Arizona’s water crisis is real, and ASU’s Water Innovation Initiative built a chatbot to raise awareness among residents.
The problem wasn’t reach, it was trust. Answers came back as dense, unreadable paragraphs residents couldn’t act on, and as an ASU product every response had to clear strict credibility and brand bars. Awareness only counts if people read it, believe it, and do something with it.
I made the response format the center of gravity. 15+ Resident interviews and a heuristic audit of the conversational UI pointed to the same thing: the content was right, the packaging killed it.
I restructured monolithic answers into scannable responses with clear next moves:
- Tell me more, Sources, Next Steps on every reply.
- Concise, credible, and actionable by default.
The lever was learnability, not visuals.
Presented at the initiative’s March 2024 all hands to ASU authorities and residents.
Across 80 testers:
- 56 engaged directly with the new response format.
- 38 (48%) asked follow up questions, a signal they were actually reading and trusting the answers.
- Users who tuned out dropped from 14 to 9.
