Electronic Recycling
Case Study
Team
Nick Hill // Sam Clare // Kaitlan Rawson
My Role
UX Designer
Tools
Sketch, Balsamiq, Principle, InVision, SurveyMonkey, DropBox, Silverback and good old pen and paper
Overview
Electronic waste is a huge problem in todays day and age. Per a study conducted January 2018, 95% of Americans own a cellphone of some kind and 77% own smartphones. With such an abundant amount of electronic devices, it’s not a surprise that most of it is not being recycled.
Our Project Goals
- Create a desktop and mobile responsive site.
- Provide users with information about recycling and donating their devices.
- Provide users a convenient way to recycle and donate their devices.
Time to Start
We started off as a team coming up with a list of assumptions which naturally came from our own experiences. We had no trouble with this, as we’re all young adults with at least one electronic device attached to our hip.
Assumptions
- It’s difficult to find where I can get rid of my electronics.
- The process is inconvenient.
- Getting value (mostly monetary) from my electronics is very important to me.
- If a family member is in need, I would rather give my device to them.
Talking about assumptions allowed us to swap stories which then launched us into questions that would later help us with our process of gathering user information.
We sat, worded our questions for the survey, and sent it out. The survey results showed that our assumptions were pretty spot-on.
Survey Results
We found that around half of our survey takers (51.56%) stated that they didn’t know of any options to recycle their device and around half (54.68%) stated they could be encouraged to recycle if it were more convenient. We were surprised that convenience was only second to incentives in terms of encouraging people to recycle but we decided to go forward with that.
To summarize:
If you don’t recycle, what would encourage you to do so?
- Incentives: 65.63%
- Convenience: 54.68%
- Charity: 40.63%
What do you do with old electronics?
- Keep them: 67.19%
- Give to family/friends: 42.19%
- Sell them: 29.69%
If you were to recycle your devices, how would you do it?
- I don’t know of any options: 51.56%
- Find local service: 31.25%
- Online service: 14.06%
After we compiled our data from the survey and interviews there were conflicting ideas within the group on the direction of the project. Ultimately, a decision was made to put our main focus towards the donation aspect.
Not So Smooth Sailing
We decided to start our creative brief, persona, user story map and a user story flow.
Joe Sullivan was our persona. We had no problem creating him and decided he really wanted to give back to the community which focused on the donation aspect of the website. His other goals reflected the convenience aspect of the website with wanting to declutter his house. Most of the demographic we were trying to meet were more technologically savvy and usually upgraded their devices.
We thought we were doing so great at this point; we had completed a creative brief and now we could move on to our user story maps!
We grabbed our sticky notes and ran to the nearest whiteboard. We sat down and proceeded to take turns looking at each other. Where to start? We decided to start at the goals and narratives. This is where the fun started.
But we soon found that we agreed on nothing.
It was an extremely difficult task putting together a User Story Map as we couldn’t decide on the organization of it and where to put what. We found ourselves adding more sticky notes on just for the sake of our map looking nice. All three of our mentors took turns coming by, asking all of us what was up, and helping us redo our entire map.
We went through this process multiple times. Soon things got heated as sticky notes went flying off the board and new ones came as quick as old ones left. After a great talk with our lead mentor we came to a decision to part ways for the day and write down all of our ideas separately. We would then come back to redo our map for the millionth time in the morning.
The Next Day
We all got together and took turns presenting our ideas and put them on sticky notes. Then we did something that none of us would have even thought about without our instructor: we worked from the bottom-up.
This new way of working on user story maps was extremely helpful in that it was easier to start small and get bigger. The result of this was that the day went by faster, more ideas were being formulated and we eventually ended up on the same page.
Our end user story map was something we were quite happy with.
After we did our user story map things started to come together. We also decided to do a user story flow, as we felt it would be very helpful in how our website would…well, flow.
We found this was super helpful to see visually, as it helped us conceptualize how we would solve the problem of the several different pathways and circumstances. It helped us determine how to organize and categorize the steps to donate or recycle, and dropping-off versus shipping.
Design Time
After we got everything in order we split up and took some time to do traditional pen and paper wireframes.
We then created our low fidelity design in Balsamiq. Balsamiq presented us with some difficulties and we made the mistake of not creating another mock-up in Sketch. We agreed that if we had done the initial low fidelity wireframes and moved those to Sketch or even just started with Sketch in the first place, it would have been a lot easier to start our high fidelity designs. You live and you learn.
Final Designs
Usability Testing
We transferred our high fidelity mockups into InVision and were able to get some good feedback. We used Silverback (which is amazing) to allow screen capture and video of the prototype which helped us see how our users interacted with our website. Fortunately everything seemed to the point and we had no problems.
You can see the InVision prototype here:
Conclusion
Overall, I think we met our goals and were able to effectively make a convenient way to donate or recycle electronics. I learned so much from this group project and have so much more to learn. Although we had our disagreements and we all had such different personalities, in the end I loved working with my team. They all had such different perspectives on how to tackle a problem that I wouldn’t have even thought about. We all had our strengths and what one of us was lacking, the others made up for.
I also learned how to take criticism and how to learn from my mistakes.
I enjoyed the entire process, mainly learning about the way people think and how they go about things. The testing, re-iterating, and solving the problems that were given to us was a challenge that was interesting to overcome.
What I’d Do Different
There were many things that I had learned doing this project that I will carry with me into future projects.
- Do more interviews with people and get more into the root of their problems.
- Refer back to our Persona more throughout the whole process.
- Put together a style guide to eliminate inconsistencies.
- Allow more time for user testing and usability testing, as we were cut short.
I’m excited to see what I learned and take that and apply it to my next project!
