Building green habits for busy people — a UX Case Study
Introduction:
In Summer of 2022 I was part of the Monday.com Climate Change App Challenge, the goal was to build an app for the Monday.com platform that can help teams and organizations take an active role in combating climate change.
We decided on Reducing Carbon Emissions with Everyday Tasks.
- Problem: Monday.com is a productivity platform that most of its users associate with work, adding another app for them to manage can easily become “just more work”.
- Goal: To increase conscientiousness of their everyday tasks, and build lasting eco-friendly behavior.
Our Solution
Create a gamified C02 tracker, where the user selects the tasks done today, the app will track how much C02 that task saved, and compare it with other team members to earn badges.
The app is built to be used for no more than 15 minutes, so it can easily fit into their work schedule before, or after jumping on their monday.com routine.
Research:
Our team got together to survey over 90 participants and interview 13 people aged 20–40 years old about their challenges in taking action on climate change. I won’t go into the details but I’ve categorized their complaints into 4 categories:
- Lack of expert guidance and information.
- Difficulty finding trustworthy information.
- Lack of understanding of the impact of their actions.
- Busy life and/or conflicts with their daily routine.
Key quotes from our participants:
- “I’m skeptical about my recycling changing the climate crisis”
- “I already have so much to do, I barely got time”
- “Every time I google something related to climate change, it’s a mess, I just get stressed”
- “Where I work they send emails to employees on how they can help, but employees are too busy to read these emails”
Design Principles:
After our research, we have focused on creating an application that is quick, shareable, and fun, so users will be more inclined to improve their sustainability habits with the least amount of effort.
Initial Design:
- The user selects all the tasks done today.
- The app shows how much C02 was saved.
- The total amount of C02 saved on a Scoreboard where they can compare it with their friends/coworkers.
What’s the motivator?
I wanted the users to have a different motivator other than the scoreboard, so inspired by Neopets’s hunger mechanic, we decided to include a virtual Polar Bear pet that will get happier the more C02 the user saves, and sad if the user doesn’t come back in several days.
We also included different badges for people who saved the most C02:
No IPA, No Problem?
During our research we saw how people had difficulty finding trustworthy and clear answers to their climate change concerns, we are not the exception.
From the start, we struggle to find a database for our app to display C02 calculations based on common eco-friendly tasks. So we created our own database.
Because we had to work with daily inputs all calculations were set to KG of CO2 per day. Here are some problems we encounter while building our database:
- Broad activities have way too many variables…
For example, When buying second-hand, how much CO2 is being saved? What variables does one use to calculate clothes? furniture? a mix of both?
- Different sources use different variables…
When looking for sources to reference, we found that there were some inconsistencies so we had to dig deeper into their calculations.
- Research location affects the results….
For example, Rideshares (Carpooling) in the US show less CO2 savings compared to the EU. This is because the definition of Carpooling in the EU is when 3 or more people share the same vehicle.
Final Results
Due to the Hackathon time constraints, the final build couldn’t be properly user-tested, and further UI redesign could not be performed.
On the other hand, our app won the Judge Pick of the hackathon and got a personal like from Yuval Azulay, VP of Programs of monday.com.
Thanks for reading! I hope you got anything from this case study. If you have any feedback or just want to say hello you can find me here.
