Carbon Tracker
Enabling users to Track and Manage their daily carbon emissions to lead a sustainable life.
Overview
Indiana University has three grand challenges Precision Health Initiatives, Environmental Change, and Addiction Crisis. We as a team of four (Team LIMA) decided to work on climate change.
Timeline
2 Months
Role
UX Researcher/Designer
Team member
3 UX designers
1 UX Researcher
My Contributions
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Conducted secondary research to narrow the scope of the project.
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Recruited participants for interviews and contextual inquiry.
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Conducted user interviews and analyzed the data to find common codes and themes.
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Conceptualized and visualized different features required to address the problem.
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Assisted in constructing user flows and information architecture to build wireframes.
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Designed UI screens for the solution.
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Conducted usability testing with expert users to understand drawbacks of the product.
Soution-at-a-glance
Problem Statement
It is difficult for people to make sustainable choices even if they want, which affects climate change.
How can an individual be aware of their impact on climate, and how to minimize it?
Solution
Carbon Tracker helps users monitor their daily carbon emissions and provides tailored recommendations unique to each user, offering a comprehensive approach to reducing their overall carbon footprint.
Key Features of the solution
Onboarding and task Completion
After a user has completed the onboarding process that collects personal, vehicle, and home appliance data, an Action Plan will be provided. It empowers users to make informed decisions that promote sustainability and help reduce their overall carbon footprint by consistently monitoring carbon emissions.
Creating a new Campaign
Climate Change Activists (CCA) can create and promote campaigns using the application. Users can register once the campaign is posted in the campaign section. As a result of this collaborative approach, the application fosters a sense of community and shared responsibility.
Design Process
The project was divided into five phases, which are listed below. The actual procedure, however, was not as straightforward as the diagram below suggests. To arrive at the final solution, many iterations between the phases were required.
Empathize
Secondary Review
Observations
Interviews
Define
Ideate
Prototype
Test
Affinity Mapping
Brainstorming
Sketches
Heuristic Evaluation
Empathy Mapping
Competetive Analysis
Wireframe
Think-aloud Session
Personas
Storyboarding
Hi-Fi Prototype
Internal Walkthrough
Research Methodologies
User Interviews
Who: 8 participants between ages 25 - 45.
How: Conducted Interviews via zoom and google meet.
Why: To gain an understanding of the user’s awareness of sustainability and their pain points.
Observations
Who: Climate change activist and general target user group.
Where: Community tree plantation and clean-up drives for 30 minutes each.
Why: To gain insights into the user’s behavior toward sustainability.
Secondary Review
What: Scholarly research papers and articles by US EIA.
How: Mapping the insights through the themes emerging from primary research.
Why: To get qualitative data and validate primary research findings.
Research Insights
Users are unable to see and understand the impact they have on the environment.
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Users are unable to stay steady on the path of sustainability because of No Accountability.
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Users Lack the Motivation to engage in a sustainable lifestyle because of lack of access to information.
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The majority of the users have not adopted the online measurement tool to calculate their carbon footprint.
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Lack of awareness of the effects of carbon emissions and elements that contribute to this.
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Users might work towards sustainability if there is a rewards system is attached to the process.
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Personas
The data gathered during the empathize phase revealed two types of users. There are two types of users: one who is fully informed about climate change and the other who is partially informed. They both want to make sustainable choices, but their requirements differ. These findings form the foundation of our personas.
Problem Statement
How can we enable and motivate individuals to track their carbon emissions and manage their impact on the climate?
Brainstorming
We held three brainstorming sessions to generate as many as 60 Ideas as possible. The following sessions were held:
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Individual Session – Each team member came up with 10 different ideas.
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Team Session - We shared our ideas from the individual sessions and then generated 25 ideas as a group.
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Shared Session - For this session, we collaborated with other teams from our class and our interview participants to generate 25 more ideas.
The exchange of ideas during brainstorming sessions was critical in determining our design direction and key features of carbon Tracker.
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Storyboards
We created two storyboards to validate our proposed solutions. These storyboards helped us visualize how the solution would address the problems found.
Zen Chung's Use case of Carbon Tracker
Andrew's Use case of Carbon Tracker
The Solution
Constraints
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Making the solution economical.
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Should not be technically complex.
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Users don't have to perform any manual calculations.
Requirements
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Ensure that users are aware of their carbon emissions.
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Making sure the users are able to track their emissions.
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Ensure users complete tasks from the action items list.
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Keeping the users motivated to continue their sustainability journey.
Features
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Detecting individual Carbon emission levels based on the user data collected during onboarding.
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Action Items - The application will recommend a list of activities the user needs to complete to offset their carbon footprint.
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Campaigns - Collaboration with non-profits to arrange campaigns to create awareness.
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Rewards - Instead of a traditional reward system, we choose to provide users with sustainability certificates.
Infromation Architechture
The features discussed above are expanded upon in information architecture.
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It was a deliberate choice to allow the user to enter information about their emissions manually to cater to a larger target audience.
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In addition, users who already have a home automation system can scan the QR code to connect it to the application.
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Integrating the accountability feature with the help of non-profit collaboration was critical to keep users engaged and motivated to live a sustainable life.
Wireframes
We decided to begin wireframes with paper prototypes, and we used priority triangles to help us optimize information based on business and user needs.
Before designing our low-fidelity wireframes in Balsamiq, we performed an internal walkthrough to identify any issues we found with the wireframes.
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Testing and Evaluation
To ensure the efficacy of our design, we carried out a series of internal tests among our design team members, as well as usability testing involving both novice and expert users. Through these evaluations, we were able to gain insights into the design's shortcomings and weaknesses, which we want to rectify any issues and improve its overall functionality in future iterations.
Problem Identified: One of the key challenges identified during the onboarding process was the need for users to complete three different steps, providing personal, vehicle, and appliance data to accurately calculate their carbon footprint. This process was found to be excessively technical and time-consuming, leading to a poor user experience and inaccurate data.
Solution: Users who have smart home appliances can now simply scan a QR code from their smart home management system hub, which allows the application to automatically connect to all devices within their home automation network.
Long onboarding
The onboarding is a 3 step process which requires alot of user input, which users were not satisfied with.
Problem Identified: The customized action plan, designed to guide users in reducing their carbon footprint, appeared as a simple checklist to users, who were unable to access the task descriptions and associated details necessary to complete an assigned task.
Solution: The action plan can be redesigned as a roadmap or journey map. This new format will enable users to see the steps required to reduce their carbon footprint, with a call-to-action button that provides access to detailed descriptions and additional information for each task.
Action Plan
The customized action plan is designed such that it looks like a checklist, which confused the users.
Link to full Figma prototype
What Worked?
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Infographics: The graph assisted our target users in understanding their environmental impact by clearly indicating their daily carbon emissions, and the KPI encouraged and motivated them to complete their weekly tasks.
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Action Items: Providing users with action items ensured that the users know how to offset their carbon footprint.
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Collaboration: Combing action items with non-profit organizations increases user awareness and resolves user motivation issues by giving the user a sense of community engagement rather than working alone on a wicked problem.
My Learnings
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Narrowing the scope of the problem space: Climate change is a severe problem, and people have been working for years to find solutions. It was necessary to narrow the project's scope to an area where we can make a difference.
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Insight-driven rather than process driven: Rather than simply following the same 5-step design process for the project, it is more important to make decisions based on insights gathered from users, stakeholders, and secondary research.
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Problem-focused rather than feature-focused: Rather than creating an application with only cool features, the application you create must solve the problem you set out to solve.
Next Steps
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Improve the onboarding process by integrating scanning of QR code for users who have smart home appliances from their smart home management system hub, which allows the application to automatically connect to all devices within their home automation network.
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Redesigned action plan to better represent different task the user has to perform through the week. This new format should enable users to see the steps required to reduce their carbon footprint, with a call-to-action button that provides access to detailed descriptions and additional information for each task.