ECOnomics was an app that was designed to encourage users to recycle with the incentive of rewards
It was created during the Spring semester, with the objective of learning how to implement the user research process
Team Leader 🕵️
User Research, Visual design, Prototyping, Usability Testing, Pitching
♻️ This app was created in the Fall of 2021 based off of pitch prompts that students found intriguing and wanted to work on. The concept of ECOnomics came from the impending doom of the environment and how people can obtain incentives if they wanted to reduce, reuse and recycle.
🌍 When we first began our research for this process, we analyzed what the users end goals would be and what their purpose could be when they were recycling. We began our discussion and decided what would be best for our users through our research meetings online
✏️ They are archetypes based on the behavior patterns we uncovered during our research, interview and affinity mapping phases. Personas allow us to understand our users goals in specific contexts which is critical for ideating and validating design concepts, a portion of the modeling phase. From the personas we’ve developed below our team will next define a list of requirements as we move onto the modeling phase.
📍 We learned from our research that we had a specific group of people that we were trying to reach. This helped us come up with our problem statement.
🌍 Problem Statement: The environmental health has been decaying for the past couple decades. We want to provide a resource that minimizes waste because there are no adequate ways of finding resources for recycling centers which will help users reach their goal of recycling more.
The problem the company is facing is poor waste management. The app is intended to get consumers to recycle more throughout their daily lives.
Our app will allow users to recycle more by showing them where recycling centers are, how and what can be recycled, how much they have helped their environment through recycling, and by provided them with rewards and incentives with greater efficiency. Our app will combat issues such as showing all recycling centers nearby, a simple and user friendly reward system. This will improve our app and make it stand out more on the market to draw in new users.
🔎 Important features: The user thought that important features such as a recycling code to know how to recycle certain items would be helpful to allow them to gain more rewards when recycling.
🚴 Incentives: Users we're looking for a way to gain value through recycling. This made us look into companies that may pay a part in recycling incentives and would like to contribute to the user's incentives.
🌍 Location services: One of the main complaints that we heard from our users were the fact that there was no way to really recycle. We wanted to implement a way for users to be able to find the nearest recycling location to them.
✏️ Once we established our app vision we wanted to put into place our most valuable findings. This helped us collaborate and create a prototype that aligned with our research and user interviews.
♻️ Our app will allow users to recycle more by showing them where recycling centers are, how and what can be recycled, how much they have helped their environment through recycling, and by provided them with rewards and incentives with greater efficiency. Our app will combat issues such as showing all recycling centers nearby, a simple and user friendly reward system. This will improve our app and make it stand out more on the market to draw in new users.
📱Once we completed our research, problem statement and established our most valuable findings, we then created our designs and a prototype. We had two rough prototypes before we finalized our last prototype.
🌍 The research that was completed throughout the semester of this project was very important in the way we as users viewed the app. My team and I had an impression of what we thought we would want the app to be, but then we shifted gears majorly after many of our user interviews.
♻️ We learned that users want to recycle, if they're taught how. And we also learned that users actually care a lot more about the environment than we think. Incentives will help the user become a better climate advocate, but instructions on how to recycle and where was also just as important.