Carbon Crush makes sustainable activities fun through rewards, gamification, and social interactions. This project was an entry for a Design for Good product design competition. The aim was to design a solution that will help people have a more positive impact on their environment and our planet.
Team: 2 designers
Duration: 4 weeks
My role: User Research, UX Design & Prototyping
Try out the Figma Prototype I made. 👉🏼
👩🏻 Annie is passionate about saving the planet and wants to motivate others to take action.
🧔🏻♂️ Mike, is somewhat aware of the problem of climate change but doesn’t think it’s his responsibility to fix it.
Annie sees an ad for Carbon Crush. Intrigued by the promise of saving the planet and engaging with a like-minded community, she eagerly downloads the app and signs up, embarking on a journey towards a greener future.
Annie explores Carbon Crush, where she discovers eco-friendly challenges completed by others and stays updated on the latest environmental news, all within the app’s vibrant feeds.
Annie finds an array of enticing eco-friendly challenges on Carbon Crush. Excitedly, she realizes she can complete and share these challenges, not only contributing to the planet but also earning rewards along the way.
Annie joins the ‘Bike to Work Challenge’ with enthusiasm. She’s eager to finally use her bike and looks forward to the rewarding treat of a free Starbucks Latte once she successfully completes the challenge.
Proudly pedaling her way to work, Annie captures a selfie of her biking journey and shares it on Carbon Crush, earning recognition for completing the challenge. Motivated to inspire others, she also shares the picture on Instagram, earning extra game points while spreading the eco-friendly message far and wide.
Intrigued by Annie’s post about earning a free coffee for riding to work, Mike’s curiosity is piqued. He decides to explore the app that Annie is using and is impressed by her profile’s collection of achievements. Inspired, he signs up for a challenge of his own, eager to join Annie in making a positive impact through Carbon Crush.
With each new user becoming a catalyst for motivating others to join the app. Environmental enthusiasts like Annie are drawn to Carbon Crush because of their passion for the planet, while individuals like Mike are enticed by the prospect of earning free rewards.
We made a script of open-ended questions and conducted 5 interviews. We tried to avoid influencing the interviewees in any way and remain unbiased. Our favourite line was, “Tell me more about that”.
For a topic like climate change, people might feel the need to be politically correct and may shy away from speaking their minds freely. So we made Empathy Maps for a deeper understanding.
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Annie, who’s passionate about saving the planet and mindful of the impact of her own actions.
Mike, who’s somewhat aware of the problem of Climate Change but doesn’t think it’s his responsibility to fix it.
Annie would later become our primary user and Mike, the secondary user.
We framed our problems as opportunities to help us move on the path of coming up with a solution. We wrote a large number of HMW notes, and voted to select the most important ones.
We were mindful of the assumptions we were making and wanted to select the most critical one to be tested. For this, we mapped our assumptions based on risk and knowability.
Using our most critical assumption, we created a hypothesis statement that we could test through our prototype.
We felt that the above hypothesis could be broken down into a more specific thing to test through the following sub-hypothesis.
Working together, alone – Each team member sketched 6 ideas quickly during the crazy 6 exercise.
Using the ideas from the crazy 6, each team member sketched a more refined version of their ideas and presented them to the team. We conducted a dot voting exercise to select the most viable ideas to pursue from the team’s proposals. Each team member had 4 votes to cast and could only give one vote to their own panel.
Based on the outcomes of the last exercise, we converged on a direction for our solution.
1. Annie leading by example.
2. Mike gets interested by seeing Annie.
3. Rewards for completing eco-friendly tasks.
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