Sustainably Made

Project Overview

Sustainably Made is an app where users can find and review local sustainable businesses. Using the prompt "Design an app that helps reduce users' carbon footprints," I worked within a team of four students to ideate, research, and design this project from start to finish. Created as a way for users to explore small businesses in their area while reducing their harm on the environment, this app opens up users to a shared community of people and businesses that care for the environment.

Research

My research began with understanding what sustainability means to people and their general attitude towards it. What kind of actions do people take in terms of sustainability? Do they care about it? Do they ignore it? Understanding this was crucial to ideating an app that people would actually find useful.

Sustainably Made is a UX Design project that was created from the prompt "Design an app that helps reduce users' carbon footprints". Working in a group of four students, I began by conducting UX research to better understand what gaps existed in the sustainable tech market, what kind of people were interested in sustainable tech, and what kinds of products I could create to fulfill those user's needs.

My research led to a key insight that consumers would choose a sustainable option if it was presented to them, but wouldn't go out of their way to find a sustainable option. As one interviewee stated, "convenience is king".

Using this insight I came up with the idea for a platform that would only present local sustainable business options to the user. Here users could review, save, and favorite local businesses to visit over and over again and reduce their carbon footprints over time. Only presenting sustainable options relieved users of having to do their own tedious research on the business's sustainability, and presented them with options that they could trust were sustainable. We built user trust by ranking each business bronze, silver, or gold in sustainability, clearly clarifying to the user what practices qualify for which sustainability medal, and highlighting each business's sustainable practices.

The development process was conducted using Agile methodology. After the completion of one prototype iteration, our team conducted user testing, reviewed feedback, made changes to not only the app's features but also the strategies in which we approached our goal to reduce users' carbon footprints. We continued testing until we had a functioning high-fidelity prototype that users loved and found easy to use.