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Educational component
Convenience factor
With our preliminary research, we had two goals in mind: taking a closer look at the existing site and other similar sites as well as understanding the audience and their pain points. Here is how we addressed each:
As society continues to grow exponentially, the amount of waste we produce is likely to reach a limit, so it is crucial to establish a sustainable waste management model in every country. With the idea of improving individual responsibility in our global future, our team to focused on an accessible solution for people to gain more awareness about sustainable waste management practices, and to help them develop waste management habits. Waste management is everyone's business, and the accumulation of more power will make our environment better.
In summary, each competitor we analyzed on our matrix has strengths and weaknesses in terms of improving waste management. The ratings indicate how all the competitors excel at being convenient for users to utilize, with how most users are already conditioned to using waste management services or being knowledgeable on how to navigate through common tech apps like yelp and google maps. However, a key takeaway from our competitor analysis is how our competitors do not educate users in proper waste management, or even encourage new users to recycle by rewarding good behavior. The education and subsequent reward cycle helps attract new people, educate them, and reward both existing and new users of waste management to retain their good behavior.
Our solution would target this hole in the market and address the needs of the populace by encouraging recycling behavior with a reward system, and make waste management an immersive experience.
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By collecting the experiences of our survey respondents and researching the main user bases of other waste management resources, we developed user personas that would potentially reflect the user base that our application would target.
I actively took on the visual communication role and drafted the blueprint to our prototype and capturing the potential user flows and use cases.
To visualize and capture possible user journeys a mobile recycling tool would lead to, I sketched storyboards on procreate for our team to gauge a better understanding of problem-solving in context with our core feature solutions. Our conclusions and research informed by survey feedback and potential user needs led us to re-imagining how we can solve day-to-day situations. Having sketched out a potential prototype that afforded a wide variety of features, I also wanted to justify the question of ‘how might we use this’ and narrating different aspects as a way to iterate improvements to my designs.
“How might we make it more convenient for people to support ecological efforts by making it easier to recycle?”
“How might we help young adults be more aware of their waste management through their phone?”
Finalizing our brainstorming and ideation process, we began bringing the product to life through developing the wireframes. To better serve our core features, we ensured the user flow would be intuitive through the organized layout and the discoverable home page.
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Our final prototyped addressed making the search process more clearer in the categories screen, tracking recycling more prominently indicating the amount recycled, and overall improving accessibility to information that aligns with user goals.
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