Date: January - June 2022
Client: Svalna AB
Project time: 5 months
My Role: UX designer
What I did: User research, ideation, prototyping, testing
Background
This master thesis was done in collaboration with Svalna, a research-based company located in Gothenburg. Svalna has developed a carbon calculator app that provides people with insights into their carbon footprint. One part of the app provides organisations or groups with the opportunity to take part in a climate competition aimed at lowering their emissions. The master thesis aimed at investigating how this part of the app could be improved, as well as developing a set of design guidelines on how to engage people to lower their emissions through an app.
Method
The "5 steps of design thinking process" was used during this project, including the five phases: empathise, define, ideate, prototype and test. We worked with these phases iteratively throughout the project. A total of six iterations were carried out.
Phase 1: Empathise
The initial research involved studying relevant topics such as nudging, gamification, motivation and pro-environmental behaviour. It also involved benchmarking where other carbon calculator apps (such as Earth hero and Deedster) and competition apps (such as Step bet) were explored.
A questionnaire was distributed in order to gather some initial information on people's knowledge about the environment, experiences with carbon calculators and their motivations to compete. The input from the questionnaire was used as a base for ten semi-structured interviews. Six of these interviews were held with experts in the fields of carbon calculators, sustainability and gamification, and four of them were held with participants who had some type of experience from Svalna's climate competition.
Phase 2: Define
The questionnaire and interviews were analysed using a version of the method of thematic analysis. As well as a basis for design work, the resulting themes lay a foundation for guidelines on how to engage people to lower their emissions. The main three themes found were that people were concerned about being judged by others based on their level of carbon emissions, that people wished to share knowledge and that they wanted to learn more about sustainability and sustainable behaviours.
Design workshop
From the interviews with the previous participants, we identified an issue around people not wanting to be shown on a leaderboard out of fear of being judged by others. With this challenge as a point of focus, a design workshop was held to ideate on alternative ways of viewing a leaderboard. This resulted in ideas such as only showing the top three people or allowing the participants to use avatars or nicknames. Some other interesting ideas such as visualising progress as grass on a field also emerged.
Design workshop.
Personas
Based on the findings from the literature, the questionnaire and the interviews, three personas were developed in order to get a better understanding of the user group. The personas had differing levels of environmental knowledge and ambition to compete. These were used and updated throughout the project as we added onto our knowledge about the users.
Three user personas.
Phase 3: Ideate
With a base in the themes found in the previous phase as well as from the workshop, a few initial sketching sessions were carried out using the method of Crazy 8. The ideas revolved around an alternative way of showing a leaderboard and allowing people to learn through the use of challenges. Other ideas were also discussed but were not developed further because of time limitations and a focus on having a simple concept.
Selection of sketches from the initial sketching sessions.
Phase 4: Prototype
The ideas of having challenges and an alternative leaderboard were developed further into low-fidelity prototypes. In order to let people learn from each other, one idea was that the user should be able to click on a person or a team in the leaderboard to show what challenges they had taken. This could let people learn from and motivate each other to lower their own emissions. Having challenges would also add more interactivity to the app and allow it to be ed as a tool to engage with others and to learn more.
Low-fidelity prototype of challenges.
Low-fidelity prototype of leaderboard.
Some changes were made before creating high-fidelity prototypes of these two features. We added the ability to sort challenges based on what category they belonged to, as a result of testing the low-fidelity prototype. We removed the possible to create your own challenge, to keep the concept a bit more simple. Originally, the idea was also to be able to invite others to take part in the competition, however this was removed as well in order to remove some of the complexity of the feature.
As a result of participants not wanting to feel too exposed, the leaderboard was changes to only show top three, plus the person's own placement (visible only to themselves). In order to get people who already had low emissions an opportunity to win, a leaderboard was added showing players or teams with lowest emissions. We also continued on developing the feature allowing people to learn from how others have succeeded in lowering their emissions by clicking on a person or a team in the leaderboard and show what challenges they had taken.
Hi-fidelity prototype of challenges.
Hi-fidelity prototype of leaderboard.
Phase 5: Test
Formative testing was carried out throughout the entirety of the project. The tests were carried out on different levels of fidelity prototypes and were most often structured as think-aloud tests.
Something that was evident throughout was that the people we interviewed and tested found CO2 to be complex and difficult to grasp. This led to us spending time to make the numbers easier to understand and focusing on how to visualise a decrease in CO2 as well as contextualising it. This also led us to dividing information from the individual, the team and the organisation onto separate pages.
Sketching on how to visualise a decrease in CO2 as something positive.
Final design
The final design, called Kallna (in Swedish "to cool down"), resulted in five main screens. Two of these screens cover the challenges and the leaderboard. The three screens called "home", "team" and "me" show information regarding the progress in the competition, such as how many tons of CO2 they have saved and how much they have decreased their emissions.
Five main screens from the final design.
From the "Me" screen the user can access their own emission data and progress as well as compare it with that of the organisation and the team. The comparison can be done in total or divided into the four categories of Food, Household, Transport and Shopping .
Visualising a user's CO2 emissions in comparison to that of the organisation and the team.
Due to lack of time, we were not able to explore all of the challenges that we found along the way. Something that could be worth looking further into is how to make the concept of CO2 easier to understand, for example through providing the users with tangible examples. This would also include investigating what type of examples or comparisons are most suitable, as how they are perceived could be thought to depend on social or cultural factors.
Secondly it would be interesting to follow participants taking part in the competition over a longer period of time, which was the original plan for this project. This would allow us to investigate whether their behaviours and attitudes changed after taking part in the competition.
