Design Story of an App to Reduce Recycling Contamination
My journey started while doing a course and a capstone project as part of Human-Computer Interaction specialization by the University of California, San Diego with Coursera. The design focus of my project was to create an interface, which would bring a meaningful change in the recycling approach followed by households and thereby help reducing recycling contamination.
What is Recycling Contamination!
Does it mean that the recyclables are exposed to airborne diseases? Or are they dipped in toxic waste? And why does it cost an additional ONE MILLION DOLLARS towards Recycling? This was my quest which motivated me to build an app that demystifies and provides a solution to this issue.
Recycling contamination happens when non-recyclable items are mixed in with recyclable items or when recyclable items are placed in the wrong recycling bins. For e.g. in my city, we are not allowed to put plastic bags in our curbside recycling bin (even though plastic bags are recyclable!) or we cannot dump Styrofoam boxes in recycling. All such things are considered as contaminants.
Why does it cost over a Million Dollars more ($$$$$$$)
There is a set cost that every city/town incurs towards recycling. However, when the level of contamination far exceeds the set standards, the costs of recycling rises exponentially with the risk of valuable recyclable material getting dumped into a landfill, as they cannot be sorted easily into garbage and recyclables. Financially it cost residents of my town an additional Million Dollars last year to deal with recycling contamination.
Issue Analysis and Needfinding
My research started with interviewing the Recycling Officer of my town, which led me to visit, a Material Recovery Facility (MRFs called as MURFs) and I finally interviewed residents from my town.
I learnt some important facts about recycling which was a major eye-opener for me:
1. Not all recyclable products are accepted by the city/town in their curbside recycling.
2. Materials Recovery Facility (MRFs, also called MURFS) is a sorting facility hired by a city/town where the recyclables gets sorted into various categories, compressed and baled for sale.
3. What-is-and-is-not recyclable is decided by the MURF, and dependent on the type of equipment they use to sort the recyclable products. In short, MURF’s dictate and lay the ground rules for recycling in a city/town.
Furthermore, my research and observations highlighted the core issue and the intrinsic thought process of the residents towards recycling
· Everyone was very enthusiastic about recycling.
· People do a lot of wishful recycling, where they are so eager to recycle that they throw things that they think should be recyclable without knowing the specific guidelines of the town.
· And when they are not sure, they don’t have an easy solution at their fingertips to solve the conundrum of what-is-and-is-not recyclable.
· Efforts by the city/town to educate consumers through fliers, newspaper ads, websites, and social media does not go far enough in reducing recycling contamination. And some of it is geographic, because every city/town has different standards for what can and can’t be recycled.
Thinking out of the box using Storyboards, Prototypes and Evaluations
One optimal approach is to leverage commonly used technology for continuous education and help everyone to recycle right. With this point of view and understanding of the user needs, I started illustrating the ideas with a storyboard.
My storyboards helped me to design multiple options of building the user interface that will simplify user interaction. This will take the guessing out of recycling which is the ultimate goal of my app. Once I had a good storyboard, the next step was to create a paper prototype that facilitated in getting my app evaluated with other peers from my course. Heuristic Evaluation (HE) gave me valuable insights even for the small details I had missed on the prototypes. I then included all these suggestions in first versions of the wireframes for the app.
User App (Ask MURF) finally taking shape: Digital Design, In-person and A/B Testing
I started to design an interactive app with the insights that I got from Storyboards, Paper Prototype and HE. I developed this prototype in InVision tool which came in handy to ask my friends to test the app in-person. Few usability issues were identified but there was one screen that users were getting confused in executing the test cases.
I conducted A/B testing by modifying two of the screens and making an alternative design. I used UserTesting.com to test two versions of the prototype where half of the users tested Version A of the Prototype and other half tested the redesigned screen (Version B) using the test scripts that I gave them.
Analysis of the A/B testing did not show any significant difference, but Version B of the app got very positive feedback from 75% of the testers. Overall all the testers were impressed with the idea and very well related to the purpose of the app.
In the End - “Ask MURF”
All the courses in this specialization has taught me valuable lessons on the importance of using effective Design in Interaction and highlighted how a thoughtful Human-Computer Interaction design can contribute to addressing /solving day to day challenges and needs.
Ask MURF app is an attempt to design a tool that is available on smart phones and tablets and similar devices that can take away the confusion on what-is-and-what-is-not recyclable and thereby greatly reduce Recycling Contamination and save the environment and valuable resources.
Prototype Link
Thanks to the course instructors and mentors from UC San Deigo and Coursera for making this specialization and capstone project successful. I also thank my peers for all their support and valuable feedback all through this program.
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Here is a demo of my app