Design Sprint: How to Encourage Shoppers at Eaton Centre to Recycle

Tina Liu
Tina Liu
Jul 30, 2017 · 10 min read

I first heard of the Design Sprint back in April when I attended a meet-up hosted by SprintTO. I was blown away by how structured and organized a brainstorming session can be, and how quickly we could come up with ideas to a difficult problem. I was eager to try the rest of the process, so I organize a design sprint practice with a few friends. After all, the best way to learn is by doing :)

In case you are not familiar with the Design Sprint, it is a 5-day process started by Google Ventures to build and test an idea in the market before building it.

Due to time constraint, we condensed the first 3 days of the sprint into two 4-hour workshops, and afterwards I prototyped and tested on my own time.


Day 1

The goal of day 1 is to share information, and understand the problem and identify the problem area(s) that you want to focus your efforts in the rest of the sprint. Here is the agenda, again it is a condensed agenda based on a 4-hr session.

The Agenda

As facilitator, you need to prepare for the day’s agenda, taking into account how much time you have, what are the key activities you want to cover during the session (depending on the problem, you may be able to skip some steps).

Schedule every minute of the session, sometimes things go off on a tangent, sticking to a schedule will help you go through all the activities so you learn the benefit of each activity. In retrospect, I would have allocated more time to drawing the journey map.

Our agenda for Day 1. We started the session at 1:30pm and ended at 5pm. The blue divider marks when we took breaks.

The Problem

Before the sprint, we came up with a few ideas for what problems we might want to solve, the one that we eventually chose was the following.

You might be wondering why it’s so narrow and specific. A problem so specific works well for a sprint practice, where the team may not have a deep understanding of the problem and is working under very tight timeline (since none of us work at the Eaton Centre nor very knowledgeable in recycling and waste disposal). It allowed us to move through the process fairly quickly and not be blocked by a huge number of assumptions.


Long Term Goals

For this part of the exercise, I asked the team “if everything goes well, what do you want to see happen as the result of our work today?”. It was a mix of “policy change”, “raising awareness”, and “better usage of recycled material”.

We then listed out our sprint questions by asking ourselves how might we fail at achieving the above goals, and we came up with the following. By the end of this exercise we are all aligned on what we want to achieve, and have faced our fears by anticipating these road blocks before even solving the problem.


Journey Map

When creating the map, we first identified the types of customers. People who are at the Eaton Centre are mostly shoppers consuming in the form of shopping, eating, drinking. By identifying these activities, we were able to identify the type of garbage produced by each activity. We also looked into the mental model of the shoppers when it comes to garbage disposal and recycling. Those who don’t know which receptacle it should go, and those who simply don’t care. Our map was simple, people have trash, looks for the nearest trash can, and then maybe makes an effort to throw it in the receptacle that they think is appropriate.

The map helps us to understand the current problem and come up with a hypothesis of where the real problem lies.


User Research — Ethnographic Observations

We then split up and spent 8 minutes at the Eaton Centre to observe how people actually dispose their garbage in the mall. As expected, the garbage bin are not being used as intended. Our observations was that although both type of users exist, the “don’t care” category is definitely the majority.

(left) garbage bin overflowing with trash; (mid) the placement of the signs does not make it easy to for shoppers to know what goes where; (right) shopping bag is being disposed as trash, it is clearly paper recyclable.

The customer observation was definitely an enlightening experience. A lot of people simply aim for the “bigger hole” and does not give a second thought about what they are put in there. The current garbage bin is also quite confusing, each receptacle has different shapes, but the recycling symbol appear on both ends, although the shapes are different, but they are not entirely clear. The confusion can lead people put their potentially recyclable items in the garbage receptacle; or even worse, put garbage in the wrong receptacle which can contaminate the recyclable materials.


Expert Interview

The purpose of expert interview was to get the information on any previous effort to solve and understand the problem. I asked a previous colleague who worked at a local environmental non-profit who is very knowledgeable in the area of recycling. Some of our key findings from talking to her were:

  • Different municipalities have different ways of separating their wastes. E.g. Markham and Richmond Hill can handle waste separation differently than Toronto. In Markham and Richmond Hill, styrofoam are not recyclable where in Toronto you can.

Affinity Map

We organized our notes that we took during research and expert interview, and rewrote them in the format of “how might we (HMW)” statements. Then we grouped similar HMW statements together and observed the emergence of 3 themes: usability improvements, convenience and emotional appeal. We could easily visualize the areas of improvement we can make to the current garbage bin.


Dot Voting

After the above research and synthesis, we were ready to choose our area of focus. We did so by dot voting. Each person was given 5 dots arbitrarily, and we voted on our favourite HMW idea/theme.

The result of our dot voting is that we want to focus on improving the visual indicators of different recycling categories to help people make decisions easily and confidently. In addition, we also change people’s perception of waste.


Day 2

Our 2nd practice session was scheduled for 2 hour, but overflew to 3 hours. The focus of “Tuesday” was to do research and generate ideas and each person should sketch out a detailed solution, and “Wednesday” was to choose a solution for prototyping and testing. Since it’s been a whole week since our first session, we did a quick recap of what happened on day 1, and also went over parts of the exercise that people thought were unclear, how they can be improved for the future.

We met up again the week later. For our second session, we combined the activities from “Tuesday” and “Wednesday”.

Research & Lightning Demo

Our research findings were written on post-it notes. By the end of the lightning demo, our collective research are easy to visualize.

We did research individually for 20 minutes. When we were done, each person presented her findings in a quick 3-minute presentation. We took notes on the research on post-it notes to make it easy to present and visualize in one place. It was very interesting how each of us focused on a completely different problem area.

Collectively, we researched different garbage bin designs, how to change people’s behaviour and habits, government regulations and commercial buildings deal on waste management, leveraging education, artistically expression as well as the power of social media.

4-Step Sketch

The 4-step sketch is basically a way that allow you to gather information and inspiration (in the form of note taking), ideation (thinking divergently), crazy-8 (refine your top idea by doing 8 variations of the same idea), and lastly, choosing your favourite variation of your top idea and creating a detailed sketch with all the relevant information. the solution should be fully fleshed out, and it should be able to stand on itself without anyone explaining it.

Art Museum & Heat Map

The Art Museum is where you hang your solution sketches on the walls and participants take turns to look at each solution in silent. While looking at each solution sketch, the team member can put 1 to 3 dots beside the part of the design that she likes.

(left) #CareToRecycle; (mid) the Community Recycling Monster; (right) Super Trash Bin + Rap Machine

Speed Critique & Straw Poll

After each person had looked at the solutions individually, we then discussed each solution as a group, specifically around the highlights marked out by the heat map, as well as any important objections. The sketcher explains her solution only at the end.

At the end of the speed critique, we took one minute to decide which solution we want to go with for prototyping, and all 3 votes were casted on the solution #CareToRecycle.

#CareToRecycle — the chosen solution to be prototyped and tested.

Prototyping

For ease of prototyping, I decided to retrofit the design to the current garbage bin instead of making it from scratch. The design consist of two parts — improving the ease of use, and providing motivation. The ease of use can be hugely improved by making the recycling categories more accessible and easy to understand, so I decided to address this area from the lid design. For the actual prototype I made a lid covering that can sit on top of the current garbage bins from bristol boards.

3 stages of planning before prototyping. In my first attempt I skipped step 3 and the result was a disaster.
The actual prototype — a lid covering that sit on top of the existing garbage bin

Test

To test the effectiveness of the prototype I wanted to measure behaviour on two dimensions: whether people cared enough to make an effort, and the success rate of putting the item in the correct receptacle. I went back to the Eaton Centre on two separate days at lunch time to carry out the control and the prototype experiments.

Test results from two days of observation — unfortunately I could not collect as much data on the prototype test day due to a lower traffic location. The green post-it means the item was placed in the right receptacle, and red means it was in the wrong receptacle.

Control Test

I carried out the control group observation at a high traffic area and observed more than 10 people discarding their trash. The current behaviour of shoppers is that little to no effort was made toward sorting their wastes and recyclables, I even observed people “shoot hoops” to throw their trash.

Prototype Test

I chose a lower traffic area to install the prototype because I didn’t want to draw attention to myself (after all, I didn’t get permission from Eaton Centre to do this). In the same 20 min, I was only able to observe 4–5 people throw out their trash. The success rate was much higher, and these people spent 1–2 second to make a conscious decision.

The “Did You Know” sign on each side of the garbage bin did not receive any attention so the attempt to provide context and motivation was not effective.

Conclusion

The lack of data does not allow me to draw definitive conclusions of whether the prototype did improve the recycling situation, but from the qualitative observations, it seemed like people were more willing to spend a couple seconds when the visual indicators were more clear and they actually had a chance to understand it.


Learnings

I had 3 aha moments in the entire process.

On day 1, we spent 30 minutes on the journey mapping, and followed by 8 minutes on ethnographic research. After the research, I realized that I learned so much more in that 8 minutes of just observing people than the 30 minutes we spent in a room, in our heads, each trying to rationalize what we think people do. We like to abstract things too soon before we even understand our users. When we do that, we can be spending precious time coming up with solutions for scenarios that aren’t likely to happen.

My second aha moment was after the day 2 exercise. Instead of assigning each person an area or research, we just researched whatever we were interested in. I researched garbage bin design and human psychology, my other two teammates researched on gamification and the business side of recycling. We presented our research and then moved onto the sketching phase. The magical thing was that we each incorporated each other’s research in our designs. No selling, no convincing, just co-creating without falling into group thinking.

When I was installing the prototype, I felt a lot of people coming toward me trying to see what I’m doing, I even got people saying thank you to me after they read the “Did you know” information. Afterwards I retreated into a corner to observe the real reaction to the prototype, I only observed a couple of people noticing the prototype in the entire 20 minutes. Sometimes positive feedback come from a place of kindness and encouragement, but that’s still not representative of the effectiveness of the work. The design needs to stand on its own, without the selling, without the charisma. That’s a sign for me to stop taking feedback from friends and family at face value.

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