a UX Case Study
My Role:
UX Designer & Researcher
The Team:
Haley Hetrick, Sara Howard, Maddie DeWitt, Breana Ingram
Canva | Figma | Google Suite | Invision | Miro
Step 1: Find a market opportunity. Step 2: Build a product to fill that need.
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Over a span of 2 and 1/2 weeks, my team of 4 UX Designers ideated a product concept, made our way through the design process, and created a high-fidelity design to put in front of testers.
We chose to design a mobile app with a sustainability focus that provides accurate information, celebrates our user's successes, and creates intuitive experiences to help the user feel empowered as they build habits toward a more sustainable future.
Don't have time to read? Watch this project being presented instead!
Jump to 2:45 to see me speak
The Brainstorm
How did we get to GAIA?
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First, we had to align on an idea. With four designer cooks in the proverbial kitchen, we collectively knew that, whatever we decided on, we needed to get there as a team. So, to get us started, we agreed to each come to the discussion with a few ideas. After a round of dot voting, we narrowed our choices down to four.
As you can see, we came to a 50/50 split on our final choice. While I was pretty fond of my concept to create an app focused on reintroducing native plants to gardeners' yards, I cast my vote for a sustainability concept, and was happy when later discussions included some of my original gardening ideas.
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After further talks that included recognizing the current market saturation for mindfulness apps, we chose to move forward with an app focused on helping users build healthy habits for a more sustainable future.
Empathize & Research
With our concept decided upon, it was time to collect the data that would shape our work.
Survey
When writing our survey questions, we wanted to gain a wholistic understanding of the modern individual and 1) their current familiarity with sustainability and sustainable practices, 2) what they would want to learn about, 3) how they learn, and 4) what resources they're currently using. After distributing it through our networks, we received over 50 responses.
Key Insights:​
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The largest motivators for individuals looking to adopt more sustainablie habits are:
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Quality of life for future generations (80%)
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Health and Wellbeing (76%)
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Environmental Concerns (67%)
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The most common challanges people face to adopting more sustainable habits are:
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Financial Considerations (57%)
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Wading through Information (57%)
Proto-persona
Our proto-persona came together fairly easily since we all had similar thoughts about who our initial user was likely to be. We felt they would most likely be a young female leading a busy life, with concerns about the future, and who consumes most of their info via social media leaving her with doubts about the reliability of the information she receives.
Affinity Diagram & Key Insights
While our survey was out in our networks collecting results, each member of the team committed to speaking with two users for a total of eight interviews. While many of my suspicions were confirmed during these interviews (such as people using social media platforms to receive most of their information, and the burnout and disillusionment that comes with the difficulties of discerning misinformation from the truth), I was also surprised to see that some users were willing to be inconvenienced if a better solution was available to them.
"We're all told, oh, you need to act now. But there's not really proper resources of where to find ways to be more sustainable that are in line with what people can afford."
Competitor Analysis
Through the info we received from the survey and interviews, we were able to identify some of the lead competitors we would be up against.
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We learned that TikTok is where a lot of people consume information. Our user knows it’s riddled with opinion disguised as fact, but it’s delivered in a fun, engaging way, and frequently presents trends that raise awareness and provide solutions to problems they either didn’t know were a problem, or weren’t sure how to address.
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Commons enables the user to link a credit card to their service, and provides a dashboard to show the real carbon footprint of an individual's spending.
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CompostNow helps out by offering composting services for your home and business by bringing you a bin to fill with compostables and allowing you to choose the frequency that they come swap it out.
Define
With the initial research done, our concept had grown stronger but was still amorphous. It was time to nail down some core pieces of who we were going to be and allow the data to shape our product.
Persona
First, who is our user? With our interviews and survey results in hand, we were able to finalize our persona.
Amelia is young, single, and invested in the world around her, but she’s exhausted and jaded by all the misinformation out there. She’s busy taking on life and while she wants to change her habits for the better, she doesn’t have the time or energy to go digging for accurate information.
Problem Statement & User Insight
Then, what issues is the user dealing with and why?
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Problem Statement:
Environmentally conscious young adults interested in adopting and building sustainable habits struggle to implement eco-living practices due to a lack of reliable resources, time and financial constraints, and insufficient subject knowledge.
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User Insight:
Young adults like Amelia Jones, who are thoughtful and care about the environment, want a convenient and trustworthy resource that will help educate, motivate, and assist them with making more eco-friendly life choices.
Hypothesis & Value Proposition
How do we think we can help?
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Hypothesis:
We believe that by providing people with a sustainability app that offers educational resources, practical tips, interactive features, and social engagement, this app can help and encourage people to adopt a more sustainable lifestyle.
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Value Proposition:
Empowering and celebrating individuals to become knowledgable, motivated, and inspired to make sustainable choices, our app will provide practical tools, personalized guidance, and a supportive community, enabling them to make meaningful impact for generations to come.
I Like, I Wish, What If...
Since we were designing a product from scratch, we brainstormed using an "I Like, I Wish, What If" exercise, dot voted on the features and concepts we thought would be good to include in the product, and put them through a feature prioritization matrix.
Feature Prioritization Matrix
The ideas we had discussed and now voted on our ideas witht the goal to Educate, Assist, and Motivate our user. After using a 2x2 matrix to organize these possible features and ideas, we organized our work under four distinct umbrellas:
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The Categories feature serves as an information repository, enabling the user to access specific guidance on diverse topics.
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The Carbon Footprint Calculator empowers the user to track their environmental impact by inputting data that looks at mileage, food consumption, and other variables.
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With the Personalized Goal Tracker, users can establish sustainability goals specific to them and conveniently monitor their progress toward achieving them.
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Interactive games will help to actively engage our user, ensuring an enjoyable and immersive learning experience.
User Flow
With the features identified, how wuld the app flow and be organized? I put together a user flow to give us a working blueprint.
Storyboard
Additionally, we moved through a short storyboarding exercise to further visualize the relationship between our product and end user.
Ideate
Now that we have the concept down, it's time to start figuring out our designs. Since there were four Designers and four key aspects of the app we wanted to create, we divided up the work to each take an aspect. I took on the gamification and settings page, as well as the task of coding an early wireframe of the settings page.
Sketches
To start us off from a collaborative space, we all came up with a few sketches to get the creativity flowing.
Prototyping & Mockups
As I was designing my game pages, I held in my mind one of our driving values; that the app should encourage. Therefore, even though we were rewarding correct answers with points, I wanted users who got incorrect answers to still leave the game on a positive note, which is why I decided to employ "Not quite" verbiage into the Trendy or True game, instead of the typical "False" response.
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Ultimately this tested well, with users recognizing and appreciating the tone while still feeling motivated to win in the next game.
Check out the Figma file here!
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Testing
Our usability testing included four tasks, focused on testing the four features we had each designed.
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The Homepage, info pages, and game pages were received positivey with no significant changes. However, we discovered some areas of opportunity within the carbon calculator, profile page, and navigation.
Changes made to the Carbon Footprint Calculator
Changes made to the user's Profile.
Final Product
With the testing feedback implemented, we applied our high-fidelity designs and welcomed GAIA!
Conclusion & Next Steps
We made big strides in a short amount of time, but we still have thoughts and ideas on where we want GAIA to go. Not only do we want to build out more games and informational resources, we want to continue to iterate with multiple rounds of usability testing. Then we want to expand our capabilities by adding a social aspect to the app, like an “Ask the Expert” feature that allows you to talk to real scientists and field experts. We also want to create an integration for TikTok challenges to engage our users on their preferred platform.