Overview

Bucket is an app prototype designed to connect young professionals, who may find it challenging to compost individually, with composting communities and to track their composting contributions. Gamification and community are part of the experience to encourage team composting. As they join local teams of composters and participate in app-based competitions, these young professionals can feel more motivated and satisfied with their composting experience.

Process

This project was focused on team research and collaboration following Lean UX principles. Using research as a starting point and sounding board, our aim was to fail fast—to continually reassess our understanding of the problem and its best solution. We used elements of the Design Studio to facilitate our design process and team cohesion. The project follows three phases: Discover, Explore, Build.

Discover

In the first phase, we wanted to indentify a specific problem and understand the people we were designing for. We began by conducting interviews and making empathy maps to see if we could spot some shared pains among participants. From there, we drafted a problem statement and agreed on the characteristics of our protopersona.

Interviews

We wanted to come prepared with questions to our interviews but be flexible enough to probe further whereever the conversation led. At Ewa Plonka’s suggestion, our team put together an interview conversation tree. a branching set of interview questions designed to help us adjust course during our interviews based on the participants’ answers and attitude toward the topic. As we prepared the interview questions, I phrased mine to be open-ended, based on examples from Starter Questions For User Research by Sarah Doody.

Our goal was to discover environment-related interests and frustrations among the interview participants and their communities. We focused our questions around the topics of environmentally-friendly products, services, and personal habits.

Empathy Maps

Looking at our empathy maps, we discovered some converging trends. Participants said they would like to practice more environmentally friendly habits. They frequently felt frustrated at the lack of options and/or knowledge available. They commented on the lack of local green initiatives or problems with those initiatives. And they criticized single-use products. At the same time, participants' actions sometimes contradicted what they thought.

So what do these trends point to?

Converging on a Problem Statement

Based on notes from our interviews and empathy maps, we tried to identify as many problems or needs as we could. Generating this list helped us come together as a group and decide on the direction of the project.

Addressing Differences in Demographics

While our interview participants were similar in age (between 20 and 30 years old) and live in cities, they reside in different parts of the world: India, the Philippines, and Canada. Naturally, specific environmental problems that came up during interviews differed based on geographic location. Because of these differing contexts, it was a challenge to identify converging issues we might address so we chose one issue that surfaced in more than one interview: frustrations with composting.

Understanding Variables at Play in the Problem

We saw a need to define a problem statement that addressed the community (both individuals and businesses) to a degree. In the Kitchener community, composting has a small following. During our participant interviews, the reasoning for limited composting practices seem to be linked to a lack of resources and convenience. Although most participants were pro-composting, none of the five individuals we interviewed actually practiced composting at home effectively or in a fulfilling way.

Drafting a Persona

We chose to focus on a target audience of young professionals that live in Kitchener, Ontario, who are interested in composting but lack knowledge or resources to compost regularly.

Explore

After choosing a problem statement, our team walked through the Design Studio process to narrow our scope: we set long-term goals, identified questions and assumptions, brainstormed how-might-we questions, and dot-voted on potential solutions.

Following the Double Diamond Model practice of diverging and converging, we widdled away at our problem to get at something more manageable.

Long-Term Goals

Our group brainstormed long-term goals—potential big-picture solutions to composting challenges—that would guide our product design.

We agreed on these two long-term goals, drawing from elements of different goals in our brainstorm list:

Questions and Assumptions

We each wrote down our questions and assumptions related to the challenges of composting and then compiled them. This step helped us identify what we knew (or thought we knew), what we didn't know, and, ultimately, what we needed to learn from further research and testing.

How-Might-We Questions

Generating how-might-we questions helped us narrow the problem without prematurely creating solutions. Once we had shared our individual HMWs, we voted on which questions to focus on.

Dot Voting on Solutions

Having chosen three how-might-we questions, we brainstormed possible solutions for each. Then we dot-voted on the solutions that were most desirable to users/customers, viable as a business, technically feasible, and ethical. We then circled areas of greatest agreement and convergence.

Build

In this phase of the project, we did Crazy 8s and 3 Panel Sketches to generate specific ideas for screen interactions. We revisited our hypothesis and began making an app prototype that we could use for the first stages of usability testing. Based on critique from other groups in the class, we simplified our user flow and narrowed our scope even further.

Our Revised Hypothesis

Based on the work we had done in Phase 2, I revised the hypothesis to avoid designing too many features in our prototype and to nail down what our minimum viable product might look like. It includes a statement describing how we would validate our assumptions.

User Flow Revision

Our initial user flow was too feature heavy. From our classmates’ and instructor’s critique, we realized that we needed to simplify the scope of our prototype and focus on the task flows that directly addressed our problem statement and hypothesis. Given the constraints of the project, we decided to shelf extra features such as journal entry flow and settings and focus on how user would create a profile, join a team, enter compost contributions, and track contributions in a wider community.

Old User Flow

New User Flow

When a new user first loads the app, the app will redirect them immediately to creating an account for themselves. If the user is a returning user, the app will automatically redirect them to the home screen. This design is to help facilitate a smooth onboarding experience as a profile is absolutely needed to help track and join a composting team.

Designing Features in Low Fidelity

Based on the sketches that we had done, we designed a set of low-fidelity screens for our minimum viable product. These screens demonstrate the primary interactions users would encounter in the app.

Medium Fidelity

Before creating a clickable prototype on Figma for testing, we added more detail to the screens and added a hamburger menu in the top right corner for navigation. We finished this project having built a simple prototype that we could test for usability and to validate our assumptions.

Reflections & Takeaways

This is just the beginning of a long project and is still at the research stages. Here are some things we could have done differently in the process or that we could do if we were to continue this project:

Would you like to know more about this project?

This case study is an overview of the work we did for this project and the collaboration methods we used. If you're interested in learning more about this project, please contact me by email or through LinkedIn.