Sustainability App Case Study

Roxana (me)

Overview

Meet the team

This design case study takes you through what was the final project at ”Scoala informală de IT”, a 4 month UX bootcamp that I participated in. The challenge was to develop a digital solution that would help people who are interested in living sustainably do sustainable behaviors more frequently and easily.

Together with my teammates, Anca Ciubotaru and Dragoș Moldoveanu, we unlocked the particularities of our users during the user research phase, and after obtaining a good amount of insights about their needs, we each designed our own solution.

My concept is a mobile app called ”WorldShare”, that allows users to create their own team with their friends and family. The goal is for each team member to enter their own sustainable actions, and together each of their action contributes to color the Earth, a symbol of lowering the group’s carbon footprint.

How we defined the problem space

We started our journey of defining our problem space by first setting a couple of research questions.

How do we define sustainability?
What are sustainable behaviors and how do they emerge in people?
What facilities exist in our area of interest (Romania) to do sustainable actions?
What are other digital products that people are already using for living sustainably?

These first questions we were able to answer to by doing desk research, by reading articles on sustainability, sustainability in Romania, and behavioral science, as well as looking into existent sustainability solutions.

We first defined what sustainable behaviors and how they can be classified. Afterwards, we found help classifying these behaviors into 4 categories, consisting of 72 distinct behaviors. These are consisted of sustainable behaviors related to goods, transport, local products, and activism.

We also found what is already know in specialty literature about what are the general individual differences that makes some people live more environmentally conscientious:

attitude and concern about the environment
women are more likely to engage in SB (mixed results)
higher socioeconomic status is positively associated with SB
younger people are more likely to engage in SB
Big 5 personality differences - agreableness, openness to experience, extraversion, honesty/humility, conscientiousness

We then managed to find two behavioral theories to explain how sustainable behaviors emerge, in order to set a set of evidence based expectations further about our users. Some of the drivers of sustainable behaviors are listed below.

concern for the environment
perceived behavioral control
perceived consumer effectiveness for the environmental behavior
social norms for the environmental behavior
personal norms
ethical obligation ideologies
knowledge about environmental issues and perceived risk of environmental consequences
motives - people engage in SB more if it is cheap, easy, rewarded

How we found our users

The next step in our research journey was to send out a survey, that would help us get a general idea about who our users are, what sustainable behaviors they prioritize or are of interest to them and if they are already using any digital solutions to help them. A second goal of this survey was to recruit future participants in our interviews.

Our respondents were Romanian people aged 22-50 years old, living in an urban environment, and we found out they are mainly interested in sustainable transportation, recycling, and purchasing local products. We recruited them by sharing the survey form to sustainability communities and our personal acquaintances that are interested in sustainability.

The graph below shows what our users are doing already to live more sustainably. Other questions of the survey regard how they do sustainable behaviors, what are the barriers of doing them, what other tools are they using and what would they need to do these behaviors more easily.

How we conducted interviews and found insight

Next, to obtain an in-depth understanding of our users and their relationship with sustainable behaviors, we conducted 9 interviews. A few of the questions set in the interview guide were the following:

Can you tell us about your general experience with doing sustainable actions so far?
What motivates you to do these behaviors?
What didn’t work for you and what did you learn from this experience?
What would you need to do these behaviors more easily?

Take a quick look at one of our affinity map variations that we did together using quotes from all of our interviewees. I could say working with the data was the most challenging moment of our teamwork, as we each interviewed different people and it took us a long time to give meaning and to organise all of their insights into different categories. Luckily, we asked for help from our class mentor and she helped us pass the state when we were overwhelmed and find our path to the next step.

What we learned

Our users are mainly young people living in an urban environment.

They are inspired to live environmentally conscientious by their love of nature, desire to be good and moral people, and understanding the negative effects that unsustainable living has on the planet.

The aspects of sustainability that they perceive are the most important and that they act upon are consuming goods, resources and food responsibly, recycling, and buying local products.

Despite the drive to live sustainably, they feel like it’s sometimes hard to follow sustainable behaviors due to insufficient infrastructure facilities to do so, the higher price of sustainable products and miscellaneous, and the overall mistrust in their individual actions’ impact for the environment.

They feel like they would need more inspiration from similar people, and this is how some of them started being interested in sustainability in the first place, to be reminded about doing sustainable actions so that they don’t get caught in everyday life and forget.

How we came up with ideas

Me and my team then took the most present needs of our users that we assessed during the affinity mapping and had a brainstorming session, during which we tried to stimulate our creativity and come up with all sorts of solutions to our formulated „How-might-we” questions.

How I got closer to my concept

My solution stems from the users’ needs to feel better about doing sustainable behaviors, to be influenced positively by similar people, to be reminded of doing sustainable actions without the app being intrusive, and to see the impact and meaning of their small actions.

For that, I decided to create a mobile app that would help them keep track of their behavior, and to interact with other people. First, I analysed the market to see what other popular apps of this type already exist and how they are working.

I compared JouleBug!, Ailuna, AWorld, and susGain, by using them and analyzing their common and distinctive features. Here are some images from these apps:

What I decided to design

After analyzing other solutions, I decided to adopt some of the features that I found fit for my users’ needs, such as fast logging of the actions, action suggestions at hand, and collaborative environment.

Seeing other beautiful apps that applied the features I initially thought of successfully and even more gamified, it was a challenge for me to come up with something original. The project requirements stated that the app must have only two functionalities, so I couldn't just add more to benchmark. I am also new in graphic design and my animation and graphic skills are limited, and we had zero funds as it was a learning project, not a paid one. But, I overcame these thoughts by prioritizing our users’ needs that we assessed in the first phase, and to keep it a simple solution for people to integrate it easily in their daily lives.

I wanted teams to visualize their collective and individual progress, so I decided to give it a graphic feature in order for them to connect with their impact.

As my users stated a need to connect with other people and some of them told us that they even started to do sustainable behaviors and are thriving to do them despite the pain points thanks to their social group, I decided to remove competition and let them collaborate and inspire each other.

I started by doodling how the main screens would look. The app will have two functionalities: logging actions, and community.

The logging actions feature gives the user the option of either check off actions from suggestions, or search for an action manually from our database.

Every user would sign up in a group of their real life friends/family, based on a code they receive from the person creating the group. The community feature allows them to see each time a member does an action, as well as chatting with each other.

The Earth image would color a little more everytime any of the members log in an action, and the tree image would color gradually after each of the individual user logs in an action.

How I refined my concept

Before diving into wireframing, I conducted the concept test with two participants at a time, in person. I presented how the app works and an image of the 4 main screens for them to get the look and feel of it, then I proceeded with open questions and discussions, while I took notes and asked some additional questions if the participants ran out of ideas.

What I found out during the concept test

the users are mostly motivated by the social aspect of the concept
the users are unmotivated by the individual progress graph, and by numeric data
the users want to not spend a lot of time to use the app
the users want to see the progress, they would be unmotivated to see the progress graph not move

What I decided to improve in my design

eliminate the graph for individual progress or change how it looks (the users didn t identify with the images used and it doesn't motivate them)
let users set a CO2 goal and add as many team members they feel in order to set an attainable goal
use as few numerical data, and let them concentrate on the visual and keep it simple

Diving into Figma

In order to make sure I will keep a congruent design, I first created a small design system:

I first designed the main screens, then developed from there all the other interactions.

Afterwards, I designed and prototyped the login flow, together with a demo that explains how the app works. This would be the onboarding process before using the app.

view

How I tested it

When the app was done and I checked that the prototype works well, I proceeded to test it out.

I invited 5 of the people that completed the initial survey to take a look at the Figma prototype. They had two tasks to complete:

to go through the demo and login process
to log in a sustainable action

What I found out:

the demo explanation bubbles were hard to find, and it there were errors in pressing “next”
some of the “next” buttons in the onboarding process were in different places on the screen depending on what content that screen displayed. I put them like that in order for the individual screens to look good and fit all of my content, but turns out, the users were confused as to where to press next when the position changed

What I changed:

First, I modified the demo screens so that it indicates that the screen is not available for interacting and it is destined to explain what happens. The user can click on the bubble to go next, they don't have to press the small button.

Next, I rearranged the screens where they select their preferred actions, so that the next and back buttons are in the middle bottom part of the screen.

Before:

After:

What I took from it

For me, this project was a springboard for learning the basics of UX Design. From research to prototyping, it immersed me into the world of UX as well as showing me how I work best. Sometimes it was hard to keep up with new information, but I enjoyed the challenge and the theme of the project, as sustainability is one of my personal interests.

Working with Anca and Dragoș was one of my favorite parts of the process, as we all came from different backgrounds and had a lot to learn from each other, but shared a common energy and seriosity in approaching the challenges.

My biggest takeaways from this experience would be to take everything step by step, keep a clean work and to leave spare time and space for improvements. I am excited to apply everything I learned into my future projects.