Monday.com Hackathon for Climate Change
A Monday.com widget/app concept
My Role: Product Designer| Duration: 2 Months| Project Status: Completed
Project Overview
With the Alarming changes in global warming within the past three decades, scientists, world leaders, and people alike have been working towards restoring the earth from the effects of human interaction. Due to the pandemic and ongoing demand for hybrid to remote work, we witnessed ecosystems slowly but surely restoring themselves and noticed more people living presently and consciously. We have seen an increase in sustainable and minimalist ways of life to better the earth and ourselves as the human species.
Younger generations have inspired companies to care more about the long-term effects of climate change and ways they can get their employees to do their part. These social concerns all point to the need for developing a sustainable app that helps employees check and improve their lifestyles while encouraging support through team-building activities.
Teams that use platforms like Monday.com need an effective way to track environmental goals without disrupting their day-to-day work duties. The widget we have created provides a platform for sustainable practices while incentivizing engagement in the digital workplace.
Because of the above requirements, we designed our Widget, Green Works, for employees to learn and improve their lifestyle around climate change. Our team's solutions were to build a responsive widget in Monday.com’s marketplace that gamifies incentives focused on sustainable/environmental practices, an interactive pop-up in Monday’s platform, and a dashboard to organize and manage the team’s progress without disrupting workflow.
Scope of Work
Monday.com states they “decided to run a green app challenge this year because work technology can give teams the tools they need to address climate challenges and help organizations be proactive about bringing awareness and fighting climate change through the tech they use every day.”
Our team took on the challenge of building Green Works, an app that allows team members to choose sustainability tasks they wish to commit to over the course of a month. Each day, team members complete a brief check-in to keep track of their progress. Each task completed counts towards the team’s overall goal, which is decided by the team at the start of each period. Should they reach their goals at the end of the month, the team “wins” the prize and they collectively make progress in addressing climate change. Our major challenge was building our app into monday.com’s marketplace and implementing our climate change app into the hands of their 152K customers.
So we had to figure out what ways we could incorporate sustainability into the workplace. We went through some brainstorming of ideas before jumping into the design process
Our Process & methods
We approached the hackathon with the intention of using the UX design process. We used Maze, Zepplin, Keynote, Figma, Figjam, monday.com, Zoom, & Google Suites. We conducted competitive research analysis, Screener Survey Analysis, User Interviews, Affinity Mapping, User Persona, User Journey, Feature Prioritization, MuShcowo mapping, Design Studio + Sketching, Wireframing, Prototyping, & Usability Testing. Then created a seamless handoff to our incredible developer.
Our Hypothesis & Assumptions for initial research
Our initial hypothesis was the following:
We came to the conclusion that most people in the workplace are not concerned about climate change or don't think about those issues when at work. So our team was looking to validate the following:
We condensed the assumptions down to the following:
RESEARCH PHASE (Discover + Define)
We conducted competitive research amongst other rival platforms to see what could be done differently on Monday and arrived at these insights:
Goals of Research
We set out to validate the following goals:
1. To identify our users’ base of knowledge about climate change-related issues. To gain insight into users' attitudes toward working sustainability practices in the workplace
2. To understand how and what our users are motivated by
3. To understand preferences regarding their workflow so we don’t design something disruptive
Research Methodology
We created a screener survey and recruited a few users for interviews. We sought out users who generally have used Monday or have used a platform similar to Monday in the workplace. The main goal of our user interviews was to capture in-depth data in order to help us validate or invalidate our initial problem statement and assumptions.
The majority of users, regardless of work environment have used a competitor platform required by their employers. While aware of Monday.com, they’ve never had to use the platform.
Data Synthesis » Affinity Mapping
Throughout our user interviews, we noticed that most people were aware of the issues regarding climate change but essentially felt helpless and didn't know where to start, or how to help the cause.
From our data breakdown, we focused on the following:
1. Users make changes to their lifestyle to do their part to address climate change
2. Users require flexibility in notification settings to adjust to personal preferences
3. Working professionals have experienced the impacts of climate change firsthand
4. People are more willing to participate if there is a personal benefit
Persona (Representation of the target audience)
All of the data we collected in interviews allowed us to create the ideal targeted audience who cares about climate change due to personal experience and wants to educate the masses without overwhelming anyone.
Journey Map (Day in a the life of target audience)
The journey map we’ve designed goes through the process of Chad’s (our persona) experience trying to create team-building exercises related to climate change. He wants to find a way to inform his team of this important topic while also keeping their attention, but in a way that doesn't disturb the workflow.
Our new focus
We validated 5/10 of the original assumptions through our research which gave us an opportunity to revise our original hypothesis and zero-in on our targeted demographic.
MVP Reveal (our concept)
Green Works allows team members to choose sustainability tasks they wish to commit to over the course of a month. Through our research, we established it would be best to allow the user to have the freedom to personalize their tasks. Each day, team members complete a brief check-in to keep track of their progress. Each task completed counts towards the team’s overall goal, which is decided by the team at the start of each period. Should they reach their goals at the end of the month, the team “wins” the prize and they collectively have made progress in addressing climate change.
Design Studio: Sketching + Concepting
We conducted a feature prioritization chart and phase map in order to determine what primary features needed to be launched first.
Our team agreed on the following features to prioritize
1. Flexible notification system
2. Customize notifications either climate reports, meetings, updates, etc
3. Gamify app to keep peers engaged and motivated with prizes, PTO, or other things to win
4. A highlight reel: showcasing team members' efforts and highlighting their progress
5. A visual tracking feature that builds incentive rewards
6. Offer suggestions for individual team members to reduce their carbon footprint like:
-unplugging unused devices
-reducing water consumption
-cold water washing
The initial sketches we did over zoom and in Figjam to discuss how we wanted the app to look visually keeping a view of a dashboard, tracking progress and a general widget that we can access for notifications and submission entries on tasks.
Initial User Testing: First Round
For both usability tests, we observed the habits of users and how they interacted with our prompt of 3 tasks:
- logging or submitting a weekly to monthly task
- checking the team's progress
- adding a new task to your personalized car on the dashboard
We used maze to follow the hotspots of each user and what needed to be improved upon.
Logging in your daily efforts:
checking on teams overall progress as an admin:
Add a new practice/task to keep track of:
Findings + Takeaways
We removed users from the test that did not complete all 3 tasks1. We made the “add task” button on the dashboard more recognizable to what users have come to expect in Monday, by making it the blue call to action color
2. We also worked to bring users' attention to our widget by adding an animation to visually engage
The problem with both was they were not recognizable so in round two of testing
Second Round
In the second round of testing our numbers improved greatly. Task 1 still needed a bit of tweaking but tasks 2 and 3 had great success.
Logging in your daily efforts:
checking on teams overall progress as an admin:
Add a new practice/task to keep track of:
Takeaways from testing + improvements made with our developer
From the results of usability testing, we knew there needed to be a few changes to the overall concept. Due to time constraints, we made moderate tweaks to the design and prepared for handoff to our developer. We were fortunate to have a great collaboration with our developer and fixed a few gaps in the design.
1. Our color palette needed to be updated to pass accessibility.
2. We were required to have a light and dark mode for Monday and had to quickly design them out
3. We had a hard time trying to find a way to have the widget display across all boards and debated the decision to have it show up in the dashboard.
4. We had to discuss how our program identifies what counts as sustainable practice and settled with allowing peer pressure to keep the built-in safety net.
5. How would we send a notification to everyone if they don't have the widget or dashboard open?
6. We needed to add another page specifically for the admin to control the cards on the dashboard for the beginning of the month and to check in once a week to approve any new tasks.
7. We originally thought about a limit for tasks but added a scrolling feature to cards in order for users to add more than 4 visible tasks. As the deadline came close we decided to cap them at 4 tasks.
8. Allowing team leaders to go into their *admin page and reconfigure the app — or reset it for the next goal of the month — or to approve teammates to add new tasks on the page.
9. we got rid of the initial settings pop-up and — left the feature as the initial checklist
10. We needed to iron out notification behaviors:
— when do we want people to get notifications?
— when would they be prompted to fill in their daily check-in?
— would the entire team get notified if a goal has been reached?
— would a user be prompted at the start of the month when the user needs to add a new task?
Design Iterations: High-fidelity Screens
Since we weren’t redesigning anything involving Monday’s layout it was a fairly smooth transition to creating pop-ups and the dashboard. Making sure we met Monday.com’s submission guidelines we had both a light and dark mode with our adjusted colors for accessibility.
Our design maintained focus on these 4 features with the additional admin page
Widget remains in the right upper hand corner — clicking on widget can provide daily check-in and submitting tasks
Dashboard pops up on the left-hand side under workspace boards — clicking on the board displays the activities and progress your team has accomplished
Admin is able to lock in adjustments for the week/month and send out notifications to the rest of the team.
Check out the Final Prototype
Final challenges we ran into
- UX challenges we ran into were mainly around recruiting people to interview or find usability testers. Over the course of the hackathon, we were able to do so but the process was quite slow.
- As mentioned above, making sure our designs pass accessibility.
- We copied the CSS for the text style catalog, and it references the fonts by URL. We didn’t have the fonts and needed to download them.
- Trying to find a way to have the widget display across all boards, and debated the decision to have it show up in the dashboard
- There was a bug in the code preventing the app from fully functioning in the Monday marketplace
- creating terms of service & privacy policy
What’s next for Green Works
We faced a handful of challenges towards the end of our submission but this project felt so rewarding to complete. As we wait for the results of the hack, our intentions for future improvements are the following:
- Change the disable notification on personal pages to a timer customized to any user’s liking.
- Add the icon from board views to the top tab.
- Fix the functional movement of the widget to show across all pages.
- Incorporate a baseline calculator displaying carbon footprint emissions and progress in reducing emissions.
- fix any bugs in the code that may have prohibited functionality or usability.
