No More Waste — my prototype

The images of patches of oceans covered in plastic makes me shiver every time. I keep thinking “What are we leaving our future generations? Air, soil and oceans will be polluted. How can we fix this?”

When I came across the opportunity to create a prototype for an app that would help people improve their behaviour, I thought of how to help them recycle more. When running my need finding interviews I discovered one crucial point: motivation. People know that they should recycle. They simply have no incentive to do so. I remember interviewing this highly educated young man that told me “I know it’s good for the environment, and socially it’s the thing you should do. I just don’t have the time or the motivation in my busy life to do it”

Introducing my prototype: No More Waste!

No More Waste! will:

• motivate you to recycle more items by challenging your friends
• teach you important recycling facts.

Here was a very basic paper prototype:

My very first paper prototype!

I ran in-person usability studies with this paper prototype, and I found out what the main obstacles and pain points were. I then developed the first actual prototype, that I asked other users test. It looked like this:

First home screen

After running some heuristic evaluations and having a couple of people testing my prototype, I gradually refined the app. I ended up having a proper remote testing with usertesting.com. I wanted to compare two different variations of the screen in which users can add the items they recycled during their challenge with their friends:

Variation A: adding items was not intuitive

Variation B: adding items was way more intuitive

Thanks to the insights provided by the tester, I improved the prototype usability.

I finished up with some polishing, to make No More Waste! nicer and more readable:

The final home screen

Voilà! Happy recycling!