Overview

The Climate Reality Project is focused on climate change education and countering climate change denial campaigns worldwide. The organization is a consolidation of two environmental organizations, the Alliance for Climate Protection and the Climate Project, both founded in 2006 by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore.

Role

This project was a 2 week team project for General Assembly UX Design Immersive program. My responsibilities involved UX Research and UX Research Synthesis

Approach

• Business model canvas

• Survey

• User interviews

• Affinity mapping

• Feature prioritization

• Sketches & wireframes

• Prototype

Challenge

The Climate Reality Project Chicago Metro Chapter is seeking ideas for tools it can put in the hands of everyday people to motivate people to act in ways that are kind to the environment and that will minimize their contribution to climate change.

Business Model Canvas

We started by developing a Business Model Canvas to better understand the non-profit organization's users and revenue. To accomplish this, we went to the Chicago chapter's website and compiled our findings into a business model.

Survey

An online survey was created to get insights about people’s thought on climate change and to get candidates for user interviews. Survey results showed that

• 90% of the people who took the survey responded that climate change is a concern.

• 82% responded that they practice habits related to environmental concern.

User Interviews

User interviews were conducted to know about users habits, interests, behaviors of target users and some of the interview questions were

• How did you become aware of climate change? What resources do you use?

• What has been easy or difficult for you to practice those habits? and Why?

Here are some quotes from the interviewees

Affinity Mapping

This technique was used to synthesize information from user interviews in order to identify themes/trends, and it provided additional insights into user behavior and pain points. We worked on it individually first, then as a group to extract the patterns from our interview notes.

Theme 1 Habits to help environment

• Tries to thrift

• Avoids single use plastics

• Uses public transportation/ walks when possible

Theme 2 Frustrations/pain points

• Government/ Big corporates is not doing enough

• Guilty about things which are not good for ecosystem

• Individual contribution is not enough

Theme 3 Concerns

• It is not convenient (Recycle bin not available in apt)

• Wildfire is scary and affecting lives (Worries about permanent damages)

• Thrifting is expensive

Persona

I developed a persona based on user research as a representation of target users.

Empathy Map

I created an empathy map to collect all of the interviewees' emotions and combine them into one to better understand the persona's feelings. This helped in honing on the problem statement for this project which is whether Nancy’s actions have any impact? She feels it is not enough and whatever changes she has made might not have an impact.

Do my actions have an impact?

Problem Statement

Nancy, a busy millennial needs to stay motivated to gain habits that help the climate, so that she can stop feeling like her actions don’t make a difference when it comes to climate change.

Ideas & Inspiration

Initial ideas included Educational videos and List of ways to act. This will not help with the way Nancy is feeling, that her actions does not have an impact.
I got inspiration came from Fitness tracker devices and Wordle.

With fitness tracker,

• People can see the number of steps they have taken and visualize progress.

With Wordle,

• It is a simple and easy challenge game play

• Easy to share

• Everyone has common goal

Solution Hypothesis

Nancy needs easy challenges which are simple and achievable, so that she can see progress & the positive impact it has on climate change

I conducted secondary research to gain information on how people develop new habits. Fogg’s Behavior model states that, in order to develop a habit/ behavior, three things has to happen simultaneously

• Motivation

• Ability 

• Prompts

  In our case,

• Nancy is trying to help mitigate climate change so she is motivated

• The challenge is going to be simple, so the ability to do the task is easy

• And notifications/ reminders about the task acts as triggers/prompts

Scenario

Nancy, a busy millennial likes to act in ways that are helpful to the environment. She is frustrated with the adverse effects of CC and feels what she is doing does not have any impact. She decides to take part in a challenge by Climate Reality app (Chicago) and realizes the positive impact of her actions and remains hopeful.

Product Features Prioritization

I use Moscow method was to prioritize the features of the MVP.

User Flow

I created a user flow to determine the actions and steps taken by Nancy to accept the challenge and check progress.

Wireframes

We Sketched individually and then combined them and transformed into wireframes using Figma.

Solution

Due to time constraint, our team submitted the gray scale wireframes as the low fidelity prototype for the class presentation. Later, I worked on my own to make a high fidelity prototype which has a simple challenge every week.