promote non-eco washing practices.
The creation of this specification formed the first ideation, and was used to generate ‘How Might We’ statement, eg: How might we get people to think of unhygienic (invisible) as unclean?, How might we get people to consider hand washing as a natural part of the washing process like food hygiene?. From these questions several concepts were explored, with the ‘Shield Laundry Campaign’ being taken forward for its relative fit with the user’s current practices.
Intervention Development
To develop the idea I used storyboarding and body storming with low-fidelity prototyping to act through the process. As the concept advanced I made several higher fidelity prototypes, and dispersed them to participants who completed a week long diary study and took part in a post-test interview.
I thought it was important to have users try the intervention independently, as the behaviours being tested were entangled with their day to day habits. I also used this to explore key questions, such as how much information was needed for the desired result and if the affordances and constraints would be enough to prompt action. The impact on eco washing and health concern was also evaluated with these remaining within ethically acceptable limits.