Case Study
GoZeroWaste
Go Zero Waste is an App that offers technological and educational solutions to move towards zero waste.
Background
For this project I worked in a team with one other UX Designer. We had 10 weeks to respond to the client’s brief, and were given the autonomy to manage our own timeline and process during that time. Our deliverables were a Figma prototype and final presentation to the client.
We were tasked with improving the user experience to make the app’s challenges more fun and engaging. The challenges are the main business model of the app so ensuring their success was essential.
Process
Research
During the kick-off of the project, the CEO mentioned that due to time constraints, they weren’t able to carry out user research. As a result we determined it was worth investing time at the start of the project to carry out user interviews so that we would have the necessary insights to back up the process moving forwards.
We started the project benchmarking to understand who were the main competitors for the app and what their solutions were. We also looked for inspiration for useful ideas for the challenges we were facing from other apps that were not necessarily related to this area.
An area where we found interesting solutions was habit and motivational apps. We determined that, if reducing waste needed to be constant and we were to make the app and challenges more engaging, creating habits would be a useful way to approach it. We also checked gamification examples to address the engagement aspect.
After benchmarking, we developed our interview script including a usability test with tasks to understand user needs and main pain points. We did six interviews that gave us a lot of insights to work with.
Define
To make sense of all the information gathered we used an affinity map to get to the main insights of the research.
It was validated that the user experience of the challenges needed to be more fun and engaging. However, from our insights we could see that it was also vital to make the current visual design system less formal in tone and the user experience less confusing.
There was a general feeling of hopelessness about the environment amongst participants and so motivating the user through the UX could help them feel more positive about their environmental impact. Users also wanted to know that their efforts were part of something wider. That industry, governments and their social network were also doing their part.
Engagement with zero waste was pinned on convenience, and whether this fit into the users’ current schedules. Changes to routine are possible as long as they don’t require more time or cost. Also, users were most likely to use the app in the morning.
We also created our main Persona to keep our user in mind all the way through the design process.
Ideate
How Might We (HMW)
Thanks to research, we gather meaningful insights and distilled them by identifying two main areas that needed addressing as part of the primary problem.
First, ‘How might we help users to understand the challenge journey?’
By:
A - Helping users complete a challenge in a clear and easy way.
B - Helping users understand every step of the challenge journey.
Second, ‘How might we help users to feel incentivised and motivated to complete a challenge?’
Wireframes and Testing
We both began sketching our ideas in paper and Miro. As we started to develop individual user flows we had a strong back catalogue of research to look back on and created separate initial wireframes to test.
When thinking about how we could make the user journey to the challenge easier to understand, we developed a potential concept where the app would have missions and challenges. Missions would allow users to select the challenges they wanted to complete, and add several to a ‘mission’. This included motivational messaging, a progress page with a leaderboard to incentivise users, as well as information about each challenge.
After we each carried out usability testing with the initial wireframes, there was some confusion around the difference between missions and challenges, and so decided to simplify the concept to ‘single’ and ‘multi’ challenges. We also had to simplify the challenge progress indicators and the leaderboard.
After testing we chose the best solutions and came up with the final wireframes to start prototyping.
The design system had to be friendly, and users had expressed that for an environmental app they expected the visual design to be clean and light. I developed a colour palette based on the existing GZW blue and turquoise, defining the ink and orange accent colour to be able to loosen this up slightly. I set the typeface as Montserrat and Lucy went about exploring potential illustration for community articles.
To ensure consistency across the app, we developed prominent CTAs and a photography direction. It was important images focussed on a more current feel, with clean yet interesting crops.
Learnings
As a team we had to figure out the most effective way to work together on a single prototype. We worked in the same Figma workspace, sharing a design system and each developing separate user flows.
This not only allowed me to learn how to analyse the effectiveness of solutions, but also how to work with another designer's wireframes. It has also been a valuable learning curve on how to keep stakeholders up to date during bi-weekly client progress updates.