Department of Computer Science

BSc (Hons) Computer Science

Academic Year 2021 - 2022

Smart Garden App Water Conservation

Student Name:
1

A report submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Bachelor of Science
Using Mobile Phones for Promoting Water Conservation

Abstract

We report a design investigation that seeks to help people to conserve water in their homes
through the use of mobile technology. To persuade people to use water more wisely, one
approach is to give them tailored information about their water use and about other
people’s usage. Investigating this approach, a mobile application was implemented to
explore the role of three different sources of information (weather, expert’s advice and
community information). Based on the evaluation, several themes for designing mobile
technology for gardeners were identified. Findings from the study show that gardeners
want more tailored messages from the system, and advice should come from more than one
source of information, to have a greater opportunity to persuade.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the 10 participants in the case study for their time and
interest.

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Table of Contents

Abstract.......................................................................................................................................i
Acknowledgements....................................................................................................................ii
Table of Contents......................................................................................................................iii
List of Tables............................................................................................................................iv
List of Figures............................................................................................................................v
1 Introduction.........................................................................................................................1
1.1 Aims and Objectives...................................................................................................1
1.1 Project Approach.........................................................................................................2
1.2 Dissertation Outline.....................................................................................................3
2 Background.........................................................................................................................4
2.1 Tables..........................................................................................................................4
2.2 Figures.........................................................................................................................4
3 Methodology (Or Approach)..............................................................................................6
4 Design (Or What you did Part One)...................................................................................7
5 Implementation (Or What you did Part Two).....................................................................8
6 Testing and Evaluation.....................................................................................................10
7 Conclusions.......................................................................................................................11
7.1 Future Work..............................................................................................................11
References................................................................................................................................12
Appendix A Personal Reflection.....................................................................................13
A.1 Reflection on Project.................................................................................................13
A.2 Personal Reflection....................................................................................................13
Appendix B Ethics Documentation.................................................................................14
B.1 Ethics Confirmation..................................................................................................14
Appendix C Other Appendices.......................................................................................14
More relevant material.........................................................................................................14

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List of Tables

Table 1 - A risk analysis table....................................................................................................4

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List of Figures

Figure 1 - A generic model of the Final Year Project................................................................5

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1 Introduction

Water is precious and, as with many other countries in the world, United kingdom has for
many years been through persistent drought and the effects of climate change. It is the driest
inhabited continent in the world. The climate is highly variable across the continent as well as
from year to year (Bureau of Meteorology, 2011). A consequence of this is that water
restrictions are currently in place in many states and cities all over United kingdom.
Depending on the location, there are restrictions on people watering their lawns, using
sprinkler systems, hosing in paved areas, washing vehicles, and refilling spas and swimming
pools. In the Melbourne metropolitan area, for example, the water storage was at its lowest
for years in June 2009, at 25.6 percent (Melbourne Water, 2011) and led to very harsh water
restrictions. At the time of writing, people are limited to water only on specified days, and
some activities, such as washing cars or watering lawns, are prohibited. With the restrictions
in place, people became aware of when they were allowed to water their gardens, but there
was and is still a lack of knowledge in the general community about how much water their
plants need (Nansen et al., 2012). Some people tend to overwater their plants and let their
watering systems run for a set amount of time. They tend to water within the restrictions even
though their plants might not need it. The main issue here is the adaptability of knowledge
presented.
People have different gardens with different plants, and the information given by the
government is hard for the community to interpret and adapt to each personal garden practice.
The project described in this paper addresses this challenge

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Aims and Objectives

The main goal is to explore the design of mobile technologies to help change people's
behaviour and habits and reduce the amount of unnecessary water usage, with a view to
collectively decreasing the water wastage throughout the Melbourne area.

As a secondary effect, this might also result in more healthy and sustainable gardens.
The paper is structured as follows.

1.First, we present related work done trying to make people more conscious about their
use of water in private households. This includes an ongoing study around garden
watering, as well as research carried out using mobile devices as a platform to change
people’s behaviour.

2.We then present details on the process of designing, implementing and deploying a
prototype mobile application using principles of persuasion to facilitate better water
usage.

3.Finally, findings from the analysis are presented and discussed by eliciting themes for
designing technology to help people adapt information into their gardening practice.

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1.1 Project Approach

Several studies about changing people’s water-use in private households have been
conducted (Arroyo et al., 2005; Kappel & Grechenig, 2009; Kuznetsov & Paulos, 2010;
Pearce et al., 2008). Arroyo et al. (2005) present numerous persuasive techniques to increase
awareness of water conservation in the domain of the sink, and created the WaterBot: a
system that motivates people to turn off the tap when not using the water. Kappel et al. and
Kuznetov et al. developed UpStream (Kappel & Grechenig, 2009) and Show-Me (Kuznetsov
& Paulos, 2010) – both physical installations in the shower, which give information about
their current water usage, with the goal of reducing their water usage. These studies showed
that the developed technologies did change people’s use of water. Whilst the above
techniques address the issues relating to water use within the home, Pearce and colleagues
conducted a 4-year (2006-2010) and still ongoing study about developing and evaluating an
online desktop application helping people water their gardens more efficiently (Pearce et al.,
2008; Pearce et al., 2009). The first part of the study described a project design for an
internet-based application to support gardeners’ reasoning about the water demands and
water supply for their gardens (Pearce et al., 2008). After the first study was conducted, an
online-application, SmartGardenWatering, SGW, (smartgardenwatering.org.au) was
developed in collaboration with horticultural scientists and interaction designers. A later
study then described the investigation of how gardeners responded to advice from the
software. The SGW system takes the form a simulation in which where the gardener first
defines various parameters for his/her garden and, based on the data, a profile of water
demand for the garden is visualized. This comprises a watering schedule that shows the ideal
frequency of when to water and the duration of watering required. The findings from a
second study presented the types of factors that brought confidence or lack of trust in the
visualized horticultural model and its application to a specific garden (Pearce et al., 2009).
An issue raised in a later study was the disconnect between sitting at a desktop computer and
exploring the horticultural issues in a technological context and actual garden practice
(Pearce et al., 2010). This disconnect between being in the garden and at the desktop leads us
to look at research carried out using other technology platforms – notably mobile devices – to
persuade people to change their behaviour. In the past 5 years, the functionality of mobile
devices has gone through a drastic change from solely providing basic applications to more
tailored and advanced programs. By looking at the present market for mobile applications,

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Apple’s ‘App Store’ (currently the largest application store) shows the great demand for
tailored applications in today’s world (Apple, 2010). The founder of Stanford Persuasive
Technology Lab, B.J. Fogg, predicted a few years back that mobile devices would be the
dominant platform for persuasion, mentioning that mobile platforms could motivate people to
achieve their own personal goals (Fogg, 2003; Fogg, 2009). He saw the mobile phone as
helping to succeed like a magic wand. He further commented: “Mobile technology can layer
information into our moment-by moment lives in a way that changes our behaviour”. We
therefore propose that the power of mobile persuasion can and will be used to enhance the
quality of today’s society by motivating people to use water more wisely and perhaps change
their watering practice. Furthermore, our mobile devices are able to gather and report current
and localized information, which is relevant to us and our contextualized goals. For that
reason, mobile devices have the potential to help motivate people more effectively than any
other platform that they use in their daily life. According to Fogg (2003), drawing on
previous psychology research, tailored applications have the tendency to be more effective
than generic information in changing attitudes and behaviours (see also Jimison, 1997):
“Information provided by computing technology will be more persuasive if it is tailored to
the individual’s needs, interests, personality, usage context or other factors relevant to the
individual” (Fogg, 2009). Several projects have in various ways tried to persuade people with
technology to become more conscious about reducing environmental impact (eco-feedback
technology). Froehlich et al. conducted a comparative study of 89 environmental psychology
papers and 44 papers from the HCI literature. The outcome of the study was a summary of
key motivational techniques that HCI -designers should be aware of to promote
proenvironmental behaviour (Froehlich et al., 2010; Kappel & Grechenig., 2009; Kuznetsov
& Paulos, 2010). “Information must be easy to understand, trusted, attract attention and is
remembered “(Brewer & Stern, 2005) Using information as a key motivation technique, Al
Mahmud et al. (2008) conducted a study exploring the information given from three different
visualization media (text, audio and video). The goal was to make people more conscious
about their energy use in their home setting. They developed a mobile application called EZ
Phone (Energy Zaving Phone) and conducted a pilot study in which they explored the three
media’s effectiveness in persuading users to conserve energy. The outcome from the study
was that text was perceived to be most persuasive, and video was the least persuasive in
changing people’s behaviour to consider energy use. A similar study by Roubroeks & Ham
(2009) explored given information about energy conservation through three different
information-methods (text only, text picture, text+video). They developed and tested a

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screen-based system. Findings from Roubroeks et al.’s study showed that the most effective
way to persuade people in adapting their behaviour in a proposed direction was by using
pictures to illustrate or expand on text. The earlier research described above (Fogg, 2004;
Roubroeks & Ham, 2009; Froehlich et al., 2010; Brewer & Stern, 2005) suggests that
information the gardeners need to support the goal of changing their environmental behaviour
should be received on a mobile device, mediated as text with pictures. The information
should be trustful and attract attention if it is to persuade people to change their behaviour.
The rest of this paper presents the design, development and evaluation of an early prototype
to explore how information given to persuade people on a mobile p

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1.1 Dissertation Outline

RESEARCH DESIGN
The study reported here explored three sources of information (scientific weather data,
expert’s advice, and community information) presented on a mobile device, and investigated
each source’s role in persuading people to adapt their behaviour in a proposed direction.
These three sources of information were provided via a mobile web-application called Smart
Garden Watering Advisor (SGW Advisor 2011). The prototype application was developed
and deployed with 10 gardeners in Melbourne in a study over 5 weeks. The participants were
interviewed before and after they used the prototype over a period of 3 weeks. The pre-use
interviews focused on exploring and understanding the participants’ current garden
knowledge and their use of IT-devices in their daily life. The pre-interview session was also
used as an introduction to the mobile prototype. The prototype explored different ways of
supporting gardeners with information, to make them become more water-wise and change or
correct their watering behaviour. The post-use interview focused on how the prototype
facilitated information to the participants, and their reflections on the three different sources
of information they had been introduced to during the 3 weeks study using the SGW Advisor.

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2 Background

THE SMART GARDEN WATERING ADVISOR

The main goal of the Smart Garden Watering Advisor (SGW Advisor) was to explore
whether gardeners found the mobile application supportive by giving them helpful
information about their garden watering. We also explored what role the actual sources of
information played in their decision to either water or skip a watering in their current
watering schedule. We asked: Do the gardeners find the provided information trustful, and do
they act on the given information? One of our key intentions in the study was that the SGW
Advisor system and its use should be as realistic as possible. Therefore, the weather
information was given in real-time and localised to the nearest weather station. Even though
the system presented in this paper can be seen as a technology prototype, our goal was to
explore the role of the different sources of information played in advising the participants,
rather than to explore technical or usability matters of the software itself. Design of the SGW
Advisor prototype The SGW Advisor application is designed with a ‘home screen’ as its
main window. The main window contains four menus items: Weather, Schedule, Advisor and
Daily Input – see Figure 1. Weather menu
The Weather menu provides information about the local weather for the weather station that
the user lives closest to. It gives specific information about the current temperature, latest
rainfall and humidity – see Figure 1. It also provides information about the last 2 days
min/max temperature, total rainfall, evaporation and average humidity.
Schedule menu
The Schedule menu gives information to the user about their current watering schedule for
the next 3 days. The watering schedule is set initially by the user and in agreement with the
actual water restrictions in the current state (Melbourne Water Restrictions, 2011). Users are
also provided with the information about the level of the current water restrictions and how
these restrictions apply to the different watering methods (hand, manual or automatic
watering). Advisor menu The Advisor menu shows an overview over the incoming messages
from the system. The unread message(s) from the system are shown with an icon of an
unopened envelope and read message(s) are shown as an opened envelope. By clicking on
each message, the message opens and the reader is able to read the content of the message.
This menu was the most important part of the system as the incoming messages allowed users
to explore the three information sources. Daily Input menu The Daily Input menu is where
the user is able to feed information into the system such as whether they have been watering

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the current day or not. The information is sent to a database, which is described in details in a
later section. Three information sources The three different sources of information explored
in this study were information about expert’s choice, garden community and weather – see
Figure 2. Figure 2. Icons for the three information sources Expert’s Choice The expert choice
presented scientific weather data (Bureau of Meteorology, 2011), combined it with
information from a knowledge database (SGW) and provided information in the inbox as to
whether to skip, add or follow the regular watering schedule. The Figure 1. SGW Advisor
showing the Home screen (left) and the four subsequent screens. 246 messages were sent to
the participants from an animated water drop, named Watie (Figure 2). Garden Community
This relates to the messages about what other gardeners are planning or already doing in their
gardens. The information could be whether the majority of the community wanted to skip or
add an extra watering to their regular watering schedule. Weather Messages received in the
inbox were the scientific weather information from the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM). The
information provided in the weather messages were objective and accurate information, in
comparison to the other sources mentioned above. This message was provided to bring a
diversity of information.
The six incoming messages
During the three weeks of the study, the participants received six different messages in the
Advisor inbox from the three different sources. The six messages contained advice on
whether to add an extra watering day or to skip a watering day compared to the current
schedule. Every time a message was sent to the Advisor inbox, the participants also received
a SMS on their mobile phone. Fogg conducted a healthcare study in which he mentioned that
using SMS messages to notifying people, has a great potential to trigger them to a proposed
behaviour (Fogg & Allen, 2009). The three messages shown in Figure 3 are the messages that
displayed only one information source in each message. These messages were from the
weather, expert’s choice and the garden community, respectively. Figure 3. The three
messages with only one source of information in each message The final three messages
users received were mixed messages, each with two different sources of information (Figure
4). Figure 4. The final three messages, each with two different sources of information. For
example, the fourth message the participants received (first image in Figure 4) was
information about the expert advising about appropriate behaviour (‘Follow your

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Figures

Figure 1 - A generic model of the Final Year Project

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3 Methodology (Or Approach)

The initial meeting with each participant began with a quick tour of their garden was
conducted, where the researcher and the participant had a chat about their garden and
watering systems. The intention of this chat was to “break the ice” between the participant
and the researcher. This was followed by a semi-structured interview to obtain a general
understanding of people’s garden knowledge and current gardening practice. Among the
questions asked were how they currently made use of any IT devices and how they obtained
information about appropriate gardening practices. The interview lasted 20 minutes. A
version of the SGW Advisor was introduced to the participant. The researcher went through
the SGW Advisor with the participant, and the participant was free to ask questions about the
case study. During this introduction, the participants received a manual that described the
system step-by-step, to prevent any later problems during the case study. The study was
conducted during spring in the antipodes. However, the weather in Melbourne area varies
considerably day by day during this season. The majority of the people living in the
metropolitan area of Melbourne do not need to water their plants in this period. Hence, for the
purpose of the research, a pea plant seedling in a pot was given to each participant – this
provided a ‘simulated’ garden to take care of during the study. Each participant was asked to
look after their plant during the 3 weeks of case study; this required of watering it regularly
(probably once a day but depending on conditions) and using the SGW Advisor to inform
their decision as to whether to water or not. The use of the same pea plant across all
participants controlled for other garden factors that might have influenced their behaviour.
The participants were required to enter information every day into the SGW Advisor as to
whether or not they had watered the plant. The day before the actual case study began, the
participants received a document with their regular watering schedule for the pea plant and
descriptive information about the three information sources they would receive messages
from during the study. During the study, the SGW Advisor system was monitored remotely
and any technical problems with the system were solved as quickly as possible. Every time a
participant interacted with the system their input was saved in the database of the system.
After the three-week period, a second semi-structured interview was conducted with each
participant. The purpose of this second interview was to discuss the different information
sources that they received via the 6 incoming messages: what information sources they liked
and disliked, and what messages they found most credible and useful. Participants were first
asked questions reflecting their use of mobile devices as a supportive tool, followed by

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questions about how the three different sources of information were interpreted and used to
reach watering decisions. Each of the 6 messages was discussed one by one. To remind the
participants about the messages, small laminated cards displaying physical illustrations of
each message were presented during the questioning. Finally, the possible benefits and
drawbacks of the SGW Advisor system were discussed. The system was tested on both
smartphones and on personal computers with particular aims in mind. For the participants
with smartphones, the system was tested to obtain reflections on the usage of the system on a
mobile device and to see whether the participants found it persuading on this kind of device
(Fogg, 2003). For the participants that used the system on a personal computer, the purpose
was to obtain their reflections on using the system on a desktop and their thoughts about the
disconnect between sitting at the desktop and doing the work in their garden (Pearce &
Murphy, 2010). The participants used the system almost every day and each participant
remembered to respond on the 6 incoming messages.

4 Design (Or What you did Part One)

Design of the SGW Advisor prototype

The SGW Advisor application is designed with a ‘home screen’ as its main window. The
main window contains four menus items: Weather, Schedule, Advisor and Daily Input – see
Figure 1. Weather menu
The Weather menu provides information about the local weather for the weather station that
the user lives closest to. It gives specific information about the current temperature, latest
rainfall and humidity – see Figure 1. It also provides information about the last 2 days
min/max temperature, total rainfall, evaporation and average humidity.
Schedule menu
The Schedule menu gives information to the user about their current watering schedule for
the next 3 days. The watering schedule is set initially by the user and in agreement with the
actual water restrictions in the current state (Melbourne Water Restrictions, 2011). Users are
also provided with the information about the level of the current water restrictions and how
these restrictions apply to the different watering methods (hand, manual or automatic
watering).
Advisor menu
The Advisor menu shows an overview over the incoming messages from the system. The
unread message(s) from the system are shown with an icon of an unopened envelope and read

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message(s) are shown as an opened envelope. By clicking on each message, the message
opens and the reader is able to read the content of the message. This menu was the most
important part of the system as the incoming messages allowed users to explore the three
information sources. Daily Input menu The Daily Input menu is where the user is able to feed
information into the system such as whether they have been watering the current day or not.
The information is sent to a database, which is described in details in a later section. Three
information sources The three different sources of information explored in this study were
information about expert’s choice, garden community and weather – see Figure 2. Figure 2.
Icons for the three information sources:
Expert’s Choice
The expert choice presented scientific weather data (Bureau of Meteorology, 2011),
combined it with information from a knowledge database (SGW) and provided information in
the inbox as to whether to skip, add or follow the regular watering schedule. The Figure 1.
SGW Advisor showing the home screen (left) and the four subsequent screens. 246 messages
were sent to the participants from an animated water drop, named Watie (Figure 2).
Garden Community This relates to the messages about what other gardeners are planning or
already doing in their gardens. The information could be whether the majority of the
community wanted to skip or add an extra watering to their regular watering schedule.
Weather Messages received in the inbox were the scientific weather information from the
Bureau of Meteorology (BoM). The information provided in the weather messages were
objective and accurate information, in comparison to the other sources mentioned above. This
message was provided to bring a diversity of information. The six incoming messages During
the three weeks of the study, the participants received six different messages in the Advisor
inbox from the three different sources. The six messages contained advice on whether to add
an extra watering day or to skip a watering day compared to the current schedule. Every time
a message was sent to the Advisor inbox, the participants also received a SMS on their
mobile phone. Fogg conducted a healthcare study in which he mentioned that using SMS
messages to notifying people, has a great potential to trigger them to a proposed behaviour
(Fogg & Allen, 2009). The three messages shown in Figure 3 are the messages that displayed
only one information source in each message. These messages were from the weather,
expert’s choice and the garden community, respectively.

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5 Implementation (Or What you did Part Two)

We are following a seven chapter model, which gives you a couple of chapters in the middle
for the “What you did” part, but if you really think it is better to have eight chapters, that is
fine too. If you go for many fewer than seven, you have probably missed something, and if
you have many more than seven, you may be going a bit fine-grained.

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6 Testing and Evaluation

Testing

Selected coding techniques from Grounded Theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1990) were used
to analyse the data. These were applied by the first author of this paper. Twenty audio
recordings of 10 pre- and 10 post-interview responses were transcribed. During this
process, significant points made by participants were marked in the style of Open
Coding. In total, 273 such significant elements were identified and subsequently
categorized as 72 different phenomena. By using Axial Coding, connections between the
different phenomena were made and formed into 12 categories, nine of which we discuss
in the next section. These were then organised into four themes. Each of these themes is
central in the analysis and is presented in the final ‘Discussion’ section.

Evaluation

Reactions to using the system One of the research questions was to explore whether
gardeners found the mobile device supportive for their watering decisions. For this, the
incoming 6 messages during the case study were used as a basis for discussion, focusing
on whether they found the mobile device useful or not. The results from these
discussions are described in this section, and discussed further in the ‘Discussion’
section. Actual vs. Preferred platform Out of the 10 participants in the study, 5
participants used the system on a mobile platform and the rest on a personal computer.
The participants were asked to discuss the platform they used during the case study. Nine
out of 10 participants preferred the system on a mobile device. One of the participants
expressed: “I found it very useful to have something in my hand and mobile. I could see
it on my mobile, instead of looking it all up on my laptop. So you have the whole world
in your hand - a gardener would always be outside, so I found it more useful for me.”
Another participant who tried the system on his laptop said: “I found it boring to do it on
the computer. It would be more handy and mobile using the system on a phone than the
computer.”

This is where you will present your results and provide an evaluation of your solution
against the problem. Try and structure your results in a meaningful way. Try and help
the reader. Do not just take some numbers, load them into a statistics package such as
SPSS and then present every statistical analysis technique in the known world. Use
appropriate methods for analysing, presenting and summarising your data.

The participants agreed that the preferred platform in the case study should be on a mobile
platform rather than on a personal computer. Skip, Add or Both The question was discussed
as to whether it was valuable to receive advisory information about when to add an extra
watering or not. Nine out of 10 participants wanted the system to advise them on when to add
an extra watering session if their plants needed water. A participant said that both notification
methods were useful because: “...even in summer you sometimes need to water an extra time,
or skip a watering suddenly because of heavy rain.” If we look at the number of times the
participants tended to add or skip a watering day according to the provided messages in the

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study, we see a progression in the three weeks of study. The number of skipped watering days
increased from 4 in the first week to 9 in the last week of the study. Meanwhile, the number
of added watering days decreased from 6 in the first week, to 2 in the last week of the study.
The participants tend to skip more watering-days and added fewer watering-days – this was
possibly because they learned to understand the messages better with time. Push vs Pull
information The question of whether the participants wanted the information to be pushed to
them, or they wanted to pull it from the system, was discussed. Nine out of 10 participants
liked to be notified and reminded when there was a message in the system. The notification
through SMS was for the majority of the participants a good method and triggered them go
online and check their message. One participant expressed: “SMS was very good; I really like
the way it reminded me about to check my system for messages.” The SMS messages were
good reminders for the participants to act and make decisions they possibly would not have
been taken if the messages were not pushed to them. Automatic vs manual system. The
participants were asked about what type of watering system the SGW Advisor system would
be more suitable for. The majority of the participants thought that the system would work
best in gardens with manual watering systems rather than automatic watering systems
because the gardeners would not have to make an effort each time they have to skip a
watering: “I think it would work best on a manual system than an automatic system because
you don’t need to switch the system on and off, and it could be problematic.” Educational
tool Eight out of 10 participants saw the system as an educational tool. One of the novice
gardeners mentioned: Four interesting themes emerged from our analysis. Even though these
themes were elicited from empirical data about gardeners, we suggest they may also be
relevant to designing persuasive mobile technology in other domains where consumption of
resources is critical.
Discussion
These themes relate to the participants’ own judgements, misunderstanding messages, desires
for tailored information, and the impact of mixed sources of information. Own Judgment
While discussing the three different sources of information, 6 out of the 10 participants
mentioned that their own judgment had the biggest impact when making any decisions
whether to add, skip or keep following the normal schedule. It appeared that the three
information sources were not determining decision outcomes, either individually or in any
combination. Instead, some of the participants expressed that the messages they received only
reinforced their own judgment of what to do. What happened can be described as: Own

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judgment  Behaviour Where the desired result could be described as: Own Judgment +
(w+e+c)  New judgment  Behaviour where w, e and c refer to the weather, the expert and
the community, respectively. A study conducted by Nansen et al. also showed that the expert
gardeners felt their intimate and detailed knowledge about water usage in their own gardens
was always greater than any information that could be provided by a generic system (Nansen
et al., 2012). This adds another challenging issue, to look more specifically at the different
levels of gardeners, from novice to intermediate to expert. Different sources of information
could be given to the different levels of gardeners; such as novice gardeners receiving
information only from the garden community and the expert, where the garden experts
received information only from the weather source (BoM).

Misunderstanding of messages
Some of the participants in the study found some of the messages received via the mobile device
hard to understand. This would severely reduce the possibility for the information to persuade.
Fogg (2003) addresses this as the Prominence-Interpretation Theory. He argues that to get a
credibility assessment both prominence (the user is notified and understands the information)
and interpretation (the user makes a judgment about it) has to happen (Fogg, 2003). Therefore,
the information provided to the user from the system has to be understandable such it can be
interpreted and be able to persuade the user to make a judgment (Brewer & Stern, 2005).
Therefore, words like “low humidity” should be explained in further details so that the user
understands what is meant.
More tailored information
The participants in the study wanted more tailored information in the messages they received,
such as information about their water-usage and rainfall measures in their own garden. With
more tailored information based on their own water-consumption and rainfall in their garden,
they might have focused more attention on the messages and hence process the information
more deeply and be more likely to be persuaded by a plausible message. This supports Fogg’s
theory about credibility. If the information is perceived as credible, it will have increased power
to persuade. According to Fogg, credibility especially matters in HCI when systems like the SGW
Advisor has to instruct or advice users, report measurements, or provide information and
analysis (Fogg, 2003). Therefore, a focus on more information in the messages, such as
contextualized weather information in suburbs and information about the smaller garden
communities with similar plants in their neighbourhood, could be more relevant and persuasive
to the user.
Mixed sources of information

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Using Mobile Phones for Promoting Water Conservation

Better impact Nine out of 10 participants expressed that they found the mixed messages – with
information from more than one information source – very interesting. The ability to
understand these mixed-source messages was considered to be greater. This suggests that the
probability of perceiving the mixed message as credible support to making a new judgment was
greater. However, the use of too much information from different sources in a message
sometimes lead to users feeling frustrated and failing to understand the message. It sometimes
resulted in no decision being taken – or little influence of the information sources. It may
therefore also be important to consider which type of gardener the message is sent to and how
much information is needed to persuade. For instance, an expert gardener might need more
facts, especially from different information sources to be convinced, where a novice gardener
might be 251 persuaded with a single message from one information source.

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7 Conclusions

This paper has explored how to design mobile technology to persuade gardeners to use water
more carefully. The design, implementation and deployment of a mobile application in the
form of a prototype have been described, discussed and several themes have been elicited.
Each of the ten gardeners in our study found the prototype to be a supportive tool to use in
their gardening and perceived the three provided sources of information as useful in their
watering practice. However, results indicate that gardeners tended to trust their own judgment
on whether to water over and above the sources of information provided by the prototype. A
lack of trust in the information sources was shown and the gardeners demanded more
personal, contextualized information to be able to regard the information sources as credible.
The gardeners found the messages in the prototype that drew on mixed sources of
information as most credible, and generally more information in the received message led to
greater trust. Although this was a limited study of just 10 participants, the results taken at face
value suggest that a mobile device could serve to change gardeners’ watering behaviour. It is
hoped these themes will help fellow researchers when designing mobile technology with the
aim of using information sources to persuade people's pro-environmental or resource-
conserving behaviour. By pushing tailored information from mixed sources, the participants
in this study were more open to persuasion.

7.1 Future Work

As this study has revealed, there is a possibility to persuade people to be more conscious in
reducing the amount of unnecessary water usage through using a mobile application as a
supportive tool in their gardens. The indicative evidence from this study is currently being
applied in a second investigation focusing on electricity usage. We will see whether the
theories can be applied in this domain and whether there are any differences when persuade
people’s pro-environmental behaviour in use of electricity.

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Appendix A Personal Reflection

A.1 Reflection on Project

The project is aimed at information people to develop and device new techniques of
conserving water.The information gathered reflex what has neen happening on the
ground with the informed individuals.

A.2 Personal Reflection on the project

I report a design investigation that seeks to help people to conserve water in their homes
through the use of mobile technology. To persuade people to use water more wisely, one
approach is to give them tailored information about their water use and about other people’s
usage. Investigating this approach, a mobile application was implemented to explore the role
of three different sources of information (weather, expert’s advice and community
information). Based on the evaluation, several themes for designing mobile technology for
gardeners were identified.

Appendix B Ethics Documentation

B.1 Ethics Confirmation

mailto:[email protected]

Appendix C Other Appendices

The three mixed messages

The 4th, 5th and 6th message the participants received in the study were each a combination
of two information sources. Participants found them very useful and to one of the messages a
participant expressed: “This message made me more comfortable about skipping the
watering, by seeing information about what other people did, and the rainfall number.” The
6th message was also rated to be the most believable message and 9 out of 10 participants
followed its advice and chose to skip a watering.

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