Eco Everyday
As part of a Product Design Course, I designed an app which prompts users to complete easy and small eco-friendly tasks so they feel a sense of empowerment and accomplishment while helping the planet. The app also has an education component which informs people on sustainability topics in an easy and approachable way.
I have been working towards living a more sustainable lifestyle and wanted to take all of my research and learnings from my own sustainability journey and put them into an app.
My original idea for the app was to create a design solution that helps you track and offset you carbon footprint.
However, after doing some user research, I found out that people are not interested in making drastic changes to their life in order to be more environmentally friendly, and they also are not interested in spending more money or more time to lead a more eco-friendly life. After compiling all of my user research, and framing my design challenge, I came up with these ‘How Might We’ questions.
I conducted three usability tests. One remote and two in person. I gathered the following feedback based off of observation and feedback directly from the users.
To make the navigation of tab bar more clear, I changed the Actions icon, changed the icon and text color of the active tab, and added a green bar to show which tab you are currently on.
To make the prototype more usable and the check boxes easier to press, I expanded the clickable area to the whole box.
To make the closing of the overlays more clear, I changed the swipe down bar to an exit button on all the overlays.
Last, I added a gamification aspect to the design. It is something I had considered early on, but decided not to implement at first to keep to app simple. However, two of the participants said something like this would motivate them to use the app more.
In the end, this was a good way of adding something different to the Home screen as well to differentiate it from the Actions screen.
It surprised me that the main issue I had with usability testing was lack of content. Participants did not like that some buttons did not work, and that there was a lot of generic filler content.
In some ways, I think it was good that this was the biggest issue, because there were few major usability issues. However, I wonder if the lack of content was a distraction for the participants and if my feedback would have been different from more content.
Since the testing prototype was only a mid-fidelity mockup, I still had some work to do on the UI. The key changes I made to the UI for the high fidelity mockup were shifting the color scheme to darker and muted greens to increase contrast, add some variation, and to make the design feel more calm.
I also changed the tab bar icons to SF symbols for consistency and familiarly.
