Reducing Carbon Footprint with Kiwi
by Creative Quackheads
Team members: Yovela Murzello, Ebru Kamis, Queenie Chen, Susan Chen and Zhijia Zhang
Introduction
The Problem
It is estimated that if sea levels rise by as much as 19 inches by 2050, millions of people will be displaced from their homes in major cities [1]. This is one of the many negative effects of climate change that continues to threaten the Earth’s sustainability. The largest contributor to climate change is greenhouse gases that consist of carbon dioxide, methane and other fluorinated gases [2]. Greenhouse gases emitted by human actions are measured as a carbon footprint and represented in units of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e) [4]. People often feel that their efforts to reduce their personal carbon footprint are insignificant in comparison to the excessive carbon emissions from industries. Moreover, some individuals lack the knowledge, time and concern to reduce their carbon footprint. Additionally, the existing carbon footprint calculators do not provide the incentive or motivation for people to consistently use the software. Hence, this project aims to address these issues with the introduction of Kiwi, a mobile app designed to help users actively manage their carbon footprint.
Value Proposition
Customer Profile
Wants
Users who are intrinsically motivated are driven by the desire to have a better environment for themselves and their generations. Others want extrinsic motivation through incentives, and support from their family, friends and the community.
Needs
Some users and those with a busy lifestyle may need guidance. Those who are aware may also need help due to the unavailability of resources.
Fears
Carbon footprint reduction might seem like an inundating task. People fear that their efforts will be in vain as they cannot see the impact of their actions and it may seem impractical to change everyday habits.
Substitutes
Currently, there are smartphone apps available for Android and iOS such as Oroeco, and websites such as CarbonFootprint.com that can aid individuals with calculating their carbon footprint. People may also get information from their utility services, for example, Hydro One.
Product
Features
Kiwi will educate individuals on the carbon footprint concept and include features such as tips on what products to buy, diets to consume, transportation to use and energy conservation. It will motivate users by offering monetary incentives. The app will also include a timeline and show users metrics indicating their impact. Additionally, it will facilitate a community and the ability to share their progress on social media.
Benefits
The app will help users reduce their carbon emissions and build awareness. Apathetic individuals will be motivated by monetary rewards to install and use the app and eventually become carbon-conscious. Kiwi will also fulfill peoples’ desire to mitigate the effects of climate change.
Experience
By accurately completing their carbon reduction activities, people will experience happiness from receiving incentives. They will also feel self-fulfillment from contributing to society, making an impact and caring for the Earth. Moreover, they will feel a sense of community with others who possess common values and goals.
Goals to Achieve
We aim to create awareness on this issue, motivate people to reduce their carbon footprint, and build a community with similar interests. We intend on fighting climate change by reducing carbon emissions and motivating people to have a positive impact on the environment. Kiwi will help users have a better understanding of their carbon footprint through viewing personalized visuals and metrics that show their impact on the world compared to using the existing carbon footprint calculators and traditional methods such as desktops and websites. Instead of making drastic changes, our app will use the data of our users’ current habits to provide them with suggestions to gradually shift towards an eco-friendly lifestyle. By incorporating gamification techniques in the mobile app, they will be motivated to engage in eco-conscious behaviours. Through Kiwi, we hope to create a community that is conscious of their carbon footprint and the significance of their actions.
Empathize and Define
Anticipated Users: Personas and Empathy Maps
When deciding who our target audience would be, we focused on three personas based on real people we knew who could benefit from our app.
Bob is a student persona. As students, we considered building an app that we would use as well. The particular trait we focused on was a university student who is busy with school and cannot find the convenience and time to engage in eco-friendly practices.
The Catherine persona is a working adult. They care about the environment but have a busy lifestyle. The app will be tailored to incorporate eco-friendly activities without inconveniencing their way of life.
The Mark persona is a parent. Parents would be interested in reducing carbon emissions as the environment has a huge impact on their children’s lives in the future. The app will be tailored to help them understand their contributions and make more eco-friendly decisions.
Exploratory Study Process: Interviews
The three personas guided with deciding on the potential participants for the user interviews. The empathy maps were used to determine what information we needed to know for each of our personas. Subsequently, three high-level question categories were generated that could be asked in the questionnaire and interviews. These were [a] how much do people know about carbon footprints, [b] what are their everyday habits and [c] what affects their motivations. With these categories, we were able to construct a set of questions for the questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The findings are as follows:
The participant for the Bob persona understood the concept of carbon footprint and its contributors but recycles only when it is convenient. His main issue with reducing carbon footprint is single-use plastics such as take-out containers. He is not motivated to recycle due to a lack of convenience and would prefer a solution similar to having a garbage chute.
The participant for the Catherine persona had a clear understanding of the carbon footprint concept and does not have an issue with recycling. He pointed out that companies produce more carbon in a year than an individual, and knowing the total amount of carbon emitted in the manufacture of products would help with deciding on purchases. He suggested that using economic incentives could motivate people to change.
The participant for the Mark persona was aware of the concept but has not taken any actions to reduce their carbon footprint, wishes to learn more and does not have the time or motivation. He indicated that eco-friendly products are often more expensive, which can be a burden for parents who have to manage the family’s expenses. However, he is aware of wasteful actions and fears that climate change might drastically change the living standards for future generations.
Some of the feedback we received for our questionnaire and interview questions included ambiguity and complexity. In a future iteration, we would split-up the number of options and include items more directly related to carbon contribution. We were also questioned on the ability to follow up in the interview if the answer to some questions were “no” instead of “yes”. Although we did not refine the questions textually, in the interviews we followed up with questions that naturally resulted from their answers to our questions.
Exploratory Study Results
Affinity Diagrams
Based on the findings from the interviews, we used an affinity diagram to highlight the key points that our app should address and infer our users’ needs and wants. After creating the yellow and blue sticky notes, we grouped these into 5 categories: Convenience/Frustration, Social Change, Recycling, Cost of Living, and Transportation. These categories formed the basis for the user tasks.
User Tasks
The first task that users would need to do once would be to set up a profile. Subsequently, the three tasks they would perform when using the app are “track and manage carbon footprint reduction”, “receive discounts and rewards”, and “make purchases from companies that have a lower carbon footprint”.
The “create profile” task allows users to create their account and input their personal details which helps with starting their journey to reducing their carbon footprint.
The “track/manage carbon footprint reduction” task allows users to understand their impact and view their progress based on the details of their carbon footprint.
The “receive discounts & rewards” task allows users to collect discounts and rewards when they successfully complete their carbon reduction activities. This focuses on the need for motivation to make eco-friendly decisions. In addition to rewards from eco-friendly products, users will be able to purchase their regular products with coupons and discounts from participating stores. This prevents them from having to take drastic measures such as avoiding the consumption of things they enjoy. Users are encouraged to change their habits and still rewarded for performing eco-friendly acts.
The “make purchases from companies that have a lower carbon footprint” task enables users to purchase products that have a low carbon footprint.
Overall, these tasks will help streamline a user’s experience with reducing their carbon footprint by facilitating commitment to using the product, tracking progress for users to see individual improvement, participating in competitions to motivate them to get involved in carbon footprint reduction activities, and identifying products with low carbon footprint while shopping.
Ideate
Design Alternatives
Storyboards
A total of five features were created for our app. However, we decided to focus on the Barcode Scanning and Data Insights features for this project.
Mark is a parent of two children and does shopping weekly at the supermarket. He struggles to decide between brands of milk but understands the environmental damage caused by certain companies and realizes the significance of his brand choices. He uses our app to find alternative products manufactured by eco-friendly companies.
Despite Bob’s workload, he decides to install our app to help him reduce his carbon footprint but begins to wonder whether his actions have an impact. By looking at the different metrics showing his carbon footprint reduction in various areas, he feels accomplished knowing that his actions have a positive environmental contribution.
Sketches and User Flows
The Barcode Scanning feature starts with a list of purchases from previous sessions and an option for users to create a new shopping cart. Users may choose to add items to the list by searching or scanning. Adding or removing an item from the cart redirects them back to the shopping cart details page. The shopping cart is updated with new actions and reflects the latest version of the cart. If the user wants to cancel the operation of scanning the barcodes of the products, they can tap on the “Cancel” button.
When the user clicks on the Data Insights feature, the main screen shows the different categories of the user’s carbon footprint, impact, and timeline. They can view the relevant Goals, Analytics and Tips for each category. The “Goals” page shows the user’s current and past goals and new goals that may be available. The “Analytics” page displays graphs of current and past carbon footprint. The “Impact” page will display current and past impacts of their carbon footprint reduction. The “Timeline” page would show their carbon footprint by weeks, months and years.
Design Iteration: Feedback and Actions Taken
We received feedback on our sketches and iterated on the design for our barcode scanning feature. It was recommended that signifiers such as the back arrow should be unified throughout the mobile app. This was taken into consideration by keeping all icons including the back arrow button, information icons, tab bar icons and hamburger menu icon universal throughout the mobile app.
Prototype and Test
Low-Fidelity Paper Prototype
The screen sketches from the Ideate phase were improved to produce a set of wireframes for the Barcode Scanning and Data Insights features. In addition to several improvements in page layout and elements, green was selected as the theme colour to convey the eco-friendly experience.
Low-Fidelity Paper Prototype Evaluations
The paper prototype was created using PowerPoint. This acted as the wizard and simulated the user flows for the two features by using clickable hyperlinks to navigate between the different slides. The evaluations were conducted virtually, and the Observer monitored the user as they clicked through the slides on their screen. We tested the paper prototype with three participants: Participant 1 was from the buddy team, Participant 2 represented the Bob persona and Participant 3 represented the Catherine and Mark personas. During the interviews, the facilitator used the script below which helped us to run consistent tests and to focus the user’s attention on areas of uncertainty.
Summary of Changes
Based on the feedback from the evaluation, we implemented several changes to the app design. These included changing the name of the Barcode Scanning feature to “Purchases”, changing its icon from a barcode to a shopping cart, disabling the minus button while item quantity is 1, changing the concept of score from “carbon footprint reduction” to “carbon footprint”, swapping the star icon with a footprint icon and having a maximum level of 5 for the carbon footprint score. We also added labels to the navigation bar. The Data Insights feature was transformed into the app’s Home Page with tappable cards showing an overview (based on metrics from the former Overall category) of the user’s Analytics, Goals and Tips. For each of these cards, a filter was introduced for the categories. Moreover, we added in-app notifications informing the users of changes in system status and error pages signifying when the system was not able to find an item. Furthermore, the mobile app’s logo and name were determined, and orange was selected as the accent colour.
High-Fidelity Prototype
The illustrations below show a few sample pages from an initial version of our high-fidelity prototype.
High-Fidelity Prototype Evaluations
Using the high-fidelity prototype, one cognitive walkthrough and two heuristic evaluations were conducted.
Cognitive Walkthrough
Three scenario-based tasks were determined for the cognitive walkthrough. The participant only struggled with the sub-task of picking the best product as he considered a higher score to be better whereas it was the opposite. In addition, the participant had difficulty finding the arrows for navigating to different weeks in the Timeline; the arrows were too small in his opinion.
Heuristic Evaluations
Five heuristics from Nielsen Norman Group were evaluated. These were visibility of system status, consistency and standards, error prevention, flexibility and efficiency of use, and aesthetic and minimalist design. Participant 1 recommended changes such as reducing the size of the dropdown, increasing the size of important metrics and animating some of the screen transitions. Removing the product from the alternatives list would also provide a more efficient flow for users. Participant 2 pointed out opportunities for improvement such as hiding the bottom navbar to a hamburger menu in deeper sub-pages and changing the colour of the footprint icon to make it stand out more. The navbar was voted to stay as it helps the user to quickly navigate to the different features of the app. The Impacts card on the home page was modified to show the overall carbon footprint and the amount reduced. The colour of the footprint icon was changed to a colour gradient from dark green to red, with red representing a product with the highest (worst) carbon footprint.
A demo video displaying our high-fidelity prototype after all these modifications can be viewed here or here.
Conclusion
At the end of the design process, our team gained new perspectives on how to approach carbon footprint reduction, effectively collaborate in a group to ideate around a problem space, and realized the value of prototyping.
From the Empathize and Define stages, we gathered that our target users know what a carbon footprint is but were not motivated to actively reduce their footprint due to inconvenience. In addition, we learned that we could try to make an impact by incentivizing companies to lower their footprint. We had many ideas on how to incorporate this feedback but having to make decisions on which ideas would be the best caused our weekly 1-hour meetings to increase in time. To address this, we decided to start timing our discussions. Having a timer allowed us to focus on the important points and prevented us from going off on tangents. Finally, when we got to the Prototype and Testing stages, we all thought the feedback from our paper prototype evaluations was extremely helpful because it allowed us to gain an understanding of how the user interpreted specific icons, symbols and functionalities.
Unfortunately, the biggest limitation of our current prototype is that only 2 of the 5 features were implemented. Thus, the next step for our team would be to fully design our high-fidelity prototype and to collect more user feedback. Our vision for Kiwi is that it would be a tool to help people perform their activities according to their carbon emissions, gradually shift towards a carbon-neutral lifestyle and create a community that is more conscious about their carbon emissions. This would motivate companies and bigger organizations to start taking action as well leading to an overall positive impact on the environment.
References
[1] NASA, “Climate Time Machine.” [Online]. Available: https://climate.nasa.gov/interactives/climate-time-machine. [Accessed: 08-Dec-2020].
[2] “Overview of Greenhouse Gases,” US EPA, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases. [Accessed: 08-Dec-2020].
[3] “Climate Change & the Carbon Footprint,” Global Footprint Network, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/climate-change/. [Accessed: 08-Dec-2020].
