GreenZone
An interactive kiosk that incorporates object recognition and gamification elements to encourage recycling activities among young apartment residents.
OBJECTIVE
Completed as part of a graduate course in User Centered Design
MY ROLE
UX Designer
Product Designer
Visual Designer
THE TEAM
Teresa Cummings
Sherry Chen
Al Jose
TIMELINE
8 weeks (Oct - Dec 2019)
Overview
I designed a recycling program that consists of a kiosk and a smart scanner to track recycling activities within an apartment building, and translates them into visual displays of a virtual forest.
I completed the project in collaboration with three other students who contributed to the product management, research, and UX writing components of the project.
Record your recycling activity
Grow a tree by recycling more
Collect rewards or support a cause
Build a community forest with your neighbors
The Problem
Americans receive 608 million packages each year.
Only 25 percent of those cardboard packages are recycled.
The cardboard box and plastic airbags live in the American landfill.
Under the prompt of designing an environmental action, our team
started out focusing our project on an everyday frustration that each of the team members had experienced: receiving packages
and having to sort and properly dispose of the materials.
This led us to our initial design question:
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How might we simplify the cardboard recycling process for young households?
RESEARCH
Secondary Research
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We conducted competitive analysis and looked into organizations that help people reduce, reuse, or recycle packaging waste. We found out that current programs were less successful for our target audience because of the extra necessary steps and high cost.
User Research
Survey
I led the design of the survey which was sent to 76 local residents in the UW area. We learned more about their behaviors, values, and attitudes surrounding recycling.
Interview and Contextual Inquiry
We conducted semi-structured interviews with 6 participants who lived in dorms and off-campus. We also conducted contextual inquiry to observe and probe users as they received packages, sorted trash, and described their recycling habits.
There needs to be WAY more incentives to recycle. I'm sorry, but helping the environment isn't quite enough.
I try to recycle because it’s good for the environment, but mostly, if I don’t recycle and all my friends do it makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong.
Key Insights
Many residents are new to the local recycling process and have to navigate it on their own.
Recycling can be intimidating and confusing.
Many participants recycle only when storage space runs out - "the boxes are piling too high".
Recycling is not part of the routine.
Those who live with others who recycle are more likely to develop recycling habits.
The users are socially influenced to recycle.
Despite recognizing environmental benefits, many consider recycling a low priority.
The users lack direct motivation towards recycling.
Design Requirements
Drawing from the insights, I set the 5 following design requirements:
The solution should work with cardboard box packaging.
The solution should help people become aware of what is recyclable.
The solution should be low effort and reduce the end to end recycling time.
The solution should hold users socially accountable to their recycling efforts.
The solution should
create incremental positive incentive.
...and refined our design question:
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How might we promote habitual recycling for students receiving packaging materials?
Personas
Synthesizing research insights, I created three user personas to embody the people our team's designing for and guide the design direction.
IDEATION
Sketching
With our design requirements in mind, our team generated multiple ideas through brainstorming and crazy-8 sketching.
Each of the four us generated 8 sketches. We then invited our classmates to dot-vote them.
We prototyped some of our ideas in low-fidelity, and tested them out.
The activities helped us converged on three potential solutions:
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GreenZone: Community Cardboard Recycling Program
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Reusable Plastic Box Membership
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Scannable QR Code Incentive
Design Solution
Following our ideation sessions, our team decided to move forward with the GreenZone concept. The idea fulfilled many of the design requirements, but most importantly it centered itself on community and accountability.
Compared to the other ideas, GreenZone has the best effort-impact tradeoff based on our team's skill set, available resource, and project timeline.
We made a storyboard to map out the features we wanted the solution to have and how we envisioned users to encounter it:
Next, we visualized the information flow and how we’d like the features to be arranged on the prototype interface.
PROTOTYPE
& EVALUATION
Mid-fidelity Prototype
We created the mid-fidelity prototype with the persona in mind, focused on demonstrating 5 key features:
Usability Testing #1
We invited 5 potential users to test out the mid-fidelity prototype. Participants completed tasks such as scanning recycles and redeeming rewards while sharing through the thinking-out-loud approach. After task completion, detailed feedback was gather through a brief semi-structured interview.
I rotated between test moderator and note-taker roles throughout the process.
Research questions
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Can users easily grasp the purpose of GreenZone
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Can users locate the key features including apartment activity log, the scanner, the virtual tree grove, and reward redemption?
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Is GreenZone's main interaction flow able to successfully engage users with the features?
Takeaway
What we learned
Design decisions I made
The function of the apartment activity log is not clear.
Create a more dynamic and collective display and removed the individual resident thumbnails.
Users found the placement of the camera window unusual and the camera interface hard to work with.
Make scanner camera full screen with larger clicking areas.
Showing multiples stages of the virtual tree at once is confusing
Create visuals of tree growth in different stages, display current stage only.
Having to login before seeing the rest of the functionality felt discouraging to users
Adjust the work flow by prompting login after scanning and add a guest option
Revised Mid-fidelity Prototype
I quickly revised the prototype and user flow to address the key findings from the usability testing session.
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After the revision, I started building high-fidelity interface prototypes and a physical kiosk model to create a better context for users.
High-Fidelity Prototype
Physical Prototype: building a kiosk
In addition to the digital prototype, we built a kiosk model that can display a touch screen. By prototyping the physical dimension of our design solution, we hoped to provide users with a better context and make the experience as immersive as possible when they interact with our prototype.
Design Feedback and Iterations
We brought the prototype back to potential users, invited them to interact with our prototype and provide further feedback.
An extreme scenario was brought to our attention.
What if someone scans one item repeatedly, just to collect more rewards?
I iterated the design based on the feedback.
Interactive Prototype
Below is an interactive prototype of the latest iteration of GreenZone.
REFLECTION
What's Next?
To work with the project timeline, our team focused the design scope mostly on the digital interface. I would love to conduct further research regarding kiosk design and arrangement, as well as the business model of the rewards system.
Some ideas for the future...
AR Implementation
The apartment forest could be modeled virtually within the apartment lobby environment and viewable by residents via Augmented Reality headset. This could generate an added sense of excitement and positive feedback around the activity of recycling with GreenZone.
Growing real trees
Future iterations of this product could see partnerships established with entities such as Tree Sisters which would correlate recycling activity to planting real trees for regions in need.
Lessons
Concept Testing vs Usability Testing
We were unsure about how do implement certain features and we asked users directly for thoughts during usability testing. Looking back, we were mixing up concept testing and usability testing activities. It would have been more effective for us to separate them, concept test first, make adjustments, and then usability test.
Consider the full experience
I'm glad that I decided to build a physical prototype of the kiosk. It helped our team demonstrate our designs in a more immersive matter. Users were able to provide more constructive feedback.
Animation is worth a thousand words
Adding a simple animation after the scanning step really helped us show users how points are collected without having to add more text. I would love to brush up my animation / video prototyping skills more in the future!
