Your guide to sustainable living.
Overview
As a UI/UX designer and user researcher in my team, I was responsible for gaining insights on sustainable home living and determining the needs of the public. Using these insights, my team designed and pitched an application experience that aimed to educate and increase accessibility to sustainable living for millions of Americans.
Duration:
3 months
Apr - Jun 2023
Team members:
Ryan Kao
Tony Meng
Sarah Shen
Kristen Ching
Isabelle Chyun
Roles:
UI/UX Designer
User Researcher
Tools:
Figma
Miro
Google Forms
Google Sheets
Canva
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Premiere Pro
Background
64% say that climate change is a “very serious” issue.
Challenges
People are unaware of their environmental impact and not incentivized to change their lifestyle.
There is limited knowledge about the climate crisis and the severity of one's actions due to the difficulty in seeing immediate effects.
Even those who are well-educated continue to face additional challenges, including existing policies that promote resource overconsumption, little support from businesses and government, and high costs associated with sustainable lifestyle.
34%
aged 18–24 say that lack of knowledge is a key barrier to living more sustainable
57%
of Americans say it is "near impossible" to live sustainably in their homes
77%
of Americans & Australians want to learn to live more sustainably
Opportunities
We can help households adopt sustainable habits by empowering them to positively impact the planet's livability and quality of life.
This led our team to formulate several guiding questions to support our efforts.
How might we…
1.
raise awareness and educate households in a way that motivates users to effectively reduce their carbon footprint?
2.
foster a feeling of fulfillment when households adopt sustainable practices in their current lifestyle?
3.
reduce cost, time, and effort to make sustainable lifestyle more approachable and accessible?
Synthesizing Problems & Designing Our Solution
Pain Point List
We have identified 3 pain points in which we designed our solution around. Click on each pain points to explore the specific features that aim to address them.
Introducing the PlanetPal app: Overview
A readily-accessible solution enabling users to develop sustainable living habits by setting goals and visualizing collective environmental impact.
PlanetPal is a free downloadable AI assistant mobile application that helps users make sustainable lifestyle changes by generating personalized action plans, tracking progress over time, and visualizing the collective impact.
Feature 1: AI Chatbot
Understanding personal lifestyle.
The PlanetPal AI assistant acts as an expert to understand the user's current lifestyle and goals for sustainable living. Users are provided suggestions to help them guide the conversation or given the option to type if they know what they need.
List of suggestions to choose
Feature 2: Personalized Action Plan
Crafting a curated checklist.
Once PlanetPal learns user habits and needs, it will then suggest opportunities for improvement and organize them onto an action plan. The personalized plan will begin with small commitments and gradually expand with monthly milestones.
Implement gradual habit changes per milestone
Feature 3: Impact Visualization
Quantifying impact of actions & visualizing difference made.
PlanetPal quantifies the environmental benefits of user's sustainable habits, showing rough estimates on how much resources are being saved. Users can track different levels of impact from the individual, local, and national scale, helping them visualize the difference made and how much carbon footprint is being reduced. This can foster motivation to collectively work towards a healthier planet.
Filter by impact scale levels
Filter by resource types & time
Feature 4: Task-its
Automatically tracking progress with a simple phone tap.
PlanetPal can track progress automatically via Task-its, which are small NFC tags that behave like Post-Its, intended to be placed around the house to remind users about their tasks. Once a Task-it is paired with an associated task, users can simply tap their phone to begin automated tracking and check off tasks whenever completed.
Impact
People feel more motivated and confident on how to approach sustainable living.
Our team tested our concept solution with nearly 200 participants via A/B testing and concierge MVP analysis. We learned that:
65%
of responses say they feel more confident after using PlanetPal
115
out of 195 ppts
was satisfied with the action plan feature
Conclusion
Final Presentation & Concept Showcase
Poster was voted first place as most visually appealing & best content.
Our team wrapped up this project with a final presentation and concept showcase, where we pitched our startup concept to a panel of executives within the HCI industry and organized a mini booth displaying our promotional poster (shown right), PlanetPal app prototype, and a Task-it prototype for visitors to test.
Afterwards, executives determined the team with the best concept in our class. The winning team would receive funds from the executives to support their kickstarter campaign. While our team did not win, our poster was voted in other categories.
Promotional Poster
Reflection
Design is powerful.
PlanetPal stands out as the most valuable project I have undertaken during my undergraduate years. Not only was this my very first time being involved in designing a startup but also pitching our startup concept in front of industry executives. As a designer who committed significantly towards research, this experience exposed me to a variety of research methodologies—such as needfinding, problem framing, and A-B testing—that made data collection more effective and interesting. The project’s focus on real-life applications provided valuable insights of the inherent processes a typical startup may go through in the real world.
I also want to thank every one of my team members who were so hardworking and made our group dynamics extremely healthy!
Thanks for reading!
