Sprout Circle
Designing a mobile application centered around climate change, encouraging users to engage with their local community.
UX Research // Interaction Design // Case Study
Role
UX Researcher
UX Designer
Timeline
Sep. - Dec. 2023
4 months
Skills
UX Research
Interaction Design
Prototyping
Visual Design
Team
4 UX Researchers and Designers
Tools
Figjam
Paper Prototypes
Figma
Overview
As part of our Interaction Design course (SI 582), we worked in groups to design a solution that tackled a part of a larger social problem. Our group worked with the general problem of climate change, and we scoped the problem to specifically focus on the information overload and lack of motivation associated with climate change.
Our final solution is a mobile application where users:
Share their small sustainability efforts with friends
Learn about local and global news surrounding climate change
Engage in their local community through volunteering + community gardens
As a UX Researcher and Designer, I worked with our team to conduct user research that helped inform our final product. I also worked on designing our prototype and iterating it based on usability testing.
Background
Climate change is a huge problem that requires everyone to do their part, yet it’s unclear what people can even do to make a difference. The enormous scope of the problem makes people feel that their actions are not making a difference, and the information overload associated with climate change overwhelms people. This often leads people to feel unmotivated, isolated, and apathetic when it comes to climate change.
For our target audience, we decided to focus on people who are already interested in climate change but don’t know where to start. We wanted to focus on reducing the feelings of isolation and hopeless associated with facing climate change, not introducing people to the concept of climate change.
Thus, we asked:
How might we engage individuals in simple sustainability activities while also connecting them to their local community and keeping them engaged for the long term?
Research
User Interviews
We began our research with 6 interviews to understand how our target users currently perceive and engage with environment-centric activities. Due to practical constraints, we narrowed our target users to young adults in their 20’s.
User Insights ➜ Next Steps:
Overwhelming information ➜ Present relevant, digestible news pieces
Overall, interviewees mentioned not knowing where to begin and being overwhelmed by all the information available. Of the interviewees that seek information about climate change, they prefer to get their news from verified news sources and social media. While they trust the information from verified news sources more, they find that social media is better for small, digestible news.
Lack of consistent motivation ➜ Quantify impact of actions
Interviewees do engage in small sustainable actions, like recycling, with few problems because they have been integrated into their daily routines. However, they expressed that many sustainability-centered actions felt too big to commit to, or even that it should be the responsibility of governments and big corporations to take action since they are the biggest polluters. Any action feels like a shout into the void, where interviewees don’t know if they’re even making a difference, thus losing motivation.
Value quality of connections ➜ Provide multiple avenues of contact
While interviewees differed in whether they preferred online or in-person interactions, they all valued the quality of the interactions. Of those who preferred in-person interactions, they still found meeting strangers in-person to be more intimidating than meeting them online. However, this intimidations is lessened if they connected with the person online beforehand, or if they already knew that they shared interests with the other person.
Ideation
Personas + Scenarios
From our interviews, we created 2 personas to ensure our ideas were grounded in the real world and our users’ needs.
Product Concept
A sentiment that kept showing up was that people would be interested in engaging in activities related to climate change, but they don’t have the motivation to continue because they feel alone and hopeless facing a problem as large as climate change.
After discussing a few different ideas, the concept we decided to move forward with is a mobile app where users can:
track and share their positive climate impact with friends
explore opportunities at local community gardens and organizations
learn about local and global climate change news
By quantifying users’ sustainability efforts and letting them share this with friends, we aim to not only help users feel like their actions are making an impact, but also help them build a supportive community that keeps them motivated. Also, by allowing users to filter for volunteer opportunities and news that specifically interests them, users have the freedom to engage with their community on their own terms, taking away barriers like information overload.
Design & Iterate
User Flow
We created a user flow diagram to brainstorm key functions we want to include and the interactions involved as users navigate the app.
Paper Prototype & Testing
Based on our user flow diagram, we created a prototype using paper, sticky notes, and other office supplies. This prototype helped us visualize the app as well as quickly make changes and get feedback from testing.
Key Findings from Testing ➜ Next Steps:
Want to look at garden and volunteer opportunities together ➜ Combine both pages into a single page
To users, both garden and volunteer opportunities represent sustainability activities, so they were confused about why they were on separate pages. Having them on their own pages also resulted the overall app having too many pages to navigate. To address this, we combined the garden and volunteer pages, so users now use one page to browse various gardening and volunteering opportunities.
Unclear icons in navigation bar ➜ Change icons and add labels
Some users were puzzled over what the different icons in the navigation bar represented. To remove this confusion, we changed the icons to be more representative of their corresponding pages, and we also added labels to each of the icons to prevent any uncertainty.
Stuck on the chat page ➜ Add clear back button
When users navigate to the Chat Page, some were confused about how to exit the page. We planned for users to exit the page by using the icons in the navigation bar, but they were expected a way to return to where they were before. To accommodate this, we added a back button, ensuring users can always navigate back to where they were if they want to.
Wireframes
Using the feedback from our paper prototype, we created mid-fidelity wireframes.
In addition to making the previous changes based on testing, we also started to think more critically about how all the screens would connect with each other and guide the user through a seamless experience.
Usability Testing
Key Findings from Testing ➜ Next Steps:
“Like” feature doesn’t follow standards set by other apps ➜ Change to match the experience on other apps
When users try to like a post, they were slightly confused because the like button was on the right side rather than the left, which is where it is on social media apps like Instagram. We changed this feature to be on the left side so that users’ experience on our app matches their expectations and is consistent with their experience across other apps.
Initial Activities Page is blank except for a search bar ➜ Include instructions/recommendations along with the search bar
Some users thought that the Activities Page didn’t load correctly when they first navigated to it because there was only a search bar on an otherwise blank page. To address this, we added recommendations to the page, providing more context to inform users that this page helps them search for different activities.
No confirmation after signing up for an activity ➜ Add a pop-up message when users successfully sign up
Users were confused about whether or not they successfully signed up for an activity because nothing on the the screen changed or indicated a success. To remove this ambiguity, when users sign up for an activity, a pop-up message confirms with users that they were signed up. The main page for the specific activity also changed to indicate that the user has already signed up.
Final Design
Key Features
Build a Community
Users can interact with people’s environmental posts, as well as chat with them. These channels of communications help users connect with others, building their own online support system.
Engage in Local Activities
Users can search and sign up for local opportunities. This not only introduces them to new environment-centric activities, but also helps them engage with their community and build a local support system.
Keep Up with News
Users can choose to read verified articles that interest them. Articles include both local and global climate change news, so users have the option to read about news directly impacting them.
Track Your Impact
As users participate in more and more environment-centric activities, they can log each of them in their profile. These contribute to an overall Impact Score, helping users track their contributions.
Challenges & Learnings
Test, Test, and Test Again
To me, this project highlighted the importance of constant user feedback. After conducting user research in the initial stage of ideation, we continued to gather user feedback throughout the entire design process by conducting user tests after each significant design stage. This constant loop of making changes, getting user input, and making more changes based on input showed me while this was a labor-intensive process, it was invaluable for pushing our designs in the right direction.
Consider Users from Both Sides
When we first began came up with the idea for our project, we identified 2 possible user groups: the people looking for a place to engage in environment-related activities and the people/organizations looking to promote the environment-related activities they are hosting. Given the practical restraints of the project, we chose to focus on only 1 user group: the people looking to engage in activities. This was because these people were the ones that were most readily available to us for interviews and testing, but given more time, our next step would be to reach out to the people/organizations who would be hosting these events to get their perspective as well.