UX Research Case Study: How might we motivate HK citizens to have a recycling habit through Green@Community?

Disclaimer : This UX research was done by my teammates Hanna, Saki, Ronya and I as a UX design student research project. This project is for theoretical purposes only, and we have no affiliation with the Green@Community or any green companies.

Introduction

Is “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” just a slogan? We are told this is the golden rule for waste management but this isn’t the case in reality. A study from Environmental Protection Department showed that the amount of municipal solid waste recovered from recycling decreased nearly half from three million tonnes in 2011 to around 1.5 million in 2020, which is considered to be a setback compared to the goals that needs to be achieved. In recent years, the Environmental Protection Department launched a programme called Green@Community to build up a new community recycling network, including recycling stations, recycling stores and recycling spots with a view to building up the recycling initiatives across the district level and promoting the green living culture in the community. From this case study, we will figure out how to strengthen the recycling habit from it.

The Green@ Community Recycling Station, Store and Spot (From left to right)

Our Research Plan

The Green@Community falls under one of the six major areas of the government’s Waste Reduction plan. The purpose of Green@Community is to strengthen the community recycling network to aide in waste separation.

Our goal is to find out if HK residents are aware of this new campaign, how do HK residents feel about recycling and what measures can be taken to help HK residents recycle more.

The following are some of our hypothesis:

• People are more motivated to recycle if they can earn Green$ or other rewards
• People find it an inconvenient and boring experience to recycle
• People are not aware of Green@Community

Our target audience includes:

1. People who is not aware of environment or recycling issues
2. People who cares about the environment but seldom/never recycle
3. People who already have a recycling habit

Out of the three target audiences, we focused on the second one — people who want to recycle and are willing but are not yet recycling. We assume that majority of HK residents fall into this category.

Our method of research is both qualitative and quantitative, we conducted surveys and interviews then we synthesised with an affinity map, personas and a journey map.

Competitive Analysis

In the competitive analysis, we explore many opportunities for Green@Community.

Competitive that we studied: Green Power, Eco Greenergy and Live Zero

These are the organizations or social enterprises that share similar goals on environmental friendliness. During our research, we found that their advantages and disadvantages can also be opportunities for Green@Community.

1. Provide higher cash incentive to the people who go to recycle, not only in drink cartons, but also other materials.
2. Strengthen linkage between upstream and downstream of recycling, consider different stakeholders into account such as scavenger, recycling company, recycle exporter, food industry etc.
3. Provide different workshops for the public to educate people the funny sides of recycling
4. Cooperate with different business or private estate

Our Research Findings

Apart from the secondary research, we conducted our primary research through interviews and surveys to uncover some pain points/findings that are reflected from their behaviour and their opinion towards recycling so that we can come up with ideas that can motivate people recycling through Green@Community.

We collected 85 surveys of people from a wide range of different age groups about their recycling behaviour and interviewed 19 persons. 3 main findings have been revealed.

Pain Point 1 : Inconvenient location discourage interviewee to recycle

Research showed us that more than half of the respondents would recycle whenever they are convenient. We further asked about the pain point of recycling in the survey.

Nearly 50% of the respondents thought an inconvenient location is the pain point for them to recycle and 80% of interviewees might have higher motivation if the location is close to them.

From our interview, 13 out of 19 interviewees were also concerned that inconvenient location is the main reason for not recycling.

Pain point 2: Inefficient and complicated recycling process caused trouble

80% of the respondents will handle their waste in recycling bins which seems to be the most efficient way to them. 78% of the respondents thought an efficient and easy recycling process facilitates them to recycle as some of them considered recycling is time-consuming.

From the interview, nearly half of the interviewees thought they have limited time to take extra effort to sort the trash. inefficient recycling process discouraged them to keep the recycling habits.

Pain Point 3: Not enough space to store the trash which hygiene problems concerned

“ My home is too small to keep the trash until recycling! ” a direct quote from one of the interviewees

This revealed that sometimes they ignore recycling because they don’t have enough space at home to store until recycling, and they are concerned of the hygiene problem if they store the items for a long time.

Affinity Map

According to the results from 19 interviews, we have sorted their comments into different categories, such as the reason for recycling and not recycling, pain points for recycling, recycling experience and thoughts about Green@Communiy etc. We sorted them mainly based on the questions that we asked, which allows us to find out the similarity and trends of their comments. We have used 3 different colours for the note to represent the 3 types of interviewees we have:

people who don’t put environment as their priority — Pink

people who cares but don’t recycle for some reason — Orange

people who loves the environment and do recycle — Green

Key Highlights

From the affinity map, we have noticed that although there are no positive comments about the traditional recycling bins, they are still the most commonly used facilities for recycling. We also find out that the most common pain point for recycling is the inconvenient location of the recycling stations/bins, and the survey shows that 86% of them think location near their home is the most convenient spot to recycle. This explains why most people are not motivated to recycle — location is the most important factor to motivate them recycle, which again proves the result of the surveys.

Personas

The demographic of our interviewees are very broad, while due to different characters and level of active/passive, individualism/collectivism, and social/self-acceptance, we created 3 types of personas which all have different goals and motivations when it comes to recycling.

Key Highlights

One interesting finding is that although they have different motivations, their frustrations are actually very similar — the inconvenience of recycling spots, the problem of storage space, and the unclear recycling requirement leading to trouble. So if we can solve these problems, frustrations for mostly everyone will be eased.

We have never thought that the recycling decision of someone who needs more social-acceptance will actually be affected by their peers, until we created the personas. They do not want to be the only ones who recycle, but just follow the crowd and want to be socially accepted.

Interest/daily habit is a factor that we find unrelated with the recycling behaviours. Even persona 3 (someone who loves the environment and recycle) have hobbies that generate waste such as online shopping, it does not really affect their recycling decision. Therefore to motivate or stop someone from recycling, their daily habit or hobby do not play a big role.

Users Journey Map

The user journey map illustrates the scenario of our persona 3 (Sabrina — a person who loves the environment and recycles) who has accumulated some wastes at home and wants to take it to Green@Community. It can describe her experiences and feelings, as well as identify her pain points during the recycling process. Beyond this experience, we create opportunities and insights.

The Users Journey Map have 5 stages:

1. Awareness — She has stored some wastes in her home and realized that she needs to bring it to the recycling place

2. Consideration — Searching for the recycling location and deciding where to recycle.

3. Action — Take action by traveling to the Green@ Community store

4. Service — Recycling experience and process at Green@ Community

5 . Incentive — She tried to redeem the gift from the store

Key Highlights

She encountered difficulties at the very beginning, since she stored her wastes at home, there isn’t enough space for recycling storage, building a recycling habit is fairly difficult in Hong Kong, due to the small living space.

At the Consideration and Action stage, she feels most confused and frustrated during the journey. In addition, there is no clear recycling instruction on which materials can be recycled. This leaves her feeling frustrated, and it’s not enjoyable to travel by public transportation with all the recycling. There should be clear guidelines on their website or app, as well as more recycling stores or spots. It should be a more convenient location so that users don’t have to make a long trip to recycle.

Her feelings tend to be more positive while she is in the store. Although she is not familiar with the recycling process, the staff is helpful and supportive, the clean and tidy store environment makes her feel relieved and reliable. We found that the gift redeem system is not the main factor that motivates her recycle. Instead, it’s just a bonus for her, but If the gift could be more interesting or varied, perhaps provide something that can be exchanged with less Green points, she would be more motivated.

Opportunities

The following problem statements are derived from the user personas and other artifacts in this research that confirm the users’ characteristics, pain points and motivations.

Defining these problem statements based on the users, their needs and what motivates them, helps direct our focus towards opportunities that can lead to solutions for Green@Community. Each perspective in the problem statements prioritizes recycling in different measures. This is why their needs are different as well. The first one needs a guide, the second needs more efficiency and the third needs to see progress. However, all of them would like to make recycling more convenient for everyone.

User Story

In order to showcase these potential ideas, we decided to write user stories and jobs to be done. The user story can be used to ideate potential features. It is also based from the perspective of our potential users.

According to our findings and insight, our target audience does not necessarily prioritize recycling unless it is convenient for them to do so. This means the recycling system and waste segregation system should be maximized according to time, closeness of location and to be as efficient to segregate as possible.

Jobs To Be Done

The situation in our context is taken from the perspective of what our users main goals are which is to recycle as conveniently as possible. We chose this context because immediately guiding users towards recycling before they generate waste or right when the rubbish is in their hands is a promising key to efficiency and convenience. This also differentiates between people who plan ahead before recycling and people who prefer to be reminded in the moment they start to generate waste to make waste segregation a more convenient experience.

Writing this can help ideate what kind of solutions might help the users of Green@community.

Insights

For the recycling habit of HK citizen

• Time and convenience is their main concern.
• Lack of space to store recycling in Hong Kong makes it difficult for HK citizens to build a recycling habit.
• Setup more recycling bins or stores, or install them in every floor, so people can recycle right outside their door or by walking, that would be ideal.
• Social acceptance can motivate HK citizens to recycle.They do not want to be the only ones recycling in the crowd. But if their peers or family members recycle, the vibes can motivate them to start recycling in order to gain social acceptance.

For the Green@Community

• Setting up more recycling stores and spots, and picking the location near the residents.
• A clear instruction and guideline for which materials can be recycled, provide different workshops for the public to educate people in more interesting and funny ways.
• They need to increase their promotion, corporate relationships, or partnerships with companies such as grocery stores or fast fashion chains, so they can gain more awareness.
• Connecting with influencers on social media is another effective way to reach them.

For incentive

• HK people can be motivated to recycle by money and gifts, but it is not the only factor and people may think the gift isn’t attractive.
• They want to know where the recycling will end up, and what the recycling will do. Telling them these statistics and figures is the most effective way to motivate them.
• It can include how much recycling we collect this year, or provide the statistic that we can save how many trees. This is the most motivating and meaningful way to encourage people.

Conclusion & Reflection

From understanding the pain points of recycling from our research, we come up with different solutions on how to motivate HK citizens in recycling through Green@Community. This is our first research project that we found quite challenging in collecting the most relevant information. We have to take significant time to synthesize and ideate from a large amount of research data. But at the same time We also found it rewarding. We understand that regular meetings are the key to manage the progress on track and we also discovered some unexpected findings during interviews such as social acceptance is one of the factors to affect user behavior. We look forward to exploring more on this issue since there is no one size-fits-all solution and generating ideas is an iterative process.