Planet: A Case Study about Recycling
HI I’M SARAH.
INTRODUCTION
This was my very first case study and I really enjoyed working on this project. It was amazing to see how an idea can be turned into a great product!
MY TEAM:
Lauren Stolworthy & Cooper Swenson
MY ROLE:
- Surveys, Interviews, and online research
- Lo-Fi and Hi-Fi Wireframing
- UI Design
- Copy writing
THE CHALLENGE
My prompt was to create a platform for users to donate their old technology.
The challenge was that users didn’t have an incentive to recycle and were content not donating their old devices. I decided to combat this by educating them why recycling is important, showing them what impact they can make when they recycle, and providing an easy way to do so. I wanted to create a platform that would educate users and provide a convenient way for them to recycle their old technology.
RESEARCH
I needed to pinpoint why users weren’t recycling so I created and administered an online survey to over 100 people and interviewed 5 people. I asked questions like,
“Do you have electronics you aren’t using?”
“Have you donated used electronics before?”
“What is the process to recycle your device?”
In my interviews I found that people aren’t that interested in electronics recycling. I discovered that they had old devices, but they didn’t know why or how they should donate. They also wanted some sort of reward from their donation, our data was split by people wanting a monetary reward or a social reward.
PERSONA
I decided to focus on our millennial responses when building a persona because that is the audience that gave me the best data.
Meet Sean Baker.
Sean was a great window to our users- he had old devices, didn’t know what to do with them, and wanted a reward for donating. I also gave him some personal characteristics, like giving him a rescue dog. Throughout the process I often fell back on the fact that he had a rescue dog to reiterate the social reward he wanted from his donation.
USER GOALS
After establishing the persona my group and I moved onto the user story map. This led to a challenge for me because I was unfamiliar with user story maps and it seemed like all my mentors had a different idea of what makes up a good user story map. My first user story map was more focused on site navigation. After completing that I realized it was a good guide for how I wanted my site to go, but that it didn’t tell the story of the user. So I started again and focused on what the user’s goals and desire were.
My user wanted to donate his device and feel that he is making a difference, so that became the top goal. Filling in after that was the education piece- why does he recycle? How does he recycle? How is he rewarded for his donation?
Once my user was defined it was time to turn to formulating a solution.
SOLUTION
I knew education needed to be a focus of the site. I wanted to answer all the questions my user had on electronics recycling when he first got to the site. That way he would be more educated and therefore more motivated to donate. I needed to give him answers to why he should donate, where he can donate, and what good his donation will do.
One thing I also really wanted to do here was personalize the site to my user. I thought if my user was educated on his options and could decide where his device goes then he will be more likely to donate. My group spent a lot of time discussing this, we had to decide how many options we were going to give our users. In this instance we all had a lot of opinions, but what helped us focus was to prioritize Sean, to think about what he, and in turn our other users, wants. We decided to give our users the option to donate their device to the environment or to one of our three recommended charities. Based on my survey results, the environmental and charitable options would satisfy my user’s desire to do social good. I also wanted to present him with the option to drop off or ship his device so that it was convenient to donate.
I also knew the reward was important to our user so I set up a rewards system to fill the monetary reward desire and a “share” on social media option to fill the social reward desire.
Low-FI Design
Once my solution was established it was time to sketch out my low-fi designs. I first drew my designs and then put them into Sketch App to review with my group. We had a great time comparing our designs and coming up with a uniform design. I was about 20 screens deep when my mentor came over and told me I had way too many screens. He reminded me how a key aspect to my site was convenience. I had to make it as easy as possible for my users to get all the information they needed in order to motivate them to donate. I didn’t want to create any friction by making them go to a bunch of different screens to achieve their goal. I ended up consolidating my information to put all of the education on the home page and ended up with about 10 screens.
User Testing
Next step was user testing. I put my site into InVision to test it with users. I was only able to test the site on one person, but got some good feedback. I asked my user tester to guide me through the site using the navigation. They told me that my main navigation wasn’t user friendly if my goal was to get users to recycle. I had originally put “About, Contact, Rewards” but there was no button to recycle so I redid my nav to include About, Contact, Rewards, and a Recycle Now button. I also got the feedback that it wasn’t obvious to continue scrolling to get more information. I learned I should put more information above the fold because there was too much space between sections. So I implemented more breadcrumbs and repositioned the design to put more above the fold.
I wish that I had time to do more user testing because it was so insightful to see how someone else viewed by site. In my next project I plan to budget more time for user testing. I also want to get better at asking the right questions. I asked my user tester to guide me through the flow of the site, but next time I will ask questions that also address my user’s motivations- did the site answer his questions about tech recycling? Will this platform inspire him to donate and create a habit of donation?
High-Fi Design
Last was high-fidelity design and this was the fun part! My group and I decided to design the homepage together and then to split our separate screens. After going through our user testing we knew that the design of our site was user friendly. I was glad that we had worked through the problems in our low-fi designs so the high-fi design came quickly. I wrote copy for our site and designed the shipping screens.
REFLECTION
Once the design was all done and I was putting together information for us to present our project I recognized something that we missed. I was going through our survey results and realized that a lot of our users wanted a pick-up option, but that we didn’t plan for that. If we had more time I would have loved to implement a pick-up option so that we could cater to even more users. Next time I plan to fall back on the research more throughout my design process.
It was really fun to take this project from beginning to end and to see it all come together. Our design provided a solution to our user because it taught him about recycling and provided a convenient way for him to do so.
This was a great project and a big reason for that was my rad team. Lauren is a very talented designer, I learned a lot from her. Cooper had great insights into making our site more useable. One of my favorite aspects of working on a team is the different ideas and insights. It was really cool to collaborate with them to form a useable, beautiful website.
