The Quest for Sustainability

In the Spring semester of my junior year of college, I decided to take the McKinsey & Co. Qualitative Design Studio Course that was being offered by the Center for Integrated Design at UT. The course was appealing to me because I wanted to improve my ability to inform my design decisions using qualitative data. I had previously taken a class on user research methods and wanted to put my newly acquired skills to the test.

The instructors had prepared the class by assigning us, in groups, to a mentor and emailing us pre-reading materials. The semester's design challenge was, "As we move into the next decade, what are ways that we can help people understand and reduce their impact on the planet?". This challenge was especially interesting to me because I had been looking for design projects that would have me working in some sort of environmentally conscious field.

“As we move into the next decade, what are some ways that we can help people understand and reduce their impact on the planet?”

Recycling, a Refined Problem

The team I was in was just as enthusiastic as I was when it came to the design topic. We began by performing what was, essentially, a brain dump of topics that we thought were interesting in the field of sustainability. We came up with a bunch of possible avenues. Our team ultimately decided to focus on recycling because we felt that it was the field that we could make the biggest impact on in our 5 week project timeline. Our previous experiences with the design thinking process, our academic backgrounds, and passion for the environment put us in the perfect position to do well.

After deciding on our topic, we refined our problem statement so that it was more specific to our area of focus. It became, "How might we build better recycling habits, through actionable steps, among college students?". Refining our problem statement was especially helpful because it gave our team something to refer to as a guiding light as we were developing our research plan.

“How might we build better recycling habits, through actionable steps, among college students?”

“So Tell Me About Your Recycling Habits...”

After refining our problem statement, we needed to decide what our research objectives would be. We decided that we wanted to maximize the potential impact that our solution could have and thought to focus on stakeholders that were accessible to us as college students. We would use the experiences of our network, college students, to get as much information in the 5 weeks we had for the course. This was crucial to making sure our solution was well-informed and thoughtful.

Research Objectives

Understand our user and their attitude towards sustainability.
Identify personas among college students who recycle
Understand our user's recycling habits
Uncover barriers and frustrations that college students encountered when recycling.

In total, we interviewed 6 college students. Some recycled, some didn't, some participated in environmental initiatives around campus, and some only had roommates that recycled.

Key Insights

The main way to reduce our impact on the environment is to reduce our consumption.
There is a lot of uncertainty when it comes to recycling “correctly”.
The social pressures of recycling incorrectly can lead some people to avoid recycling altogether out of fear of embarrassment.

We were surprised by how strong the issue of social anxiety was amongst most of the people we interviewed. This was due to there not being a uniform method of recycling that was available to everyone, specifically in public places that did not have a single-stream recycling system to dispose of their consumables. Many people were unsure if they were putting items in the correct bins or if they would contaminate it. This made our users worry about how they were perceived by people around them who might know the correct way to recycle.

Meet Susie & Alan, Our Protagonists

We used these insights and our qualitative data to formulate our user personas and user journey maps. We created our user personas as amalgamations of the quotes and stories we had heard from our interviews with university students.

Susie, is the type of person that knows all there is to know about recycling. She is incredibly passionate about the environment and has been recycling since she was a child. Alan, on the other hand, just recently watched a documentary on recycling and has realized that he has been contaminating almost all of the recycling bins he's thrown garbage into. Alan is interested in becoming more sustainable but doesn't really know where to start.

Our journey maps tells Alan's story as he struggles to learn how to recycle correctly. This was especially important to our ideation phase because it gave our team and stakeholders a better handle on the problem by providing the perspective of our user.

3..2..1.. Let's Jam

After we presented and received critique from our mentors at McKinsey, we dove head first into ideation. This for me is always the most fun. I like to compare ideation workshops to jazz jam sessions. Everyone has a different perspective but we're improvising on the same ideas that we've discovered and internalized through our research.

We came out of our ideation session with an idea to help simplify the complicated debacle that is recycling. We needed something that was as simple as pointing your phone at an object and asking, "How should I recycle this?". We decided to develop a concept that would make use of a minimalistic and informative UI and computer vision and we would call it Sustain.

Product Features

The app would feature a camera that gives you recycling information on whatever you point it to. It would let you know if the item was recyclable or not and what steps would be needed to recycle it properly. For example, if the item was an aluminum can the app would tell the user to rinse the can and dispose of it in the aluminum or single-stream.
The app would help the user understand their consumption habits by incorporating what they have recycled and products they input into the app itself. This feature would be gamified in the future so that the product incentivizes the user to act more sustainably.
The app would keep a log of frequently used items for easy access.

In total, we interviewed 6 college students. Some recycled, some didn't, some participated in environmental initiatives around campus, and some only had roommates that recycled.

Paper Prototypes

We wanted something quick and easy to do a proof of concept so we drew a sitemap, iterated on it, and proceeded to draw up some screens. We ran a few tests using our paper prototypes on some of our peers. We asked them to use the paper cutouts as if they were a fully functioning device. From there, we would change the screen as if they were using the device in real time.

Eventually we wanted to test the app with more people over the internet so I cropped the images, arranged them in Figma, created what seemed like a million symbols, and wireframed it all together. We gained some good insights from testing out the paper prototype that we would use to inform our design decisions in the high fidelity version.

Hi-Fi Prototypes

I took the lead on the UI design for this project and got a chance to apply what I had learned from my self-taught background in graphic design and user research into a hi-fi prototype.

Design Values

The app and its main features needed to be accessible with very few taps.
The information needed to be clear and concise to give the user the information they needed as quickly and conveniently as possible.
The app needed to incentivize users to change their consumption habits.

We wanted the UI to be as minimal as possible, similar to the Google Search app. The camera and search on the home screen were the primary focus to give the user easy and quick access to the information they needed to recycle without it being a hassle. We found that this would be key to making sure the product successful. We didn't want the user to struggle to get to a screen and have them forgo the act of recycling because they couldn't get access to the information they needed quickly enough.

Post-Mortem

This class was a unique experience. I was paired with a group of well-rounded individuals that had a lot to bring to the table. Our mentors, Jared Culp and Danila Pelicani did an amazing job at making sure we weren't missing any of our blind spots and packing our 5 weeks with as much instruction as possible.

One aspect of the solution that I would've have loved to develop further was the implementation and gamification of the consumption footprint. The confusion surrounding that aspect of our solution, I felt, could have been solved by implementing a short tutorial or by making it more pronounced in the overall design of the app.

Regardless, I am proud of the amount and quality of work our team was able to create in a very compact 5 weeks. 10/10 would take the class again.

Sustain