BUILDING SUSTAINABLE HABITS
Overview of a client project to create an interactive sustainability app for individuals and consumers to understand and manage their carbon footprints .
Tread lightly on Mother Nature.
The leading US natural energy provider and Drawn worked together to design an interactive experience that helps individuals and organizations lead a more environmentally conscious lifestyle. By tracking carbon usage through daily activities, habits, and challenges, and earning credits from their choices, this platform serves as an engaging avenue to understand and monitor one's impact on the earth. Drawn worked on this project through every phase of the product maturity, incorporating research throughout the design process.
Project at Drawn - Austin, TX
Role: design researcher
Research Context:
I jumped into this project at the start of the research phase, which was spread out over several weeks of research and testing with the goal of understanding user behaviors and needs related to living an eco-conscious lifestyle. I was the junior researcher on this project and assisted the head researcher along the way.
During the first two weeks of research I helped recruit the participants for 10 in-person interviews in Baltimore, MD. The goal of the sessions were to understand our component questions of whether or not sustainability is quantifiable, who are users were, and is there a need for a quantified sustainability app. After recruitment, I helped design the research plan which included participatory design, emotional journey mapping, customer sourced metrics through developing a database of activities that are considered valuable in order to define what environmentally beneficial behaviors are.
We spent roughly 15 hours with our users, and over the course of each interview, I got to experience the power that human connection and stories have. We started out as strangers in a room, but over the course of each session, connections were made, people opened up about themselves, and we dug deeper into their lives to better understand how we could help our client make an impact on their customers lives. .
Over the course of the week of interviews, I documented the information through notes and photos, and the head researcher allowed me conduct two of the interviews. We then had to quickly synthesize all of the information we collected and create a research report to share with the client. The stories and information we gathered from the people we talked to were crucial in swaying the direction of the project, and the client was convinced not because we told them what to do, but because we introduced them to who their customers were and what they had to say.
Reflection: Challenges and Takeaways
This was my first big project, and I remembered feeling a mixture of shock and excitement when I was asked to be one of the researchers on the project. I held a lot of responsibility, and for the first time it involved pressures of client expectations, a budget, and a very short timeline. This experience pushed me to step outside of my comfort zone, and the fact that I was trusted to handle a project like this one made me realize how important trust is in the workplace. My boss and the other researcher trusted me to get the job done, and I learned an unprecedented amount about the power that user research brings to a project.