Greeny

Case Study

Project Overview

Adobe Creative Jam is an event series hosted by Adobe and a partnership with large companies all over North America (such as Target, Disney, Twitch, etc.). College and university students compete in teams’ tournaments that showcase their creative skills by using Adobe Creative Cloud apps.

In College + Target Creative Jam, my good teammate, Lucio Chen, and I are designing a recycle app in one week of the period. The app intends to facilitate retailers help their local communities educate, encourage, measure, and/or track recycling.

Since it's our first time entering the event, we surprisingly won fourth place out of hundreds of competitive teams in the final presentation and third place in the overall scores. And honestly speaking, designing an App in one week was an excellent opportunity to test my research, collaboration, communication skill, and most importantly, sell our idea to professional judges.

August - September 2021

My Contributions

Secondary Research, UX, UI Design

Tools

Adobe XD

Recycling is such a big topic, and it covers a large scope of users from different cultural backgrounds, ages, and educations. Luckily, the project brief gave us lots of freedom in deciding the project’s scope. We started to search online to gain some ideas on people’s intention on recycling and those who don’t recycle often. The intention is that when we understand this group of people, we are more easily to find common identities to create our persona.

What is people’s thought towards recycling?

Unfortunately, the project duration doesn’t allow us to interview large amount users, which we have to more rely on the internet search. However, we gained great inspiration from this article Turning Maslow’s Hierarchy on Its Head where the article’s perspective believes what people want should take more focus than people’s basic needs.

So, we brought the idea to our process, where we stopped thinking and searching why people don’t often recycling, but we started looking holistically on why people don’t want to recycle.
We found there are amount of people who don't recycle often is mainly because they don't know where to recycle correctly, and it's time-consuming when bringing recycled items to the station. Also, recycling doesn't seem very motivating because it's hard to tell the actual impact they made on the planet. What people really want is convenience and motivation, and this became our core intent when designing Greeny.

Below are the rough moodboard and low fidelity prototypes that we created to explore ideas.

"Necessity is reductive. Desire is complex."

When we asked people about their understanding of the recycling process, it was very similar to throwing trash with extra steps. People have to decide to put items into different bins and throw these items into the recycle station. The recycling process is unmotivated and discouraging. Although some areas will enforce penalties for not recycling, we want to focus on providing a positive experience in Greeny.

To differentiate the recycling process from throwing away trash.

Greeny provides options for users to prepare their recycle items for pickup or find nearby recycle stations based on users’ item categories. The pickup option provides users with a shorter process in the whole recycling process and makes less social contact during today’s pandemic scene.

Schedule a pickup date for the recycle items

Every time users recycle their items successfully, they will receive recycling points redeemed for gift cards or donated to charity for helping society.

Encouraging users' recycling behavior

Greeny visualized users’ annually report on recycling. Not only to show appreciation for their contribution but also to let users recognize every small action can truly help the planet.

Provide educational and encouraging experience on users’ contribution.

Users have the freedom to track how and where did their recycled item send. Greeny wants to provide a transparent process to users to recognize their contribution to the planet in every small detail.

Tracking the recycle items

Design for people wants, not because they have to use them.

Often time, designers can limit the idea explorations on people’s basic needs. Although these basic needs are crucial, we should focus more on the top of Maslow’s pyramid for people’s higher-level needs. These higher-level needs are usually complex for different groups of people, which made holism more critical to be focusing on when designing a human-centred product.

Focus on the process.

The project has only one week duration, which it was challenging for us to have better communication, time management and defining the project scope. I had made a mistake where I was stuck creating beautiful UI instead of focusing on digging research on the end-users. The mistake wasted one precious day in this one week, but I pulled the process back to research when I realized the progress was not moving at all. At the end of the day, a UX designer’s main goal should focus on defining the problem and finding possible solutions.

Key Takeaways