A UX case study on promoting environmental consciousness, forming community, and encouraging achievable and realistic habit changes
About CommuniGreen
CommuniGreen helps individuals build and sustain better habits by offering community guides, petitions, and ethical marketplaces—encouraging small, meaningful steps over an all-or-nothing approach.
Our Contributions
This self-initiated Coursera project explores a concept app that motivates users with rewards and guides while creating business opportunities for local vegetarian/vegan restaurants, second-hand shops, community events, and farmers markets. Krista led the research and designed the end-to-end design independently.
01 the problem
Many people aspire to live a more eco-friendly and low-waste lifestyle in order to sustain and preserve the planet.
However, they often encounter challenges that lead them to give up and revert to old habits, inadvertently supporting the primary causes of climate change.
02 User Research
03 Insights
Key takeaways: User frustrations
Can't afford eco-friendly brands
Unsure or unaware of sustainable businesses
Don't have a choice/privilege
Unsure of where to begin
It's inconvenient
04 Design Solutions
Educate
Inform users through engaging visuals and tutorials on how to reduce their waste.
Motivate
Log and track users' progress, rewarding them with discounts at ethical and sustainable businesses when they achieve their goals
Connect
Establish community-driven environmental change by connecting like-minded individuals through local events, petitions, protests, and guides that inspire and empower collective action.
05 Building Empathy
After leveraging insight and quantitative data from user surveys, Krista created personas to better relate with main user groups and their goals.
Mary
demographics
Age: 23 Occupation: Floral designer Location: San Diego, CA Life Stage: Single, no children
motivators
- Connection with nature - Supporting small businesses - - Progressive lifestyle - Health & wellness
constraints
- Frustrated her individual impact doesn't make a significant difference when there are numerous businesses, government entities, and neighborhoods making poor environmental decisions. - Wants to help but feels isolated, lacking friends or acquaintances in her city who share the same eco-conscious values - Feels that eco-friendly businesses are not transparent
Julie
Demographics
Age: 35 Occupation: Urban Planner Location: Portland, OR Life Stage: Married, (2) children
motivators
- Sustainable parenting - Advocacy & Education - Health & Safety - Convenience & Time Efficiency - Role model to her children
constraints
- Frustrated she can't find eco-friendly products that are affordable for her family - Time management: balancing kids with researching and implementing a new lifestyle is overwhelming - Finds it hard to maintain momentum to keep up with a sustainable lifestyle - Doesn't know of any like-minded parents in her city
06 Ideate
07 Information Architecture
After deciding main features, Krista created a rough sitemap from her sketches and drafted user flows.
08 Wireframes
09 UI Style Guide
Color
Primary
#026642
#F58B2A
Secondary
#E5ECE8
#C6BE04
Tertiary
#FCD6C6
Neutral
#FFFFFF
#000000
Success
#9fb483 - op 25%
#9fb483
error
#c24936 - op 25%
#c24936
Typography
Gopher
Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz Regular, Bold
Soliel
Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz Regular, Bold
10 Hi-fidelity design
Community
Suggests groups
Direct access to local events
Abundance of petitions to sign, share, and raise awareness
Volunteer for non-profits
The map feature provides information on sustainable and low-waste locations nearby
Can be bookmarked to view later
Learning Lifestyle
Educating users through a feed of DIY hacks, swaps, guides, and visual statistics
Increases awareness, engagement, and ignites passion for sustainable practices
11 Iterative solutions
Onboarding
Remove the onboarding screens
The Problem
Requires excessive user attention
Require more effort and clicks
Could potentially lead to an increase in user abandonment
The Solution
After signing up, the user is welcomed with a general overview of getting started
Displays what CommuniGreen offers right away
To begin, an optional engaging quiz is offered for users to log their current habits ⬇️
The Solution cont.
Quiz results show user their carbon footprint data
Suggests challenges
Raises interest and motivation at the beginning of the experience
Logging Habits
Testing proved that this screen:
The Problem
Was overwhelmingly cluttered
Unpleasant to log
Decrease in motivation and increase in user abandonment
Insufficient size & spacing: tappable UI elements are not "thumb-friendly"
The Solution
Gives the user freedom to pick and log categories they are most focused on
Points accumulate for redemption when challenges are completed
Rewards include donations towards favorite non-profit organizations, discounts at ethical stores, farmers markets, and vegan/vegetarian restaurants
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